Metaphoricity in the real estate showroom: Affordance spaces for sensorimotor shopping

Abstract

This paper adopts an ecological view of cognition to analyse the role of the environ-ment in scaffolding metaphorical experience. Using ethnographic material collected from two real estate showrooms in China, we describe how each showroom setting is equipped with to-be-phenomenologically-experienced objects designed to stimulate desirable sensorimotor experiences and altered bodily states during the guided show-room tours. By analysing the qualities of such settings and identifying the processes through which visitors become environmentally coupled—including active and pas-sive touch in highly organized auditory, olfactory, and gustatory environs—we demonstrate how the showrooms constitute an affordance space for enacting meta-phoricity through doubleness in experience. Implications for conceptual metaphor theory relating to the nature of environments and bodies are discussed.