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The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology
... Having shown that appropriation was initiated by telcos -users at that moment -we argue that acts of re-appropriation were driven by customers of telecommunications. 7 Citing Asad [9], Lu and Qiu [94] seem to suggest that appropriation [of technical practices] could be seen as a central, institutionalized practice more than individual undertakings. Meanwhile, readers of Polanyi such as Jessop [85] have shown that "intellectual labour can be subsumed" in institutions and commoditized into outputs that make part of "a networked, digitized production-consumption process. ...
... Airtime sellers and eventual mobile money agents were the primordial manifestations of bridge-builders at local and national levels. 9 A participant [P11] who worked as an agent in the early days 9 Agents are a principal component of the informal sector in Africa, as they bridge the gap between the served and the underserved, or excluded. However, in the case of telecommunications, agents were also users. ...
... Airtime sellers and eventual mobile money agents were the primordial manifestations of bridge-builders at local and national levels. 9 A participant [P11] who worked as an agent in the early days 9 Agents are a principal component of the informal sector in Africa, as they bridge the gap between the served and the underserved, or excluded. However, in the case of telecommunications, agents were also users. ...
This paper reexamines appropriation in human-computer interaction (HCI), which refers to the unexpected alterations made to artifacts by users. We analyze when earlier informal practices of exchanging airtime for cash became enclosed into proprietary mobile money platforms, and show that this enclosure has a longer history in global telecommunications. Building on interviews with 19 experts in computing, policy, and media, we challenge teleological narratives of the inevitability of mobile money often overlooked in computing and global development. We develop an 'appropriation matrix' introducing a dialectic of re-and reverse-appropriation animated by three elements—users, artifacts, and imaginaries—that unexpectedly switch between production and consumption, complicating invention and innovation in formal and informal economies. This matrix may help HCI and development better understand how different values, visions, and practices might have led (or could still lead) to different designs of products like mobile money.
... Approaching translation from a postcolonial viewpoint, scholars argue that the linguistic and cultural exchange between the South and the North is unequal (Asad, 1986;Jacquemond, 1992;Venuti, 1995). Asad (1986) focuses on language inequalities in the context of cultural translation. ...
... Approaching translation from a postcolonial viewpoint, scholars argue that the linguistic and cultural exchange between the South and the North is unequal (Asad, 1986;Jacquemond, 1992;Venuti, 1995). Asad (1986) focuses on language inequalities in the context of cultural translation. He investigates the power dynamics in translation, distinguishing between 'strong' and 'weak' languages. ...
Social media is developing increasingly as an open space for communication across languages and cultures. YouTubers, for instance, use different audiovisual translation strategies to attract more viewers and disseminate their content on a large scale. It is believed that there has been an increase of foreignising strategies by content producers in the last decade. This article explored the role of foreignising subtitles in source/local culture visibility and cross-cultural communication among international viewers, drawing on Venuti’s translation theory (1995). To fulfil this, the researchers conducted an inductive thematic analysis of 544 comments from 4 YouTube vlogs. Three themes emerged from the analysis: 1. Awareness, 2. Meaning negotiation, and 3. Affect. The results showed that the foreignisation of YouTube subtitles triggered foreign viewers’ curiosity to engage in conversation about language and culture, which raised their awareness of the linguistic and cultural features of the source text. This led to the conclusion that the foreignisation of subtitles fosters cross-cultural communication and the source/local-culture visibility.
APA Citation:
Er-ramy, Y. , Boudhim, Z. , & Belhiah, H. (2024). Immigrant Youtubers’ Subtitling: The Role of Foreignisation in Local Culture Visibility and Cross-Cultural Communication. International Journal of Society, Culture & Language, 12(3 (Themed Issue on Culture & Communication)), 95-107. doi: 10.22034/ijscl.2024.2030067.3499
... Indeed, it challenges the ontological assumptions of modern concepts and their analytical and interpretive power to capture the so-called cultural realities of Others. Rather than being conceived as a paradigmatic shift or radical theoretical rupture, in the Kuhnian sense, against anthropology's intellectual genealogies, ongoing ontological discussions give continuity to anthropology's reflexive (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), conceptual/intellectual (Strathern, 1980;Wagner, 1981), methodological (Geertz, 1973;Turner, 1980), and cross-cultural translation and ethico-political contributions (Asad, 1973(Asad, , 1986. The methodological subversion lies in the aims to invent new concepts by translating, as opposed to capturing, alternative modes of existence. ...
Although decolonial thought from Latin America and the Caribbean is a multifaceted field of research and sociopolitical praxis, it is often interpreted monolithically. To refuse this tendency, we argue that it is imperative to trace decolonial theory’s intellectual genealogies and engage in transgressive decolonial hermeneutics to re-interpret texts (theories) according to their living socio-historical and geopolitical contexts. Following Stuart Hall’s lead, we first sketch out the geopolitical and sociocultural exigencies that allow for theoretical movements to unfold, paying more attention to the geopolitical implications of thinking “from” Latin America and the Caribbean. Second, we address the ethical imperative of thinking “with” as we seriously engage in inter-epistemic dialogues to advance an ecology of decolonial knowledges and pedagogical practices born in struggle. Ultimately, this article situates decolonial discourses and practices according to the conditions that enable their praxis-oriented intellectual expression.
