Imagine a Culture Where an Argument Is Viewed as a Dance George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen

Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way.

In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.

But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different.

It would seem strange even to call what they were doing “arguing.”

Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.

Credit: George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen

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