Article Metaphors and cultural narratives on adaptive responses to severe adversity: A field study among the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil Iara Meili 1 and Eva Heim 1 , Ana C Pelosi 2 and Andreas Maercker 1 Abstract The expressions resilience and posttraumatic growth represent metaphorical concepts that are typically found in Euro- American contexts. Metaphors of severe adversity or trauma and the expressions of overcoming it vary across cul- tures—a lacuna, which has not been given much attention in the literature so far. This study aimed to explore the metaphorical concepts that the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil uses to talk about adaptive and positive responses to severe adversity and to relate them to their socio-cultural context. We carried out 14 semi-structured interviews during field research over a one-month period of fieldwork. The data were explored with systematic meta- phor analysis. The core metaphors included images of battle, unity, spirituality, journeys, balance, time, sight, transform- ation, and development. These metaphors were related to context-specific cultural narratives that underlie the Pitaguary ontological perspective on collectivity, nature, and cosmology. The results suggest that metaphors and cultural narratives can reveal important aspects of a culture’s collective mindset. To have a contextualized understanding of expressive nuances is an essential asset to adapt interventions to specific cultures and promote culture-specific healing and recovery processes. Keywords Brazil, idioms of distress, metaphors, posttraumatic growth, resilience, socio-cultural context Introduction Trauma (‘‘wound’’ in Greek) is a metaphorical concept that originates from Euro-American somatic medicine and that gives rise to the implicit understanding that traumatized people have a ‘‘wounded psyche’’ (Maercker & Heim, 2016). Resilience and posttrau- matic growth (PTG), on the other hand, are widely known metaphorical concepts representing adaptive responses to trauma or severe adversity. Although the two terms have been treated as synonyms (Sattler, Boyd, & Kirsch, 2014), it has been argued that they represent distinct concepts (Tedeschi, Shakespeare- Finch, Taku, & Calhoun, 2018). Resilience, a metaphor originating from materials science, refers to a personal trait of being flexible and able to bounce back from adversity (Bonanno, 2004), the capability to withstand adversity and to return to the previous status quo. As a biological metaphor, PTG is applied to the posi- tive psychological outcomes of struggle with difficult circumstances (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). Related metaphorical expressions for growth are ‘‘develop- ment’’ or ‘‘maturation,’’ which indicate an aspiration to go beyond the previous status quo in the aftermath of adversity and achieve a higher state of wellbeing. A growing literature has taken a culture-sensitive approach to these two concepts (e.g., Hinton & Kirmayer, 2017; Lewis, 2013; Splevins, Cohen, Bowley, & Joseph, 2010; Ungar, 2011). It has been 1 University of Zurich 2 Federal University of Ceara ´ Corresponding author: Iara Meili, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich Binzmuehlestr. 14/17, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland. Email: iara.meili@outlook.com Transcultural Psychiatry 0(0) 1–14 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1363461519890435 journals.sagepub.com/home/tps