... Una teoría etnográfica sobre el encuentro, por lo tanto, que sólo puede ser posible a partir del encuentro mismo. 27 Esta tensión nos remite al famoso debate entre Herskovits y Frazier, que tuvo lugar en la primera mitad del siglo XX y que ha sido actualizado desde entonces, de diferentes maneras, como dos "líneas de fuerza": "internas" y "externas" (Goldman 2009 Lo que esta teoría esboza, o traduce (Asad 1986), es otra forma de pensar sobre el tiempo, en la que el pasado, el presente y el futuro pueden coexistir, y un acontecimiento presente puede transformar tanto el futuro como el pasado. Cuando mis amigos de Tumaco, al encontrarse con las prácticas religiosas afrocubanas, me dijeron que "todo eso siempre había existido allí", esto no quiere decir que todo eso siempre había existido de la misma manera, ni que esta existencia, para poder emerger, no requiriera un trabajo cuidadoso de instauración, de realización de un posible. ...
This article explores the emergence and transformation of Afro-diasporic religious practices in Tumaco (Nariño), a city in Colombia’s southern Pacific region. This process began in 2005, sparked by a political mobilization of local teachers that gave rise to a political and spiritual movement of resistance and experimentation. Rooted in the recovery of ancestral traditions—such as the veneration of spirits and wakes for living saints—the movement also fostered a (re)connection with African-based deities and religious practices that, from the participants’ perspective, had always been present and inherently their own. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tumaco between 2017 and 2019—including participant observation and interviews—the article follows this process of spiritual and existential reconfiguration. Some interlocutors described it as a movement to “return to what is ours,” which unfolded through dynamic entanglements between people, deities, political currents, and ritual practices. Taking this proposition seriously, the article develops an ethnographic theory of encounter between religious practices—one that avoids both the reduction of these practices to a supposedly authentic African past and the deconstructive impulse to dismantle such narratives entirely. Ultimately, building on this ethnographic theory of encounter and the concept of resonance, the article proposes a way to rethink anthropology itself—as a resonant and intercessory practice.
... Recuperamos esse, que é um clássico debate entre antropólogos, não porque tenhamos qualquer ambição de aprofundá-lo aqui, mas porque esse é o ponto de partida desta reflexão sobre o entrecruzamento entre o universo do feminino e as práticas de cuidado a partir da expressão "aguentar". 3 Adotando a perspectiva de Talal Asad (1986), o nosso objetivo é fazer um exercício de comparação entre os diferentes significados de aguentar a partir dos usos que nossas interlocutoras de pesquisa dão a essa expressão. A intenção é ensaiar 3 ...
Este artigo reflete sobre a categoria cuidado quando atravessada pelas dinâmicas de gênero e geração na sociedade cabo-verdiana. O ato de cuidar é de fundamental importância para as dinâmicas familiares nesta sociedade que é marcada por mobilidades de múltiplas ordens – entre pessoas, vilas, cidades, ilhas, países. O interesse é pensar sobre o cuidado a partir do idioma local expresso pela categoria “aguentar”, expressão que carrega em si múltiplos significados que nos permitem compreender o valor de cuidar na construção da pessoa ao longo de seu percurso de vida. O que desejamos com tais reflexões é complexificar as noções de cuidar ao observar as diversas disputas sobre o universo dos cuidados: com, quando, quem cuida ou deve cuidar não compõe um campo que está dado, mas que é construído e constrói pessoas e moralidades nesta sociedade marcada por fluxos.
... Translation has been around since the dawn of mankind and his need to connect with others with different languages and cultures (Asad, 1986;Doherty, 2016). Translation theorists and scholars have disagreed about the duality of source and goal since the age of Cicero, Saint Jerome, John Bingham, and Hunayn ibn Ishaq (Cooper, 2017;Langermann, 2012). ...
This study explores gains and losses at the grammatical, lexical, and stylistic levels in three eminent Qur'an translations from the context of translation theories. It also utilized the descriptive qualitative research method, Hervey and Higgins' (1992) concept of loss, and Nord's (2005) paradigm of textual analysis in the translation. The results implied that losses occur at grammatical, lexical, and stylistic levels due to the imprecision of chosen words when translating the meaning of some Qur'anic Arabic terms, expressions, and structures into English. Additionally, the intended translators subjected to inquiry on occasion seemingly grasp the meanings and subtleties of the lexemes; thus, they pick out lexemes that are appropriate and usable in their grammatical, lexical, and stylistic contexts. Such fidelity in choosing words and varied expressions resulted in gains at the grammatical, lexical, and stylistic levels. Also, the three translators espoused verbatim and loan translation strategies, which led to grammatical, lexical, and stylistic losses. Finally, it elaborates that profound linguistic repertoire, broad cultural knowledge, language proficiency, and thorough understanding of both Arabic and English, besides greater understanding of good books on exegesis and linguistics, are crucial in offering a proper translation of the Holy Qur'an generally and Qur'anic Arabic words particularly.
