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2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
| © William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi.
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.001
SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION
Translating worlds
The epistemological space of translation
William F. H, University of California, Berkeley
Carlo S, École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales
Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology and
linguistics. At least since Saussure and Boas, languages have been seen as systems whose
differences make precise translation exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. More recently,
Quine has argued that, in purely abstract terms, reference is ultimately inscrutable and
translation between languages is in principle indeterminate. From a Kuhn-inspired point
of view, we argue, on the contrary, that the challenge posed by the constant confrontation
of “incommensurable” (yet translated) paradigms may become a field for ethnographical
inquiry. This approach can provide a new anthropological way to define translation, not
only as a key technique for understanding ethnography, but also as a general epistemological
principle. Social anthropology would be thus defined not only as the study of cultural
differences, but also and simultaneously as a science of translation: the study of the empirical
processes and theoretical principles of cultural translation.
Keywords: translation, incommensurability, culture, ethnography, epistemology
Why translation?
Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropol-
ogy and linguistics. Linguists perform multiple translations, usually starting from
an acoustic image of speech, or a visual image of a sign, which is transcribed in
more or less phonetic detail and subjected to morphological, syntactic, semantic,
or pragmatic analysis, depending upon the empirical focus and theoretical fram-
ing of the work. In the course of analysis, the object language is translated into the
formalism of linguistic description. Even when not explicitly comparative, all of
linguistics is virtually comparative insofar as formalisms are assumed to be appli-
cable to many or all languages (Benveniste 1974, 2012). This also implies translat-
ing object languages and their grammars into typological categories. The dynamic
2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
William F. H and Carlo S 2
field of linguistic typology is an outgrowth of this, with much to teach us about
translation. Contemporary social and cultural anthropology are of course less for-
mal than linguistics, but no less engaged in translation and comparison. When field
notes are recorded, social institutions and discourses are analyzed (such as kinship,
residence patterns, exchange or ritual practices), and ethnographic descriptions
are crafted, translation is present in every step. And even when not overtly com-
parative, social and cultural anthropology inevitably involve comparison, and this
means translation into some set of terms and concepts that can mediate between
the differences among societies and best capture their particular dynamics. The
importance of translation is therefore that it is through its multiple varieties that
both disciplines constitute their objects and formulate generalizations.
The equivocal status of translating has several sources. First, with the excep-
tion of well-known debates in British social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s,
relatively few anthropologists would describe their own craft as a kind of transla-
tion—although the issue is coming back to the fore in the recent literature: see Pym
(2010), Asad (2010), and Viveiros de Castro’s (2004) provocative argument that
translation rests on a kind of “controlled equivocation.” For a working linguist, very
careful attention is paid to analysis, but this analysis is rarely understood as a form
of translation. For both fields, cross-language glossing, say from Kuna or Maya
into French or English, is a mere heuristic. The load-bearing evidence comes not
from a gloss, but from the social or linguistic practices themselves, and it is relative
to their own social contexts that utterances, actions, or events gain their meaning.
For these reasons, the previous paragraph may appear contentious to some read-
ers. It would seem that we translate from the original mostly in order to abandon
the translation in favor of the original. We know in principle that any translation is
selective, which implies loss of features from the original, and that any translation
also adds in supplementary features absent from the original (Benjamin [1923]
2004; Berman 2008). Ironically, the process of successive failed translation may be
our best tool in discerning what is specific to any object society or to any “original.”
In other words, it becomes a method, as we will show in the next section. Transla-
tion is both how we constitute our objects and how we make claims about them.
This equivocal duality surely raises the risk of circularity or at least incorrigibility.
A second source of equivocation lies in the fact that fully accurate translation
is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, and yet translation is ubiquitous in so-
cial life. We do it all the time. Not only experts translate, but ordinary speakers do
too, in the course of everyday activities. Bi- or multilingualism, code switching,
blending, crossing, paraphrasing, reported speech, and giving accounts are all well-
established sociolinguistic phenomena, and all may involve the same key elements
as canonical translation. The fact that they are part of everyday practice, and not
only of social science research, is a good reason to pay close attention to translation
as a process endogenous to social life.
