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THE TWENTY-FIRST KATHARINE BRIGGS MEMORIAL LECTURE, NOVEMBER 2002
Introduction
Contrary to popular opinion, those seemingly plain and simple truths called proverbs are anything but straightforward bits of traditional wisdom. A glance into any proverb collection reveals their contradictory nature: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" but "Out of sight, out of mind." Proverbs are not universal truths, and their insights are not based on a logical philosophical system. Instead, they contain the general observations and experiences of humankind, including life's multifaceted contradictions. But matters are even more complex, since the meaning of a proverb depends on its function in a given context (see Krikmann 1974; Mieder 1989a, 20-2). As Kenneth Burke observed, metaphorical proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations: "In so far as situations are typical and recurrent in a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies for handling them" (Burke 1941, 256). By naming social situations, proverbs express generalisations, influence or manipulate people, comment on behavioural patterns, satirise societal ills, strengthen accepted beliefs or comment on practical social conduct (Goodwin and Wenzel 1979; also in Mieder and Dundes 1994, 140-60). Above all, proverbs are used to free complex situations from ambiguity. However, as proverbs as analogies are of their nature ambiguous, that is, open to interpretation, they are of a vexing and paradoxical analogic ambiguity themselves (see Lieber 1984; also in Mieder and Dundes 1994, 99-126).
This is true for the proverb "Good fences make good neighbours" in literary works, legal briefs, mass media, advertisements, and oral communication on a personal or socio-political level. The inherent ambiguity of the proverb is that its metaphor contains both the phenomenon of fencing someone or something in while at the same time fencing that person or thing out. So it is natural to ask: when and why do good fences make good neighbours? when and why should we build a fence or wall in the first place? when and why should we tear such a structure down? The proverb contains, to quote Caroline Westerhoff, the "irresolvable tension between boundary and hospitality," between demarcation and common space, between individuality and collectivity, and between other conflicting attitudes that separate people from each other, be it as neighbours in a village or as nations (Westerhoff...