... Translation has been around since the dawn of mankind and his need to connect with others with different languages and cultures (Asad, 1986;Doherty, 2016). Translation theorists and scholars have disagreed about the duality of source and goal since the age of Cicero, Saint Jerome, John Bingham, and Hunayn ibn Ishaq (Cooper, 2017;Langermann, 2012). ...
This study explores gains and losses at the grammatical, lexical, and stylistic levels in three eminent Qur'an translations from the context of translation theories. It also utilized the descriptive qualitative research method, Hervey and Higgins' (1992) concept of loss, and Nord's (2005) paradigm of textual analysis in the translation. The results implied that losses occur at grammatical, lexical, and stylistic levels due to the imprecision of chosen words when translating the meaning of some Qur'anic Arabic terms, expressions, and structures into English. Additionally, the intended translators subjected to inquiry on occasion seemingly grasp the meanings and subtleties of the lexemes; thus, they pick out lexemes that are appropriate and usable in their grammatical, lexical, and stylistic contexts. Such fidelity in choosing words and varied expressions resulted in gains at the grammatical, lexical, and stylistic levels. Also, the three translators espoused verbatim and loan translation strategies, which led to grammatical, lexical, and stylistic losses. Finally, it elaborates that profound linguistic repertoire, broad cultural knowledge, language proficiency, and thorough understanding of both Arabic and English, besides greater understanding of good books on exegesis and linguistics, are crucial in offering a proper translation of the Holy Qur'an generally and Qur'anic Arabic words particularly.
... 20 My sense has been that arguments think themselves through me as much as vice versa. There is something to be said for Foucault's author function (1980), as a complex agent or a Deleuzian assemblage, here an antiphony of Balinese and those who 'authorize' them (Asad 1986;1990c). And what about the imagined addressees? ...
This is a brief intellectual autobiography which traces my theoretical development over sixty years from social anthropology to cultural studies, media studies and poststructuralism to the perennial problems of the human sciences.
... The sole epistemology that has prevailed in the West utterly disdains cultural diversity. One of the most insightful criticisms of the domination of Western knowledge is that of Talal Asad (1986) in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, co-edited by historian James Clifford and anthropologist George Marcus. Asad accuses anthropologists and translators of acting as colonial agents. ...
This article focuses on the translation of non-Western knowledges. It aims to describe different types of translation which anthropologists have used to approach a kind of knowledge that is constructed not only with the intellect but also with more than five senses. Including the ideas of the so-called 'sensory anthropology', which, together with other types of translation in anthropology, such as 'shamanic translation', 'translation as equivocation', 'intercultural translation' and 'total translation', open the door to a new way of addressing and dealing with the translation of this knowledge. The article also shows how some contemporary translation theories can be combined with the sensory turn in anthropology to be able to translate a type of knowledge that from time immemorial has not been transmitted through the conventional channels of the Western world.
... Critical, feminist, and post-structuralist ethnographers beseeched their colleagues to confront the logics of positivism, logocentrism, and white supremacy (Abu-Lughod, 1991;Asad, 1973Asad, , 1986Crapanzano, 1986;Clifford, 1986a, b;Haraway, 1988;Harding, 1987;Lather, 1986;Torres & Milun, 1990). Lather (1986) argued that positivism and logocentrism mystified "the inherently ideological nature of research in the human sciences" and legitimated "privilege based on class, race, and gender" (p. ...
In this chapter the authors share critical historic turns in ethnography in educational and social science research in the U.S. The authors describe initial radical departures from positivism toward emic approaches in anthropology and sociology, the interpretive turn, and the melding of interpretivism and critical theory in critical ethnography. They discuss the collapse of critical ethnography and explore movement toward a postcritical/post-critical epoch. They conclude with more recent ontological developments informed by post-structuralism, posthumanism, and new materialism, and address post qualitative research.
... This act of translation highlighted the power imbalance between groups. As noted by anthropologists working with the concept of translation, it is a power-laden endeavor-what can and cannot be made commensurable between two languages and whose language gets more or less distorted in the forging of commensurability are reflections of power relations, both of the speakers and of the wider cultures to which they belong (Asad, 1986;Gal, 2015;Pigg, 2001;Povinelli, 2001). In the case of PSE procurement processes-the unofficial focus of the entire mesa-it was the departments who controlled funds that were clearly in positions of authority. ...
The National Institute of the Popular Solidarity Economy (IEPS) in Ecuador was created to promote an alternative form of economy—the Popular Solidarity Economy (PSE). As a precarious institute with limited funding, IEPS staff worked hard to find alternative ways to support the PSE. In this article, I examine their work through the lens of valor agregado (added value), a commonly used local term for how economic value is created. Government bureaucrats intervened primarily by creating an audience that was interested in the social aspects of the alternative economy. Because valor agregado ambiguously refers to both monetary and social value, it helped the PSE better integrate with the wider economy. With this approach, I offer a potential new path for analyzing government support for alternative economies. By refocusing our attention on key actors' understandings of value creation, anthropologists can sidestep questions of whether alternative economies have been “co‐opted” by capitalism and instead examine the necessary interfaces between these alternatives and the mainstream.
