Social Structures Applied to the Provision of the Built Environment

Author(s):  
Stephen L. Gruneberg ◽  
Graham J. Ive
Author(s):  
Stephanie Peña-Alves

This chapter explores sociocultural frames of metaphor in the case of door metaphors to highlight the cognitive sociology of access. Bridging and building on insights in cognitive linguistics and cognitive sociology, it contends that metaphorical projection involves generic sociomental processes. To illustrate this theoretical claim, the chapter analyzes how social structures of relevance and markedness in the built environment pattern the conceptual structures of door metaphors. It also analyzes individuals’ strategic use of door metaphors to shape metaphorical politics of access in the abstract. Attempting to broaden both the cognitive sociology of metaphor and the sociology of access, it concludes with a discussion of the promise of a distinctly cognitive sociology of access.


2020 ◽  
pp. 159-196
Author(s):  
Kimberly Sumano Ortega ◽  
Joshua D. Englehardt

Despite the importance of Los Guachimontones within the larger Teuchitlán tradition of ancient west Mexico, little is known of its socio-political organization and underlying sociocultural structure. Departing from a dual–processual framework and utilizing spatial analysis, this chapter analyzes variability in the spatial syntax, formal characteristics, and distribution of architectural groups in the nuclear core and Loma Alta sectors of the site. Variability, in terms of differing degrees of openness and/or connectivity, suggests distinct functions of discrete areas within the site, and demonstrates how the socio–structural organization of the groups that occupied Los Guachimontones was negotiated, reflected, and reified in the built environment. Results of a comparison of architecture in these site sectors suggests that discrete physical spaces were utilized in diverse manners as architectural discourse to communicate distinct messages to different social groups, even when the built environment of these sectors presents a high degree of formal homogeneity and contains the same architectonic elements. This chapter thus adds a new analytic axis and alternate framework that provides insight on both architectural variability at Los Guachimontones and the social structures that gave rise to these architectonic configurations.


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