Representing Others

Translation, Ethnography and Museum

Kate Sturge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138139190
• eBook ISBN: 9781317642121
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Cultural anthropology has always been dependent on translation as a textual practice, and it has often used 'translation' as a metaphor to describe ethnography's processes of interpretation and cross-cultural comparison. Questions of intelligibility and representation are central to both translation studies and ethnographic writing - as are the dilemmas of cultural distance or proximity, exoticism or appropriation. Similarly, recent work in museum studies discusses problems of representation that are raised by ethnographic museums as multimedia 'translations'. However, as yet there has been remarkably little interdisciplinary exchange: neither has translation studies kept up with the sophistication of anthropology's investigations of meaning, representation and 'culture' itself, nor have anthropology and museum studies often looked to translation studies for analyses of language difference or concrete methods of tracing translation practices.

This book opens up an exciting field of study to translation scholars and suggests possible avenues of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

 

1. Introduction

Let’s begin at the deep end, with a decontextualized piece of translated conversation:

What would make you decide to bring her back? – She must open her mouth and say, “They did this to me, they did this, and this.” In front of the Bukhensha family, in front of them! So that I know, so that their errors appear to my eyes too. Otherwise,… perhaps she is playing with me, and with them, with the both of us. That couldn’t be. (Dwyer 1982:161)

How did these English words, published in an ethnographic account of Moroccan life, come into existence? Were they mechanically generated by the Arabic words in which the interview took place? Do they amalgamate or paraphrase or reflect or explicate, are they literal or free or do they deliberately exoticize? Under which conditions were their preceding Arabic words spoken, and under which do they reach an anglophone audience on the page? This book attempts to explore some of the questions such a passage might prompt. It does so by tracing those debates in the disciplines of cultural anthropology and museum studies which tackle issues of representation closely connected to translation.

Even without a context, the sample above already indicates that representations of this kind take place within a web of inequalities. On the one hand, the speaker’s words are taken into English by a process of selection, editing, reordering into the grammatical and semantic categories of another language, as well as the application of traditions of translating that signal ‘literal’ faithfulness by using a form of translationese. The speaker himself reports his ex-wife’s potential words – both ethnographer and interviewee are engaged in the practice of reporting speech, and in neither case does the reported person get to determine how his or her words are framed. On the other hand, there is a political asymmetry between the two main participants in this conversation: one side initiated the dialogue within the terms of a powerful institution which cannot be accessed by the other; one owns the copyright and ‘speaks for’ the other in a hegemonic language on an academic stage.

Discussing Marx’s use of two German terms, Darstellung and Vertretung, both translatable into English as ‘representation’, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes how English combines the notion of portraying other people with that of speaking for them or in their place, in the parliamentary sense (1988:276-80). The ambiguity in the term ‘representation’ arises for both ethnography and translation; both claim at once to ‘show’ others to the domestic audience and to speak the others’ words in the language of that audience. As we will see, this is a dynamic which critical voices in anthropology and museum studies have been addressing in detail over the past few decades, and the purpose of this book is to identify areas of thinking that promise to be fruitful for the discipline of translation studies.

Before we start, though, I should identify which strands of translation studies I am working from. In the context of ethnographic translation and the translation of cultures in museum displays, it doesn’t make sense to look at translation as a mainly technical process of re-encoding stable meanings into a second linguistic code. We will see that the ‘meanings’ encoded by ethnographic representation are complex, unstable, hybrid; they are born of the contingencies of the receiving system rather than those of the source. Far from being a potentially reversible bridge-crossing movement, translation in this view is a usually conflictual encounter, one “central to the interface of cultures in the world, part of ideological negotiations and cultural struggles, a form of intellectual construction and creation, a metonym in the exercise of cultural strength: it is a matter of power” (Tymoczko 1999:298).

This line of thinking within translation studies is one that shares many questions with ethnography (understood here in its double sense as the practice of cultural anthropology ‘on the ground’ and the writing of ethnographic accounts). As Johannes Fabian points out, anthropology used to yearn for ‘accurate’ representations but is now exploring the implications of an acceptance that representations are not mirrors reflecting pre-existing, separate objects: “the Other is never simply given, never just found or encountered, but made” (1990:755), and in recent decades translation, too, has had to face a ‘crisis of representation’ which undermined positivist notions of fixed ‘source texts’ capable of objective restatement in another language. According to Talal Asad, anthropology’s crisis – feeding into the ‘postmodern’ turn of the early 1980s – was prompted by shifts in the global political landscape: since the Second World War and with the rise of independence movements, “fundamental changes have occurred in the world which social anthropology inhabits, changes which have affected the object, the ideological support and the organisational base of social anthropology itself And in noting these changes we remind ourselves that anthropology does not merely apprehend the world in which it is located, but that the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it” (1973:12). In the same period, he notes, the Western academy was increasingly turning away from totalizing methods in all the social sciences and addressing instead smaller, micro or local histories and geographies (ibid: 13; see also Sewell 1999). Moving into the early twenty-first century, we see the growing presence of postcolonial theory, including engagements with globalization and its effect on concepts of ‘culture’.