... This hegemony is not characterized only by quantity but also by ideology, as works which are translated from dominated into dominant languages can often present distortions of the source culture. Venuti (2008) describes it as a "racist opposition between Western rationality and Eastern irrationality" Asad (1986), in describing the power imbalance in translation discourse, says that "the languages of the Third world societies are "weaker" in relation to Western languages (and today, especially to English)" (p. 157). ...
This MA thesis presents a translation from Arabic into English of the introduction
and two chapters from the novel مدينة الموتى (The City of the Dead) by the Egyptian author Hassan Elgendy. This thesis also includes a commentary and analysis of the issues of cultural equivalence that arose during the translation process. The novel is a horror fiction set within Arab and Islamic culture, which means that it has various culture-specific elements which are not easily transferred into English. These elements are subdivided into two categories: (a) cultural and religious elements and (b) metaphysical elements. The commentary also shows how I adopt Venuti’s (2008) principles of 'domestication' and 'foreignization' in order to reach my purpose of producing a literary translation which, from one side, remains respectful of the source culture discourse, and from the other side, can still be considered as commercially valuable. In order to guide me in my translation choices, I also rely on an anthropological approach referred to as 'universal cognition', which reflects anthropologists’ efforts to explain cultural similarities between different communities by associating them to the cognitive similarities believed to be universally shared by all humans. By referring to this approach, I do not adopt the traditional focus on the differences between the source and target cultures, but rather look for similarities and common grounds between them, in an attempt to address more effectively issues of cultural equivalence.
... This is examined in more depth in the contributions by Fernández and Gibb which, unlike the other articles of this special issue, are not principally centered on the politics of academic writing but examine wider aspects of researching multilingually. As Fernández reminds us, for an academic working across cultures research becomes an act of translation, a reflection which is also at the heart of social anthropology (Asad, 1986; see also Gibb in this issue) and comparative sociology (Turner, 1980). Silencing language can only lead to a mystification that places fieldwork outside the scope of serious critique (Borchgrevink, 2003). ...
This introduction to the special issue provides some context on the linguistic landscape that characterizes contemporary academia and on the significance of academic translation for knowledge production. It elaborates on how the adoption of English as academic lingua franca, one of the most pervasive aspects of a global university system shaped by neoliberalism, has led to the coexistence of differently placed languages in a competitive market. Most of the world’s researchers in the social sciences and the humanities today exist in highly multilingual spaces where the simultaneous use of different languages for research, writing and teaching has become routinized. However, the preponderance of English as the universal medium of what counts as globally relevant knowledge also determines the nature of mostly covert, yet widespread academic translation practices without which the functioning of the lingua franca would be impossible. These ordinary yet widely ignored translation practices are constitutive of knowledge production in a global academic space. Reflecting on the politics of translation in this highly unequal field becomes, in this context, a necessary undertaking. Such a reflection entails, on one hand, a recognition of the continuity and inseparability of writing, interpreting, and translating in shaping the production of social scientific and humanistic knowledge and, on the other, a critique of assimilatory forms of translation through which the dominance of plain English as the language of science is constructed.
... Al hablar de engagement automáticamente nos lleva al terreno de una experiencia compartida de los intercambios transoceánicos, mismos que fueron bidireccionales y no únicamente en un solo sentido. Y al hablar de translation, a la manera de Talal Asad (1986), nos remite al concepto de la antropología social de "traducción cultural" (cultural translation), que va más allá del análisis de un texto, sino que se transfiere al campo de las prácticas sociales: es decir, cómo la gente que es originaria de un lugar interpreta su propia realidad cuando entra en una nueva localidad, y cómo pone en práctica todo su bagaje cultural previo. De igual manera, a lo largo del libro observaremos cómo los distintos autores utilizan conceptos como "fusión", "híbrido", "transcultural", que reflejan el nivel de interacciones dinámicas entre los distintos actores de cada lado del océano. ...
Reseña del libro: Capistrano-Baker, F. H., y Priyadarshini, M. (2020). Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Trans-lation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires (1565-1898). Ayala Foundation, Inc., Getty Research Institute, Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institute), 318 pp.
