Chapter 5 explores the complexity inherent in metaphoric mappings as a result of their reliance on both the conceptual structuring of the source domain of space and the language used in a metaphoric statement.

This chapter’s ethnography of the “quality of life” West Bank development/settlement of Alfei Menashe describes the structural realities and security schematic narrative lens through which this Jewish Israeli audience filtered “the conflict” and understood the series. They are viewed from outside by stateless-nation Palestinians as living behind the “Wall Enclave” and by state-minority Arab/Palestinian Israelis as a “settlement” (most Jewish Israelis regard it as a “consensus settlement”). Alfei provides its children the greatest opportunity for contact with Palestinians, which the separation barrier has all but eliminated for Israelis. Neither interpersonal contact with Palestinian day laborers who build and clean their homes and playgrounds, nor imagined contact influenced their readings of the text. From secondary conversations, news media portrayals, and artifacts like the barrier constructed to maintain the secured existence of Israel, they learn Palestinians are those who commit terror. Via a binary logic, anyone allowed into Israel (or Sesame Street) is not Palestinian. Fearing harm, a majority erased Palestinian characters. These processes, not Sesame Street, were overwhelmingly socializing them, leading them to oppose the series’ attempt to communicate peace. They normalized and reproduced “the conflict,” assuming defensive play patterns; for them, the resolution is “evicting, killing or imprisoning” Palestinians.

How do cultural artifacts influence the ways we experience and act? In this chapter I propose that cognition is cultural tout court and that habits provide a central link between human organisms and the sociocultural environment. I will defend an enactive account of habits that sees them as expansive in the temporal (they relate us to a history of sociocultural interactions) and spatial sense (they are co-constituted by our brains, bodies, and cultural artifacts). This account is based on Dewey's pragmatist–organicist concept of habits that rigorously anchors experience in culture. I will trace cultural factors in Dewey's philosophy and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science with a focus on pervasive artifacts – such as architecture, pictures, and moving images. Such artifacts have become part of our habits of perceiving. I finally situate artifactual habits within recent predictive processing theories that claim to provide the corresponding neuroscientific theory to our cultural minds.

If cognitive neuroscience is meant to investigate what makes us human, cultural artifacts and artistic expressions should be at the top of the list of its explananda. Cognitive neuroscience, in tight cooperation and dialogue with the humanities, can shed new light on several theoretical issues related to aesthetics, traditionally dealt with exclusively within the camp of the humanities. A succinct description of embodied simulation theory in relation to aesthetic experience is proposed, and some accomplishments of this bottom-up approach to the experience of visual art and film are illustrated. The notion of “habit” is introduced, it is connected to its potential underlying neural mechanisms, and to the production and reception of human cultural artifacts. Capitalizing upon pragmatism, Pierre Bourdieu, and practice theory, the relationship between body, habit, practice, and rituals and its bearing on the creation of symbolic objects and cultural artifacts is analyzed from a neuropragmatist approach, which emphasizes the procedural and implicit forms of human cognition. The suggested gradual transition from tool-making to symbol-making grants the following: (a) It shows that utilitarian and symbolic behavior are both chapters of the same cognitive technology trajectory; (b) it does not require one to assume that symbol-making is the late externalization of a previously existing inner symbolic thought, because symbolic thought and symbol-making are the co-constructive outcome of the development of shared performative practices and habits; (c) it is fully compatible with the neurobiological characterization of human relational potentialities as instantiated by embodied simulation. It is proposed that through the repetition, combination, and memorization of particular shared behaviors and actions, and their mimetic ritualization, the social group infuses new cultural meanings into reused bodily performances.