Kurin [Kurin] analyzes the differences in culture and ethnicity in Pakistan. In his essay, he discusses the Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew terms ruh, aql and nafs, roughly translated as spirit, life energy (related to blood kuhn and life jan), and intellect (though aql is metaphorically and metonymically related to reason, humanity, civility and judgment). In his essay, Kurin analyzes how the three terms and their meaning can be used to systematically analyze differing images of class and ethnicity.
The fundamental observation of importance is that various combinations of these terms can metonymically denote hot and cold qualities. The variation in culture and ethnicity of people can then be mapped onto the along this scale and thereby used for social and political action. The basic metaphor used are the mappings
I will briefly reproduce Kurin's data to demonstrate how this mapping can be used characterize different views of the villages versus the urbanite.
The first set of data pertain to the Jangli/Babu difference. Jangli's are referred to as having their nafs dominate their aql, and Babus as having their aql dominate their nafs. Babus in this reading as the urbanties and Jangli's are the villagers.
Let us consider the main features of the Jangli and Babu using our mapping.
Now let us look at the boundary conditions of the hot-cold case. There are four possible combinations. They are reproduced in the table below.
While all possible boundary conditions can theoretically exist, only two (condition 2 and 3) show are asymmetric` and serve to outline the differences. These serve to generate the two views in Kurin's data. These views are described below.
The main thing to notice about these views is their close correspondence to earlier conceptions of hot and cold as being clustered along the same dimensions. This gives us further evidence that the concepts are clustered in a radial category that occupies a cross-cultural semantic space.
Once we have established the features of the semantic space, we can look at combinations of the features at the target level and try to see if the mapping holds. Let us change the definitions of the urbanite and the villager to observe if the mappings hold.
Supposing we change our definition of the city dweller and look at a person who has both aql and nas, though aql still dominates. Here is a person who has intellect and reason (coolness) and also possess strong desires. This can make him crafty and a schemer. Such a person is referred to as a chalak. In fact, the data Kurin presents demonstrates that the chalak person is referred to as having a heated coolness exactly what we would expect from the individual mapping and their combination in the source domain (hot-cold).
Similarly we can change our definition of the villager, and ask what would happen if the villager lost his nas. Here is a person who is neither desirous nor needy. He has no intellect nor any need for acquiring possessions. He is basically accepting, and naive. He is likely to be unassuming, and uninteresting. In other words he is a simpleton and is referred to as a seedha saadha. Performing the same trick of source domain inference as before, we would say that such a person had a cooled heat disposition. Guess what Kurin's data suggests.