The concept of ‘namûs’ refers to a shared way of being and meaning that is central to Kurdish social life. Namûs, however, is most commonly known through translation as the concept of ‘honour’. In this article, I ask what happens when ‘we’ make a return to the vocabulary of namûs (not ‘honour’). What other meanings, frames, and ways of relating are opened up by the epistemic centring of namûs? The catachrestic operation that is namûs-as-‘honour’ is trapped within a colonial politics of translation, fixing the concept and its meaning in an injurious and epistemically unjust form. Reconstructing the meaning of what namûs entails, first by a return to its etymology, and second by exploring ethnographic encounters with subjects of namûs in Denmark, North Kurdistan, and Turkey, I argue that the conceptual non-equivalence of namûs with ‘honour’ in Eurocentric discourse requires a more rigorous form of translation which is attentive to the onto-epistemology, conceptual specificity, and historicity of namûs. To this end, I argue that openness and proximity to such lives are needed to capture the (un)translatability of namûs as a ‘life-worldly’ concept. This article, thereby, diversifies and interrupts the historicity of the concept of ‘honour’ by attending to namûs in its plurality. In doing so, the subjection of norms in the monolingual language-culture is challenged, and the aesthetic conditions that render such non-liberal lives as (un)intelligible are refigured. This makes possible a different mode of global feminist solidarity built upon openness, listening, and intimacy.
The article presents the results of the study of discursive construction and moralization of subjectivity in court documents. The research is based on the analysis of court decisions in criminal cases under Article 148 of the Criminal Code, Part 1 and Part 2 (better known as the article ‘on insulting the feelings of believers’), as well as demanding compensation for moral injury for ‘insulting the feelings of believers’ under Article 151 of the Civil Code. The documents create a model of an intersubjective situation of insult, considered with the reliance on the internal states of the participants of this situation — intentions in the case of the accused and emotions in the case of the victims, which are expressed through the legal language. The discursive reconstruction of the intentions of the accused is framed with reference to legal moral categories, this creates an image of a person who consistently and deliberately violates the norms of the moral order. To protect this order, ‘religious feelings’ translated into terms of moral injury and moral suffering. Hence, in the context of the legal protection of the ‘feelings of believers’, the anti‑social behaviour of the accused is contrasted with social, i.e. moral, behaviour, namely, respect for certain (most often Orthodox Christian) symbols. The typical antipode for the accused is a religious person, or, rather, someone who properly demonstrates an emotional reaction to acts of transgression of moral boundaries.
Abstract
Translation of the Arabic novel into French presents a very interesting case
since it sheds light on the question of the cultural representation of the Other and
on the role of the translator, among other main actors, in the negotiation of the
cultural distance /rapprochement between the Arab novelist and the target
audience.This article is a reflection on the effect of using of one of the global strategies (domestication versus foreignazation) on the Other's image by analysing some cultural elements.
The question of repatriation of anthropological knowledge is perhaps best considered by comparing past and present museum practic es. To investigate what it means to repatriate knowledge, we must understand the processes involved in repatriating museum objects, including what it involves to become a museum object. Such knowledge may produce new insights into our disciplinary histories as well as our current practices of anthropological knowledge production.
Formative works in descriptive translation studies assert that language power relations – asymmetries between the “status” or “prestige” of source languages (SLs) and target languages (TLs) – broadly determine translations’ linguistic features (Baker 1996, 183; Toury 2012, 314). To date, these claims have not been tested in any systematic, empirical investigation involving a variety of languages and linguistic features. The central research question addressed by this doctoral thesis is thus whether translations from comparatively higher-status SLs tend to exhibit higher levels of SL influence, conceptualized as interference and foreignization.
The project applies comparable corpus methodology. It constructs a corpus of literary prose from the late 19th and early 20th century, where texts are either translated into or originally composed in English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Croatian, or Irish. Using a novel method of assessing language status developed from Lewis and Simons’ (2010) EGIDS model, the relative status for each selected language is expressed ordinally and synchronically. The thesis subsequently conducts corpus-based studies measuring the potential association between SL status and SL influence on the lexical, syntactic, and paratextual features of translations. Lexical interference is operationalized as the relative frequency (RF) of loanwords originating in the SL and attributable to the translator. Syntactic interference is operationalized using a novel metric called the syntactic interference/normalization coefficient (SINC), which measures the extent to which a translation’s RF distribution of part-of-speech (POS) n-grams resembles those of comparable SL and TL texts. Paratextual foreignization is operationalized as the RF of translator-attributed footnotes and endnotes. The studies test for the hypothesized positive association between SL status and each of the aforementioned response variables using the Kendall rank correlation coefficient. Finally, the results of the three studies are synthesized to determine whether there is a positive association between SL status and SL influence on translations’ linguistic properties.
The project's findings offer strong empirical evidence that more powerful source languages like English and French tend to induce more loanwords in translation than less prominent source languages like Swedish or Croatian. This outcome indicates that language power dynamics do in fact play a decisive role in determining source-language influence on translations – at least on the lexical level.
En este artículo me ocuparé de la siguiente pregunta ¿Qué consecuencias tiene para la antropología social tomar en serio las demandas de escucha de grupos incómodos? Para responder a esta pregunta me valdré del material etnográfico construido entre los años 2005 y 2008 entre oficiales historiadores del Ejército Nacional de Colombia. Sostendré que, si se asume que en la etnografía la empatía y el respeto a las demandas de escucha, son condiciones de las que no se puede prescindir, detenerse en la comprensión del ‘otro incómodo’ tiene como consecuencia la ampliación de los horizontes disciplinares, la multiplicación del conocimiento de las formas de estar en el mundo.
