Trope

Nietzsche's tropological approach to human understanding is echoed in subsequent thought, and especially in such postmodern thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and in postmodern deconstructionism. This late-twentieth-century work is co-occurrent with the revival of interest in Vico and his tropology in the 1960s and 1970s. The tropological theories of the historian Hayden White are notable here. White echoes Nietzsche's assertion in The Use and Abuse of History (1957) that historical writing is not a window enabling us to directly perceive historical reality but rather a perspectival screen always obstructing our view of the past in its particular way, according to the persona and preferences of the historian. In Metahistory (1973), White examines the great historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), Jules Michelet (1798–1874), Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), and Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), showing how each had a particularly powerful poetic grasp of the part of the past that interested him and how this grasp was a function of the particular poetic tropes that he found evocative and helpful in organizing his thoughts. These tropological screens, or "governing metaphors," of historical writing acted in the particular historian to more or less self-consciously include or eliminate data from consideration. Historical understanding is thus anchored in the constraints exercised by the tropes the historian chooses.

White's work was accompanied in the seventies and eighties by tropological approaches to both anthropology and cognitive linguistics. Beginning in the collection The Social Use of Metaphor (1977) edited by David Sapir and Christopher Crocker, anthropologists gradually worked toward analyzing the role of the various tropes as they played off or interacted with each other in social life and culture. This interactive tropology, the authors in this collection argued, was useful in developing a more sensitive anthropological ethnography—that is, the study of the dynamics of "communicative interaction" in society and culture. Cognitive linguists, working over a twenty-year period that began in 1980, developed a linguistic theory of the logic behind the figuration of human understanding as anchored in bodily experience and projected out on the world. This is a theory sharply contesting the objectivist and rationalist paradigms in philosophy and in its way an actualization in cognitivist terms of Vico's efforts to identify the poetic logic of life in civilization. Cognitivists pay particular attention to the effect this logic has on the categorization processes in cognition, an emphasis that is congenial to anthropologists interested in the social categorization processes in culture and social relations.

The trope concept is an integral part of an enduring debate about the role of the figurative both in human communication and in bringing about social and cultural change. Cultures may vary in their stability over time, but all cultures are dynamic to one degree or another and can be persuaded to change the structure of their social relationships and turn in a new direction. The degree to which the tropes—themselves micro-turnings of thought—are influential in these macro-level social turnings has been a central question of tropology.