One of the central themes in cognitive linguistics is the uniquely human development of some
higher potential called the mind and more particularly the intertwining of body and mind
which has come to be known as embodiment. Several books and volumes have explored this theme in
length. However the interaction between culture body and language has not received the due
attention that it deserves. Naturally any serious exploration of the interface between body
language and culture would require an analytical tool that would capture the ways in which
different cultural groups conceptualize their feelings thinking and other experiences in
relation to body and language. A well-established notion that appears to be promising in this
direction is that of cultural models constituting the building blocks of a group's cultural
cognition. The volume results from an attempt to bring together a group of scholars from
various language backgrounds to make a collective attempt to explore the relationship between
body language and culture by focusing on conceptualizations of the heart and other internal
body organs across a number of languages. The general aim of this venture is to explore (a) the
ways in which internal body organs have been employed in different languages to conceptualize
human experiences such as emotions and or workings of the mind and (b) the cultural models
that appear to account for the observed similarities as well as differences of the various
conceptualizations of internal body organs. The volume as a whole engages not only with
linguistic analyses of terms that refer to internal body organs across different languages but
also with the origin of the cultural models that are associated with internal body organs in
different cultural systems such as ethnomedical and religious traditions. Some contributions
also discuss their findings in relations to some philosophical doctrines that have addressed
the relationship between mind body and language such as that of Descartes.