The “experimental moment” in anthropology (Marcus & Fischer 1986) involved increased application to ethnography of the tools of literary criticism – and with this a perspective that fits more closely with studies of literary translation. Thus, ethnographic writing has been examined as fiction and as translation, with more recent critics expanding the notion of translation to cover both such writing and the wider processes of cultural negotiation within which it takes place. These new definitions of translation and of culture itself are discussed in Chapter 2, where we will see that while the ‘experimental moment’ did much to unpick the ‘translation of culture’ in the wide sense of filtering and fictionalization, the aspect of interlingual translation of the words of other people, the practical basis of much ethnographic work, has received far less attention. Chapter 3 considers anthropology’s long tradition of grappling with the experience and writing of cultural difference: after all, anthropology has always been about “figuring out what went on in people’s heads when you couldn’t get at it by projecting your own assumptions and experience” (Darnell 2001:xx) and no less so has literary translation. Translation in both forms offers a means of expanding apparently monocultural worlds and drawing out the actual interculturality of the world we all share, but how to do this in practice, without either effacing or “fetishizing” difference (Said 1989), is a thorny question indeed.

In Chapter 4, a historical outline of the rise of ‘classical’ ethnography will prepare the way for the discussion in Chapters 5 and 6 of counter-moves proposed by the ethnographic experiments of the 1970s onwards. The aim of these chapters is to give a taste of the range of innovative translation techniques being applied by ethnographers, many of which open interesting lines of enquiry for translation scholars.

Chapter 7 looks at ethnographic museums in their capacity as ‘translations’, for though not written texts, they too are frequently analyzed from a textual perspective. As a genre of ethnographic representation that has a much larger and more diverse audience than the written word alone, museums add an important dimension to our understanding of translation as a practice of representing other people’s words, lives and beliefs.

The inclusion of museums makes it even less fair than usual to apply the well-worn accusation ‘traduttore traditore’ in the critiques that follow. Not only is there no clear-cut object of such translatorial treason once our ‘source texts’ are no longer printed books with single authors, but even if there were the translator would be bound to betray both it and everyone else involved in the whole process – dialogue participants, institutions, editors, professional colleagues, students, readers. The ‘translator’s task’ I will assume here is not to be ‘faithful’ but to make principled and if possible accountable choices on how to produce the words and images that will enter the global circuit of cultural representations. This question is the focus of Chapter 8.

Let me close with a few caveats. Firstly, discussing ‘there’ depends on defining ‘here’. In my case that is a white British standpoint, limited to anglophone traditions in order to avoid scattering and diluting the account too far and not because there has been no work done in other languages, other histories. Aside from practicalities, the focus on the English-language tradition also reflects the political impact of this tradition as nurtured by colonialism (for Britain) and internal colonization (for North America). For the sake of consistency of access and because of my own linguistic limitations I have only cited works available in English.

Secondly, the huge spectrum of practices of representing other cultures, most of which could be described as forms of translation in a broader or narrower sense, could include anything from novels and films to travel accounts and translated legal canons. Limiting myself to written ethnographies and anthropological museums is not to exclude these related fields but to invite further investigation of them.

Thirdly, at times my comments will seem only negative, following the hallowed tradition of translator-bashing. But despite the troubled past and present of ethnographic translation – in its harshest formulation, as an imperialistic appropriation into terms of the translating culture – this book starts from the assumption that translation must happen, that, however difficult, it is a necessary move and an assertion of our common ground in being human. Translation must happen, that is, if the alternative is to wait silently until the others adopt our own language and linguistic homogeneity makes translation obsolete.

Finally, this book doesn’t claim to offer either great depth or complete coverage of current debates or the state of the art. My aim is to open up curiosity for further work: the next steps are up to you.

2. Translation as Metaphor, Translation as Practice

Applying translation studies perspectives to ethnography means assuming that the work of ethnography is a kind of translation. Before we turn to specific forms and difficulties of ‘ethnographic translation’, let’s first ask what lies behind that assumption. In particular, this chapter explores the metaphor of ‘the translation of cultures’ and its cousin, ‘culture as translation’.

