Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology

298 Pages·2003·2.34 MB·English

by  Paula G. Rubel

Translating Cultures
Perspectives on Translation
and Anthropology
Edited by
Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman
Oxford•New York
First published in 2003 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA
© Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman 2003
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Translating cultures : perspectives on translation and anthropology /
edited by Paula G. Rubel and Abraham Rosman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN1-85973-740-4 – ISBN 1-85973-745-5 (pbk.)
1.Communication in ethnology. 2.Ethnology–Authorship. 3.
Translating and interpreting. 4.Intercultural communication. I.
Rubel, Paula G. II.Rosman, Abraham.
GN307.5.T73 2003
306—dc21
2003000652
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1859737404(Cloth)
ISBN 1859737455(Paper)
Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction: Translation and Anthropology
Paula G. Rubel andAbraham Rosman 1
Part I: General Problems of Translation
1 Lyotard and Wittgenstein and the Question of Translation
Aram A. Yengoyan 25
2 Translation and Belief Ascription: Fundamental Barriers
Todd Jones 45
3 Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating “Glossando”
on Thin Semiotic Ice
Michael Silverstein 75
Part II Specific Applications
4 The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Ineffable: Representations of
Untranslatability in Ethnographic Discourse
Michael Herzfeld 109
5 Translating Folk Theories of Translation
Deborah Kapchan 135
6 Second Language, National Language, Modern Language, and
Post-Colonial Voice: On Indonesian
Webb Keane 153
7 Notes on Transliteration
Brinkley Messick 177
–v–
Contents
8 The Ethnographer as Pontifex
Benson Saler 197
9 Text Translation as a Prelude for Soul Translation
Alan F. Segal 213
10 Structural Impediments to Translation in Art
Wyatt MacGaffey 249
11 Are Kinship Terminologies and Kinship Concepts Translatable?
Abraham Rosman andPaula G. Rubel 269
Index 285
–vi–
Acknowledgments
The chapters of this volume were first presented as papers and discussed at a
conference, Translation and Anthropology, held at Barnard College, Columbia
University, 10–12 November 1998. We are very grateful to the Wenner Gren
Foundation which sponsored the conference, and especially to Sydel Silverman,
President of the Foundation at that time for her support. Barnard College provided
the venue for the conference. We want to thank President Judith Shapiro and
Provost Elizabeth Boylin who were particularly helpful. Jean McCurry and her
staff made all the necessary arrangements, which made the conference a memor-
able event. We wish to thank Michael Silverstein, Michael Herzfeld, and Alan Segal
for their input in helping us to organize the conference.
The participants at the conference included those whose papers comprise the
chapters of this volume, and in addition Suzanne Blier, Serge Gavronsky, Arnold
Krupat, Simon Ortiz, and Douglas Robinson. All the papers were circulated before
the conference took place. We would like to thank all of the participants for their
particularly illuminating and lively discussion during our meeting. Some of the
points made during those discussions are included in the Introduction to this
volume (referenced by name). As we talked and discussed the papers around a
large table, the problem confronting another’s ideas, interpreting them, grasping
what the interlocutor was getting at, brought back to each of us the basic issue of
translating a different and sometimes strange culture into our language and our
culture.
Kathryn Earle of Berg press has been particularly helpful in organizing the
publication of this volume. We also wish to thank Mansour Kamaletdinov for all
his assistance in preparation of the manuscript and for particular attention to detail.
We hope that this volume fulfills the expectations of all those who helped to
bring it about.
Paula Rubel
Abraham Rosman
New York City
–vii–
Notes on Contributors
Michael Herzfeld is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the
author of eight books, the more recent being Portrait of a Greek Imagination and
Anthropology: Theoretical Practice In Culture and Society. He is the winner of the
J. B. Donne Prize on the Anthropology of Art and has been awarded the Rivers
Memorial Medal (Royal Anthropological Institute). He has had fellowships and
grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Found-
ation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research
Council.
