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–