Table Of ContentTranslaTing Worlds
Hau
Books
Executive Editor
Giovanni da Col
Managing Editor
Sean M. Dowdy
Editorial Board
Anne-Christine Taylor
Carlos Fausto
Danilyn Rutherford
Ilana Gershon
Jason Throop
Joel Robbins
Jonathan Parry
Michael Lempert
Stephan Palmié
www.haubooks.com
TranslaTing Worlds
THe ePISTeMoLoGICAL SPACe
oF TRAnSLATIon
Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series
Edited by
William F. Hanks and Carlo severi
Hau Books
Chicago
© 2015 Hau Books
Hau Special Issues in ethnographic Theory Series (Volume 1)
The Hau Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series prints paperback ver-
sions of pathbreaking collections, previously published in Hau: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory.
Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore
Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in)
ISBn: 978-0-9861325-1-3
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Contents
List of Contributors vii
InTRoDUCTIon
Translating worlds: The epistemological space of translation
William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi 1
CHAPTeR one
The space of translation
William F. Hanks 21
CHAPTeR TWo
Transmutating beings: A proposal for an anthropology of thought
Carlo Severi 51
CHAPTeR THRee
Powers of incomprehension: Linguistic otherness, translators
and political structure in new Guinea tourism encounters
Rupert Stasch 89
CHAPTeR FoUR
Healing translations: Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism
Anne-Christine Taylor 117
vi TranslaTing Worlds
CHAPTeR FIVe
Bilingual language learning and the translation of worlds
in the new Guinea Highlands and beyond
Alan Rumsey 147
CHAPTeR SIX
Culinary subjectification: The translated world of menus
and orders
Adam Yuet Chau 175
CHAPTeR SeVen
All translation is radical translation
Bruce Mannheim 199
CHAPTeR eIGHT
Acting translation: Ritual and prophetism in twenty-first-century
indigenous Amazonia
Carlos Fausto and Emmanuel de Vienne 221
CHAPTeR nIne
Words and worlds: ethnography and theories of translation
John Leavitt 259
CHAPTeR Ten
on the very possibility of mutual intelligibility
G. E. R. Lloyd 295
Index 313
List of Contributors
Adam Yuet Chau (Ph.D. in Anthropology, 2001, Stanford University) teaches
in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and is a
Fellow at St. John’s College. He is the author of Miraculous response: Doing popu-
lar religion in contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2006) and editor
of Religion in contemporary China: Revitalization and innovation (Routledge,
2011). He is currently working on book projects investigating the idiom of host-
ing (zuozhu) and forms of powerful writing (“text acts”) in Chinese political and
religious culture.
Emmanuel de Vienne is Associate Professor at the University of Nanterre,
France. He conducted fieldword among the Trumai in the Upper Xingu Region
(Mato Grosso, Brasil). His topics of interest include shamanism, ritual, and jok-
ing relationships.
Carlos Fausto is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Museu Nacional,
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of Os Índios antes
do Brasil (2000), Inimigos fiéis (2001) and Warfare and shamanism in Amazonia
(2012). He is the coeditor (with Michael J. Heckenberger) of Time and memory
in indigenous Amazonia (2007) and (with Carlo Severi) L’image rituelle (2014).
William F. Hanks received the Joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology
from the University of Chicago in 1983 and currently teaches in the Department
of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Director
of Social Science Matrix, a cross-disciplinary research institute. He investigates
viii TranslaTing Worlds
the relation between grammar and communicative practices, colonial history,
and contemporary shamanism among the Maya of Yucatán, Mexico.
John Leavitt eaches in the anthropology department of the Université de Mon-
tréal, specializing in linguistic anthropology. He has conducted field research in
the Central Himalayas of northern India and in Ireland and has published on
comparative mythology, oral poetry, and the history of linguistic relativity.
Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Philosophy and Sci-
ence at the University of Cambridge and is now based at the Needham Re-
search Institute. He has published twenty-six books, initially concentrating on
ancient Greek philosophy and science and then embarking on detailed com-
parative studies with ancient Chinese thought. His three most recent books,
which tackle the underlying philosophical problems of such comparisons and
related issues in cognitive science, are: Cognitive variations: Reflections on the
unity and diversity of the human mind (2007), Disciplines in the making (2009),
Being, humanity and understanding (2012), and The ideals of inquiry (2014), all
from Oxford University Press.
Bruce Mannheim is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan
and a leading scholar of Andean languages, cultures, and history. His works span
from a linguistic history of the Quechua language since the sixteenth century—
and its shifting social ecology (the language of the Inka since the European
invasion); to narrative; to ritual practices around places; and to Quechua ontol-
ogy. His current research project is a theory of cultural replication—the ways in
which cultural forms are stabilized across time and spread across populations.
Alan Rumsey is a Professor of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the
Pacific, Australian National University. His research fields are Highland Papua
New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia, with a focus on speech genres and on
relations among language, culture, and intersubjectivity
Carlo Severi is Professor (Directeur d’études) at the École des Hautes études
en Sciences Sociales and Director of Research (Directeur de recherche) at
CNRS. A member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège
de France since 1985, he has been a Getty Scholar at the Getty Institute for
the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles (1994–95), a Fellow of
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix
the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2002–2003), and a Visiting Fellow at Cam-
bridge (1990, 2012). He is the author of La memoria rituale (La Nuova Ita-
lia, 1993), Naven or the other self (with Michael Houseman, Brill, 1998; French
edition: CNRS Éditions, 1994), and The chimera principle (Hau Books, 2015;
French edition: Rue d’Ulm-Musée du Quai Branly, 2007).
Rupert Stasch is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cam-
bridge. He is the author of Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West
Papuan place (2009). Since 1995, he has carried out twenty-one months of field-
work with Korowai speakers of Papua, Indonesia. He is currently writing a book
about interactions between Korowai and international tourists.
Anne-Christine Taylor is a social anthropologist, specializing in the study of
lowland South American indigenous groups. She is Directrice de Recherche
Emeritus at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France),
and headed the Department of Research and Teaching at the Musée du Quai
Branly from 2005 to 2014.