Todd Jones is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas. He is the author of numerous articles in both philosophy and social science
journals and is currently working on a volume about reductionism and belief in the
Social Sciences.
Deborah Kapchan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Texas at Austin. She is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and
the Revoicing of Tradition (1996) and is currently completing a manuscript on
music, narrative and trance in the context of the Moroccan Gnawa performance.
She writes about performance, poetics, music and aesthetics. In 2001, she was the
recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to translate Moroccan poetry
in dialect into English.
Webb Keane is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Signs of Recognition: Powers and
Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (1997), as well as many
articles on missionaries and modernity, religious language, semiotics, etc. He has
received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute
for Advanced Study, the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavior Sciences
and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Wyatt MacGaffey is John R. Coleman Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at
Haverford College. He has published extensively on social scructures, politics,
history and art of Central Africa and his most recent work is Kongo Political
Culture: the Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (2000). He was a Ford
Foundation Fellow and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
–ix–
Notes on Contributors
Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the
author of The Calligraphic State and is completing a new work on shari’a, a
regime of an Islamic State. His research has been funded by the Social Science
Research Council, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Fulbright
Program.
Abraham Rosman is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Anthropology at
Barnard College, Columbia University. He has done anthropological research with
Professor Paula Rubel for many years and they have jointly published many
articles and books, including Feasting with Mine Enemy: Rank and Exchange
among Northwest Coast Societies, Second Edition. They have done research in
Iran, Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea and most recently have been doing
research on the collecting of objects, most particularly ethnographic artifacts in
America. Their book The Tapestry of Culture is going into its eighth edition. He has
received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship as well as grants from the National
Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.
Paula G. Rubel is Professor Emerita of the Department of Anthropology at
Barnard College, Columbia University. She has jointly done research with Pro-
fessor Abraham Rosman for many years in Iran, Afghanistan and Papua New
Guinea. They have published many articles and books, including Feasting with
Mine Enemy: Rank and Exchange among Northwest Coast Societies, Second
Edition. Their book The Tapestry of Culture is currently going into its eighth
edition. Currently, they are doing research on collecting artifacts, particularly
ethnographic objects, Disneyana and Black American, in the United States. She has
been the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the
National Institutes of Mental Health, the Social Science Research Council and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
Benson Saler is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Brandeis University. He is
the author of Conceptualizing Religion (paperback edition 2000) and co-author of
UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth (1997). Professor Saler has
held grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National
Endowment of the Arts and Humanities and the Wenner Gren Foundation.
Alan F. Segal is Professor of Religion and the Ingeborg Rennert Professor of
Jewish Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of
Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World, Paul the
ConvertandCharting the Hereafter: The Afterlife in Western Culture. He was a
Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and has received grants from the John Simon Guggen-
heim Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, the Melton Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
–x–
Notes on Contributors
Michael Silverstein is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in the
Departments of Anthropology, of Linguistics and of Psychology at the University
of Chicago. He has recently edited Natural Histories of Discourse with Greg Urban
and has contributed to Regimes of Language edited by Paul Kroskrity. He has
received grants from the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, the National
Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Max-
Planck-Gesellschaft and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He was also
awarded a fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Aram A. Yengoyan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,
Davis. His recent publications include Religion, Morality, and Prophetic Tradit-
ions: Conversion among the Pitjantjatjara of Central Australia; Origin, Hierarchy,
and Egalitarianism among the Mandays of Southeast Mindanao, Philippines; and
No Exit: Aboriginal Australians and the Historicizing of Interpretation and Theory.
