Abstract
Political cartoons constitute a critical interface of sociopolitical communication. The cartoonist, who is a principal player in building sociopolitical iconography, registers a historical moment by constructing a memory of the political system. The cartoon being a mass medium, addresses directly, in a recognisably metaphorical language; whereby, iconography circulates in the public sphere. A psychological analysis of visual metaphors would enlighten one about the process by which social perception develops and how public opinion gets configured. Metaphors are capable of configuring the quotidian, and they also add a new reference to the event. Political metaphors by the cartoonist present behavioural templates; on the one hand, the gestures of the politicians are provided while on the other, a cycle of thought and action is initiated within the readers; thus an icon is built as well as an opinion is shaped. The conceptual metaphor theory by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980) supplies a framework to understand how a cartoonist, utilising metaphors to build iconography, influences public opinion. How are these metaphors directed? The authors employ focus group discussion (FGD) and a survey among 35 students for a pilot study to analyse the group perception and to study how the effect of iconography is played out. A selection of 20 cartoons on the linguistic issue and state organisation, faced by Jawahar Lal Nehru as portrayed by Shankar in ‘Don’t Spare Me Shankar’ (1983), has been chosen for the study. How has Shankar portrayed the dilemma of Nehru? What are the metaphors employed by the cartoonist for the pictorial representation? How are these metaphors received by the group? The psychological investigation through metaphors will initiate a probe into the way a cartoonist thinks and how he affects the group perception and the process of building iconography. On the whole, the paper will analyse the interaction between the cartoonist and the public through metaphors.
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Notes
- 1.
The concept of bisociation explains the way mind associates an idea with two different fields, which are probably unrelated. A pun is an example of bisociation.
- 2.
Conceptual blending is a successor of bisociation and evaluates the cognitive process of blending mental spaces from the generic space into a new blended space.
- 3.
Agenda-setting theory asserts the power of media and their influence in prioritising news as well as shaping public opinion through their news coverage.
- 4.
Priming (memory effect) is a study in psychology which examines how the triggering of one stimulus results in the reaction to another stimulus.
- 5.
Charles Forceville’s multimodal metaphors (Forceville & Urios-Apraisi, 2009 p. 3) explain the involvement of different modes in metaphors (like the visual and the verbal). The target and the source domain in multimodal metaphors are presented through multiple levels of perception.
- 6.
Graham and Bachmann describe various types of ideation in their book Ideation: The Birth and Death of Ideas (2004) pp. 44–47.
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Venkat, V., Balakrishnan, V. (2018). How Conceptual Metaphors Make Political Iconography: A Focus Group Discussion on the Psychological Aspects. In: Leung, MT., Tan, LM. (eds) Applied Psychology Readings. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8034-0_19
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