The translation of culture

The concept of ethnography as a translation of culture is nothing new. The tasks of that “pair of inverted twins” (Tedlock 1983:334), the missionary and the anthropologist, were described by Malinowski in 1935 as “translating the white man’s point of view to the native” and “translating the native point of view to the European” respectively (in Tedlock, ibid). Talal Asad’s important 1986 essay shows that from the 1950s and especially in British social anthropology, the concept of ‘translation of cultures’ became increasingly common. The alien world of anthropology’s objects needed to be reframed in a language which could be understood by the Western academy. As Godfrey Lienhardt put it in 1954:

The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think […] begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own. (cited in Asad 1986:142)

More recent uses of the metaphor reject the notions of ‘remote tribes’ and ‘primitive thought’ but still regard the project of ethnographic writing as a kind of translation: an attempt to “understand other cultures as far as possible in their own terms but in our language, a task which also ultimately entails the mapping of the ideas and practices onto Western categories of understanding” (Tambiah 1990:3).

It is not language in the narrow sense alone – or even primarily – that is to be translated here. Instead, the ethnographic translation proposed by Lienhardt aims to represent the thinking ‘behind’ language and practices. In his discussion, Asad defends functionalist anthropology’s attempt to portray the internal coherence of alien social practices and beliefs, as opposed to approaches that denounced their irrationality and downright wrongness. However, he points out that the search for coherence is not an innocent act. It works on the assumption that the ‘natives’ cannot know the true meaning of their practices, which must instead be identified by the more skilful and objective outsider; as a result, authorship and agency shift from the people studied to the anthropologist-interpreter. Closely bound up with this point are two issues which will be very important to our discussion: firstly, the ‘cultural translation’ constructs its source text as well as transferring it into a different language in the manner of the traditional translator, and secondly, the production of ‘cultural translations’ is not the individual business of the ethnographer but a process strongly constrained by the context of institutional power.

To begin with the construction of the source text, Asad notes that although the anthropologist in the field tries to learn to live a different life and think inside the different discourse, when he or she gets home it’s time to write a translation “addressed to a very specific audience, which is waiting to read about another mode of life and to manipulate the text it reads according to established rules, not to learn to live a new mode of life” (1986:159). In other words, life has to be put into textual form. This rules out a range of other possible forms to express what the anthropologist has learned – forms like participation in dance or performance which might try to recreate the experience – and foregrounds the written text as a means of verbally representing the other way of life (ibid: 160). But unlike, say, a literary translator, the cultural translator doesn’t simply find the textual form ready made. Not only is there no ‘source text’ in the physical sense, but people’s lives and practices are not necessarily text-like at all. Faced with the complexity of life in the other place, the anthropologist has to “construct the discourse as a cultural text in terms of meanings implicit in a range of practices. The construction of cultural discourse and its translation thus seem to be facets of a single act” (ibid).

What is behind this idea of culture as being a text or like a text? Though it was initiated by Paul Ricoeur, we’ll focus here on its influential application to anthropology by Clifford Geertz. In his seminal collection of essays The Interpretation of Cultures, published in 1973, anthropologist Geertz defined ‘culture’ as follows:

The concept of culture I espouse […] is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he has himself spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (1973:5)

Geertz goes on to explain that observing behaviour alone cannot tell us enough about ‘significance’. He uses (after Ryle) the example of watching somebody close one eye for a second. Is that person blinking, or winking, or indeed rehearsing or parodying a blink or a wink? We can’t say anything useful about the behaviour unless we investigate the meanings that motivate the blinker/winker and interpret them in terms of a larger, surrounding ‘web’ of other meanings. This kind of definition, fundamental to Geertzian interpretive anthropology, compares culture to a language (in the sense of a ‘semiotic code’), an analogy which has been pursued especially by the linguistics-oriented structuralism prominent in francophone anthropology. But Geertz’s own version of the analogy focuses on the process of reading, so that cultural facts are like texts (or “ensembles of texts”, ibid:452) which do not stand for themselves but demand complex interpretation. Geertz is trying to demolish the assumption that cultures consist of objective data which simply need to be collected and correctly laid out for analysis. Instead, he says, “what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they […] are up to” (9). Such constructions are “fictions” (15), not in the sense of being untruths but in the sense of having been ‘fashioned’ or ‘made’. In Geertz’s model the members of a culture themselves make sense of – interpret – their own practices, and the anthropologist in turn attempts to make sense of those interpretations in a kind of ‘reading’.

Describing anthropological data as constructions of constructions moves anthropological interpretation very near to hermeneutical literary interpretation – the two activities are intertwined in Geertz’s argument. He describes them as “not just cognate activities” but “the same activity differently pursued” (1983:8; for apractical application, see Geertz’s famous account of a Balinese cockfight, 1973:412-53). This method provides a more concrete basis for the notion of ‘cultural translation’ t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Half Title
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Translation as Metaphor, Translation as practice
• 3. The Translatability of Cultures
• 4. Historical perspectives
• 5. Critical Innovations in Ethnography
• 6. Ethnographic Translations of verbal Art
• 7. Museum Representations
• 8. Ethical perspectives
• 9. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index