This paper considers the development of new clinical and medical practices in the early 2000s in France, after the adoption of legal reforms aiming at the prevention of sexual infractions and the protection of minors. The paper explains how the reform led to the creation of a new form of punishment for sexual offenders, l’obligation de soin (therapeutic obligation), which can be described as long-term mandatory therapeutic monitoring. This paper offers an analysis of the implementation of this measure from the standpoint of the specialized mental health care unit which were entrusted the mission of caring for the new group of convicted patients, i.e., patients sentenced to undergo mandatory therapy, after this legal reform. In the new regime these mandatory therapies created, clinicians are tasked to combine their conventional mission of care for the patient in the present, with the judicial mandate of detecting and preventing the patient’s relapse qua recidivism in the future. Mobilizing ethnographic examples that evidence the way clinical care comes to encompass a penal mandate of long-term surveillance of convicted patients, I argue that the dual injunction of procuring care while preventing relapse-recidivism constrains the psychodynamic forms of clinical intervention deployed by French clinicians, realigns both psychiatric and clinical interventions along penal lines, and revives interest in some of the diagnostic categories and aims of criminal psychiatry which were important for the development of psychiatry in France.
Modern Saudi Arabian literature is a dynamic reproduction of the country’s ongoing socio-political transformations and cultural struggles. As writers negotiate the complexities of identity at the crossroads of tradition and modernity in a rapidly changing society, the role of literary motifs, such as names, becomes increasingly significant. This study, anchored within a new historicist perspective, explores the function of names in Ahmed Abodehman’s memoir The Belt. It illuminates the construction of literary naming and its role in the confluence of individual identity and collective cultural discourse within Saudi Arabia’s socio-cultural change through the character of Hizam. This analysis underscores the use of names as a nuanced literary device that imbues the narrative with deep cultural and ideological resonances. The study also highlights the cultural shifts evident in modern Saudi literature that are instrumental in exploring the evolving cultural topography of the nation. It further hammers on the complexities involved in the ‘triangular’ process of literary translation that the narrative has undergone, offering a critical perspective on the intricate interplay between cultural identity, linguistic diversity, and the dynamics of representation.
Challenging the false neutrality of secularism, J. Z. Smith (1988) declared that between “religion” and “religious studies” there is “no difference at all.” The subsequent rise of area studies matched the decline of comparative programs whose underwriting logic faltered under postcolonial scrutiny. This turn toward particularity and data expansion was a way of reckoning with the ethnocentric universalizing of modern social theory. Today, scholars in both religious studies and anthropology worry about how ethnocentrism persists in the very form of “the data.” However, the former have largely misunderstood the contributions of anthropology’s ontological turn—specifically the “radical” variant “perspectivism”—to disciplinary reform. I explain why perspectivists suggest replacing talk of multiple views with talk of multiple worlds to model a genuine alternative to cultural relativism.
Up to now, the Handbook of Translation Studies (HTS) consisted of four volumes, all published between 2010 and 2013. Since research in TS continues to grow and expand, this fifth volume was added in 2021. The HTS aims at disseminating knowledge about translation, interpreting, localization, adaptation, etc. and providing easy access to a large range of topics, traditions, and methods to a relatively broad audience: not only students who prefer such user-friendliness, but also researchers and lecturers in Translation Studies, Translation & Interpreting professionals, as well as scholars and experts from other adjacent disciplines. All articles in HTS are written by specialists in the different subfields and are peer-reviewed.
The recurrent themes of identity and social belongingness, and tension between tradition and modernity reflect the complexities across generations of post-colonial African writers, mainly in Ghana. This study explores how address and reference terms (ARTs), as constructs of naming practices, used for and by characters in Armah’s Fragments, Aidoo’s Changes, and Gyasi’s Homegoing reiterate the themes of identity and social belongingness, and tension between tradition and modernity. Using Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall’s principles of post-colonial theory, and the concept of address and reference terms, the study revealed that ARTs, mainly descriptive phrases and personal names, contribute to the characterisation and the exploration of themes such as identity and social belongingness, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Each novel explores the complexities of identity and social belongingness within the context of historical, cultural, and societal changes, illustrating the enduring impact of these factors on Ghanaian experiences. The study offers implications for literary and interdisciplinary studies.
In the course of globalization and transnationalization processes, it is true for numerous professional fields of practice and research that conversations can no longer be conducted in the first language of the respective participants. In the context of refugee, asylum and migration regimes and policies, the complexity of translation and communication processes becomes particularly clear. Without the help of interpreters, migrants and refugees are often unable to communicate in conversations (interviews, hearings, therapy), which usually entail vital decisions. Also in qualitative social research, such as ethnographic or sociolinguistic field research on flight and migration, the increasing diversity of languages in research fields requires the involvement of language mediators/interpreters in the research process. Here, too, multi-layered, multilingual situational communication constellations arise in the conversational constellations that are already characterized by hierarchical relations of inequality and emotionality. Interpreting in migration-related multilingual, often tense situations has directed research interest above all to procedural strategies to be developed contextually in order to overcome linguistic as well as culturally conditioned communication barriers.
