In our relationship with people, events, and objects, or in our efforts to understand educational and cultural problems, we often make use of metaphors, but we rarely pause to reflect on the nature of this mode of symbolizing and try to comprehend the role that this mode plays both in research and practical contexts - unless we ourselves are involved as specialists in the fields of art, poetry, literature or music. Yet, metaphors are an integral part of educational language, as philosopher Israel Scheffler convincingly argued more than forty years ago (Scheffler 1972, or. ed. 1960), because, on the one hand, they allow us to indirectly express (or to understand) certain ideas that from time to time we elaborate about the child, the teacher and the educational activity, and, on the other, they also indirectly represent specific educational programs. Likewise, metaphors are a constitutive part of anthropological and ethnographic language: in fact, we are so used to speak of culture in terms of "point of view", "perspective", "frame", "eyeglasses", and about the ethnographic experience as providing us with a "binocular vision" that we might no longer hear those definitions as metaphors. The optical metaphors had in time substituted the earliest one ("whole"), but today each of them is thought as composed of a multiplicity of views even at the level of the individual. If in the 60s anthropologists had been concerned with defining the individual's cultural learning process ("mazeways") and the unique cultural version resulting from it ("idioverse", "propriospect") (see Wolcott 1991, 1996), in the 70s they pointed out that individuals cannot be interpreted as competent in just one culture, and that being multicultural (namely, being able to deal with a group's internal differences related to gender, age, power, status, among others) is in fact "the normal human experience" (Goodenough 1976). The cultural differentiation internally characterizing a socially stratified society was later reiterated by Hannerz (1992) in terms of "cultural complexity". If, according to the 1871 definition coined by Tylor, culture was that "complex" whole to be transmitted to, and acquired by the newborn as a member of a given society, today we are still more than willing to subscribe to its "complexity", but not to its "whole-ness". Consequently, in the 90s, metaphors such as "hybridization" and "métissage" have been introduced to define contemporary societies and cultures, while individual and cultural identities are qualified as "hybrid" and "mestizoed". These now widely popular metaphors are intended to provide a name for collective and individual identities that can no longer be perceived, interpreted and acted upon as homogeneous ones, based - as they supposedly were - on shared assumptions, beliefs, behaviors. Biological metaphors are thus charged with the task of successfully suggesting an image able to convey how people perceive and talk about themselves, their groups of ascription and affiliation, their own society. My paper will first of all aim at discussing the scope and benefits of such metaphors and then explore if in the fields of literature and arts (with particular regard to painting) we can find literary and art works that can evoke and represent such multifaceted human and social conditions. Bibliographical references Goodenough W. (1976), Multiculturalism as the Normal Human Experience, in "Anthropology and Education Quarterly", 7, 4. Hannerz U. (1992), Cultural complexity. Studies in the social Organization of Meaning, Columbia University Press, New York. Scheffler I. (1972), Il linguaggio della pedagogia, Editrice La Scuola, Brescia (or. ed. 1960). Wolcott H. (1991), Propriospect and the Acquisition of Culture, in "Anthropology and Education Quarterly", 22, 3. Wolcott H. (1996), Trasmissione e acquisizione culturale, in Gobbo F., a cura di, Antropologia dell'educazione. Scuola, cultura, educazione nella società multiculturale, Unicopli Editore, Milano.