Socio-metaphorical Analysis and Political Cultures: on the Study of Falangist Nationalism

Abstract

This text presupposes that the main interest of the socio-metaphorical analysis lays on the study of metaphors as clues that can bring us closer to the values, expectations and desires of those who produce and use them. The article proposes focusing the analysis to a collective subject wide enough but, at the same time, conveniently delimited: the political cultures. Defining the latter in the way that has been done by the cultural history of politics, the first part of this text is devoted to reflect on what the metaphorical analysis can provide for a better understanding of political cultures, underlying the potentialities of this kind of proposal. Next, the aim of the second part is to apply what has been previously exposed to a concrete case-study: the use that the Falangist political culture made of metaphors in order to define the Spanish nation during the effervescent years of the civil war and the immediate postwar period.