This study aims to analyze some of the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological implications between the anthropology and the environment and sustainability. Departing from the assumption that anthropological and ethnographic analysis and interpretive research on organizational anthropology has an emergent and symbolic role rooted in social processes and with no a priori assumptions, with explanations and categories defined by the organizational actors, which had an impact on sustainability and the environment through the green marketing practices. The method employes is based on an analytical and descriptive issues from the theoretical and empirical literature review leading to reflective analysis. It is concluded that ethnographic and anthropological methodology is pertinent to be used in the analysis of its interactions between anthropology, the environment and sustainability as a new specialty in organizational studies. Also, the study proposes the implementation of green marketing habits and practices on sustainability, drawing from the organizational anthropology.
The South Sami concept of dåajmijes vuekie is used to discuss a nuanced system of evaluative norms operating in Sami culture, past and present, in relation to objects, behavior, and activities. Where Western aesthetics may focus on surface appearance, dåajmijes vuekie emphasizes effective action in relation to practical needs, social interaction, and ethics. The authors suggest that evaluative norms associated with Sami traditional knowledge and activities can provide valuable insights for understanding not only Sami traditional life but also works of contemporary Sami artists and writers who draw on Sami cultural norms in conscious ways.
Chinese painting is a foreign other to the Anglo-American world. This article explores how Chinese thinking on painting is translated into English and what implications it carries for the English translation of Chinese traditional culture in general. Early Chinese Texts on Painting , an academic book targeting academics and China enthusiasts, is taken as a case study. Using the notion of cultural translation as a theoretical foundation, this study finds that three strategies are used to translate Chinese painting into English: pluralizing meanings of key notions, contextualizing otherness through the recurrence of Taoist, Confucian, and Chinese literary ideas, and restructuring temporal and thematic ideas. These findings imply that cultural authenticity of foreign otherness can be approximated despite temporal, cultural, and linguistic distances. This study seeks to provide new answers to generic questions about the role of language in cross-cultural studies.
Zusammenfassung
Das semantische Feld, das durch das Binom der ‚policy‘ und ‚politics‘ der Übersetzung bezeichnet wird, ist von zentraler Bedeutung, weil es erlaubt zwei Komplexe in den Blick zu nehmen: 1. Übersetzungspolitik(en) im Sinne von Translationsnormen und damit die Frage nach den soziokulturellen, ökonomischen und interkulturellen Bedingungen, die dafür verantwortlich zeichnen, dass und in welcher Form übersetzt wird; sowie 2. die Rolle von Übersetzungen im Kontext politischer Verhandlungs- und Aushandlungsprozesse. Heuristisch sind damit drei Gesichtspunkte des Politischen von Interesse: kulturelle Normen und Kriterien, die über die Art der Übersetzung entscheiden (kulturelle Filter); politische, religiöse oder ökonomische Interessen, die sich mit Übersetzungen verbinden (Kalkül) und die Bedeutung von Übersetzungen für alle Formen der Interaktion im politischen Bereich im engeren Sinne (Diplomatie).
The semantic field denoted by the two terms ‘policy’/‘politics’ of translation is of central importance because it allows us to focus on two complexes: 1. translation policy in the sense of translational norms and thus the question of the socio-cultural, economic and intercultural conditions that are responsible for the fact that translation takes place and in what form; and 2. the role of translation in the context of political processes of negotiation. Heuristically, three aspects of the political are thus of interest: cultural norms and criteria that decide on the fact and the type of translation (cultural filters); political, religious or economic interests that are linked to translations (calculation) and the significance of translations for all forms of interaction in the political sphere in the narrower sense (diplomacy).
This chapter argues that languages are symbols of social identities and that managing translation and interpreting (TI) builds upon existing social hierarchies and power dynamics. Within this overarching context, the role TI play role in supporting and challenging oppressive social systems is explored. The chapter highlights how the contributors to this collective volume expose similarities and differences in how institutions operate TI when serving different populations. Throughout the examination, different forms of power emerge as differently instrumentalizing TI to perpetuate or contest established power dynamics. The contexts explored span a wide spectrum, encompassing international intergovernmental organizations and public services. This broad scope serves to reveal contradictions and shared dynamics. The chapter finally foregrounds human causation and highlights the rationales and the epistemological and social benefits of plotting new routes into unexplored spaces of institutional translation and interpreting.
