Conceptualizations of Homeland in Rumi’s Poetry: A Cultural Linguistic Approach

There has been a surge of interest in exploring Rumi’s conceptualization of homeland in his poetry. However, albeit inconclusively, to our knowledge, no study has investigated homeland utilizing the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics: the gap that the present study seeks to fulfill. In so doing, the present study utilized cultural schema, cultural metaphor, and cultural category, as the analytical tools of the interdisciplinary field of Cultural Linguistics to unravel the portrayal of homeland in the Mathnavī Rumi (2008) and Dīvān-i Shams Rumi (2000). Benefiting from corpus-based analysis, suggested by Jensen (Corpora and cultural cognition: how corpus-linguistic methodology can contribute to cultural linguistics. In: Sharifian F (ed) Advances in cultural linguistics. Springer Nature, Singapore, pp 477–506, 2017) as a research method for Cultural Linguistic studies, 98 distichs reflecting the theme of homeland were selected. Grounded-driven inductive content analyses (Charmaz, Qual Inq 20(9):1074–1084, 2014) of the distichs foregrounded a variety of cultural metaphors, including homeland as inhabitancy, homeland as earthly world, and homeland as celestial world, cultural schema of becoming one with god, and cultural category of earthly homeland as opposed to divine homeland. What yielded was that Rumi moves from the ephemeral to the religious and then to the mystic conceptualizations of homeland that pinpoint a shift from cultural to idiosyncratic conceptualizations of homeland.