He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a member
of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and received grants
from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
–xi–
Introduction: Translation
and Anthropology
Paula Rubel and Abraham Rosman
The central aim of the anthropological enterprise has always been to understand
and comprehend a culture or cultures other than one’s own. This inevitably involves
either the translation of words, ideas and meanings from one culture to another, or
the translation to a set of analytical concepts. Translation is central to “writing
about culture”. However, curiously, the role that translation has played in anthro-
pology has not been systematically addressed by practitioners, even though
translation has been so central to data-gathering procedures, and to the search for
meanings and understandings, which is the goal of anthropology. One of the
reasons for this has been the ongoing internal dialogue about the nature of the
discipline. There are those who feel that anthropology is a social science, with the
emphasis on science, whose methodology, which usually involves analytical
concepts, sampling and quantification, must be spelled out in detail. On the other
side are those who emphasize the humanistic face of the field, and who feel that the
way to do fieldwork cannot be taught. Still others, who focus on achieving under-
standing of another culture, think it can only be achieved by “total immersion” and
empathy.
Since its inception as a discipline and even in the “prehistory” of anthropology,
translation has played a singularly important role. In its broadest sense, translation
means cross-cultural understanding. The European explorers and travelers to Asia
and later the New World were always being confronted with the problem of under-
standing the people whom they were encountering. Gesture and sign language,
used in the first instance, were soon replaced by lingua francas and pidgins, and
individuals who learned these lingua francas and pidgins became the translators
and interpreters. These pioneers in cross-cultural communication not only brought
back the words of the newly encountered people but also became the translators
and communicators of all kinds of information about these people, and the inter-
preters of their very differing ways of life, for European intellectuals, and the
European public at large. They were also the individuals who were the basis for the
conceptions which the Others had of Europeans.
With the development of anthropology as a formal academic discipline in
the mid-nineteenth century, and later as a social science, translation of course
–1–
Paula G. Rubel andAbraham Rosman
continued to play a significant role. At this point in time, anthropologists such as
Edward Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan and Johann Bachofen remained in their
offices and libraries at home, while they theorized about the development of human
society and the evolution of culture. But their theories depended upon ethnographic
information collected by missionaries, travelers, traders and colonial government
officials. These were the individuals who were in first-hand contact with the
“primitive peoples”, who were very different from themselves. Their descriptions
of the ways of life of the people they were encountering were being published in
the various professional journals and monographs, which were established during
this period. At this point in time, the sources of this data were not questioned, nor
was there concern with, or any evaluation of this information in terms of how it
was collected, whether it was based on actual observations or casual conversations,
which languages were used, who was doing the translations and what were the
methods used. The degree of expertise of these Europeans in the local languages
or whether they used interpreters, and who these interpreters were, was also not
considered. Translation was the modus vivendi; however, the anthropologists of the
time were not concerned with questions of translation but only with the inform-
ation itself, and the ways in which it could be used to buttress the evolutionary
schemas and theories which they were hypothesizing.
Even when anthropologists themselves began to do fieldwork and gather ethno-
graphic data at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century,
field methodology and the role translation would play in the data-gathering
enterprise were not really addressed. Though Boas, the founding father of profes-
sional anthropology in the United States, emphasized the importance of linguistics
and the central role that language played in culture, he did not deal with the
question of translation. In the training of his students he emphasized the necessity
of learning the native language. The students were to collect information about the
various aspects of a culture by recording texts in the native language. He himself
published the results of his research with the Kwakiutl in the form of texts as, for
example, in the two-volume Ethnology of the Kwakiutl, with the Kwakiutl version
of the text transcribed in phonetics on the bottom half of the page and the English
translation on the top half. There was a brief note about transcription at the begin-
ning of the work entitled Explanation of Alphabet Used in Rendering Indian
Sounds (Boas 1921: 47). He sent his Columbia University students to various
American Indian tribes, whose languages were in danger of disappearing because
of the shift to the use of English. This was to record valuable linguistic information
about these languages, using phonetic transcription, before knowledge of them was
lost. Though he did not deal with translation in general, Boas recognized that the
languages of the New World were organized in a totally different manner than
European languages and Latin. Such differences in grammatical categories are
central to problems of translation. The fact that grammatically, a speaker of the
–2–