During the Indian freedom struggle there was a big role played by the writers who wrote inspiring words which had encouraged the freedom fighters. We live in political boundaries and protected by it, so whatever happens in that politically bounded area it directly affects the society and a literature is the best medium to represent in a realistic way. Literature is not only the medium of expression but it is also a medium of awareness. Whatever experienced by society becomes the subject matter of literature and it is inexhaustible. Literature is an inseparable part of human's life the situations and the miseries bear by the people it takes shape of the literature which creates realism in art of life. Literature is not only intimately related to life and the society but it is a big factor which plays tremendous role in creating a literature is 1 Fox, Ralph (1956). The novel and the People, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House. history, because todays politics is tomorrow's history and history is that we learn our lessons from. History is not only the testimony but it is a written testament of our past and so it is very much related to literature. History are the stories, a written memory of past. It is the narrative of our cultural roots. And so is the literature. According to Zhu Ying it is "derived from the Latin historia, history implies, first and foremost, a story or narrative of events connected with a real or imaginary object or person; second, history is a systematic written account comprising a chronological record of past events, circumstances, and facts." If we look into our history we can find that in the time of nationalist moment Indian writers and intellectuals represents history in a new form to push the freedom moment.
El objetivo de este artículo es analizar la forma como ha sido acogida y vertida en el trabajo institucional de construcción de memoria la experiencia de las niñas, niños y adolescentes en el contexto de la guerra colombiana. El trabajo ha sido realizado a partir de una revisión de los informes realizados por el Grupo de Memoria Histórica de la Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación y por el Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. El texto comienza mostrando la insuficiencia del lenguaje articulado para dar cuenta de la experiencia infantil y juvenil de la violencia; luego analiza cómo se han incorporado a los informes institucionales de memoria los testimonios de los y las infantes, para determinar la validez que allí se le ha dado el conocimiento que dichos testimonios pueden aportar. Finalmente, el artículo concluye que la experiencia infantil y juvenil del sufrimiento no se recrea en el trabajo institucional de la memoria, sino que tiene lugar una forma de injusticia epistémica que recae sobre los testimonios de niños, niñas y adolescentes en la medida en que se relativiza la importancia y centralidad que estos testimonios tienen como fuente de conocimiento sobre el pasado reciente violento colombiano.
This chapter covers an account of fieldwork among Filipino Roman Catholic ritual practitioners alongside those of phenomenologically inclined anthropologists and performance studies scholars, particularly those who have deployed a ‘radically empirical’ approach. The author examines how these scholars have channelled the vicissitudes and anxieties of fieldwork towards productive ethnographic insights. The radical empiricist project is particularly feasible in contexts in which ethnographers encounter less ‘rational’ but intrinsically human experiences such as pain, suffering, healing, and illness in the reenactment of Christ’s Passion. This chapter offers a reflection on the methodological feasibility of embodied and ‘distendedly reflexive’ approaches towards a more expansive understanding of religious pain and suffering.
This article argues that while translation as a metaphor was prominent in anglophone anthropology for most of the second half of the 20th century, the practices of interlingual translation that are often central to the production and circulation of disciplinary knowledge have tended to attract much less attention. The first main section begins by briefly reviewing debates about the idea that anthropology crucially involves ‘the translation of culture’ or ‘cultural translation’. This use of translation as a metaphor to characterize the discipline emerged within both UK and US anthropology in the 1950s, but subsequently became subject to sustained criticism. The focus of the article then shifts in the second and third sections to practices of translation in, respectively, anthropological fieldwork and the international circulation of anthropological texts. More specifically, it examines the difficulties associated with interlingual translation in fieldwork and ethnographic writing; the hidden or invisible ‘translation work’ undertaken in the past by the assistants and spouses of ethnographers; and the translation of anthropological work into other languages. The article concludes by calling on more anthropologists to publish detailed accounts of their own translation practices, arguing that in so doing they will be able to draw on valuable historical antecedents from within the discipline, important collections of anthropological reflections on translation that have appeared over the past 30 years, as well as on relevant work by translation studies scholars and sociologists of translation.
In this Philological Conversation, Dilip M. Menon dwells on the questions of how to think concepts and theorize from the Global South and on writing history beyond the Eurocentric, colonial, nationalist, and terrestrial. We discuss the political and epistemic implications and consequences of such urgent tasks. Dilip M. Menon speaks about his affinities with Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin, among others, and refects on the themes of coloniality of knowledge, postcoloniality, decoloniality, oceanic history, and the idea of paracoloniality. He links his earlier works to his recent decolonial intellectual projects and discusses his intellectual formation and his practice as a historian and social theorist. Put together via e-mail exchanges, this conversation is a culmination of several in-person conversations that took place in Beirut, Delhi and Berlin. One only hopes for many more to come.
This article contributes to the scholarship on queer migration by exploring the translation of knowledge as a concept and process whereby social, cultural and epistemic histories and structures are negotiated. Drawing on my own experiences of engaging in ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with queer asylum seekers in Denmark, I reflect on ways of translating knowledge by focusing on the epistemological, methodological and affective dimensions of research relations. By reflecting on my own position as an epistemological translator, I follow the ways in which affective intimacies emerge in embodied encounters and how these intimacies are constrained and made possible by institutional norms, bodies and spaces. My central argument, drawing on autoethnography, affect theories and decolonial perspectives, suggests epistemic translation as a method of navigating affective intimacies and encounters in research relations. This approach may support a critical reflection of differing positionalities and moments of untranslatability within knowledge production.
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