A related source of equivocation is that while we think of translation as operat-
ing across languages or social worlds, it is a robust feature of any individual social
world, even in monolingual or monocultural societies (if such actually exist). There
is a strong line of argument to the effect that understanding is itself a matter of
translation: the object understood is translated into some variety of interpretant
or representation on the part of the understander. Following Peirce (1955), this
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can be thought of as a mental representation, a corporeal response to the object,
or a variety of other kinds of sign, but in each case, the interpretant can be said to
translate its object into an understanding of it. We expand on this point in the light
of American pragmatism in the next section. The key point for now is that in the
passage of meaning from one language or society to another, translation does not
come into play only after the translator has understood the original. It is not an
ancillary rerendering or glossing, but is itself the basis for understanding. Transla-
tion in one or another variety is always already in play, long before the overt act
of rerendering some social object into a foreign language. This is why we speak of
an epistemological space of translation. At stake is what we can know, how we can
know it, and how we can make it known.
Translation at a general level is too widespread and the concept is too powerful
to let it run loose. Our aim in these papers is to relate the anthropological issues of
commensurability, description, and understanding to the linguistic issues of deter-
mining and redescribing meaning, at whatever level. We start from the conviction
that while different varieties of translation raise different questions, there are im-
portant commonalities. By combining, rather than isolating, linguistic and social
analysis, we can improve both and point the way to a better theory of translation at
all levels. This, we believe, will open a horizon for research in both fields.
From relativity to indeterminacy and incommensurability
At least since Saussure ([1916] 2006), Boas (1989), Whorf (1956) and Sapir (1985),
languages have been seen as systems whose differences make precise translation
exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. In fact, cross-linguistic differences of nearly
equivalent expressions are Saussure’s preferred evidence for his signal concept of
arbitrariness. The pairing of sound with meaning is arbitrary in that it is conven-
tional, and the best evidence of this conventionality is cross-linguistic differences.
Given what is ostensibly the same statement translated into, say, French, English,
and Kwakiutl, each language expresses it in a unique way, according to its own way
of “cutting up reality” into linguistic elements.
For Boas, this function of categorization was central, and he argued convincingly
that it has consequences for how speakers of different languages perceive the world.
His argument was not that language limits perception, but that the routine expres-
sive patterns of one’s native language, especially the obligatory categories, render
automatic or unreflective certain features of the worlds we describe. Marking of
person, number, tense, deixis, noun classes, and phonology provide well-known
examples in which the native speaker is induced to attend to the corresponding
features of the scenes (s)he describes. The relativity effect is not about what a native
actor can express or understand, but what (s)he usually does express or understand.
This gave rise to what is known as classic linguistic relativity in the writings of
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The former expanded the Boasian focus
on categories to include the major grammatical systems of the language, draw-
ing heavily on analogy, while the latter emphasized “habitual ways of speaking” in
which languages are used. For both, as for Boas, the twin facts of cross-language
difference and intralanguage norms of expression combine to guide or channel
2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
William F. H and Carlo S 4
the perceptual and expressive habits of speakers. Although it has proven very dif-
ficult to demonstrate relativity effects conclusively, there has been a resurgence of
research in the area over the last two decades (Hill and Mannheim 1992; Lucy 1992;
Levinson 2003; Leavitt 2010; Enfield and Levinson 2006; Enfield and Sidnell 2012)
as well as a large literature in cognitive and psychologically oriented linguistics
(see, e.g., Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003). Like the translator, the relativity
theorist must know at least two languages, contrasting them in order to better un-
derstand the specificity of each. Unlike translation, however, relativity theory, at
least in it mainstream variants, has been based on the model of the monolingual
speaker. When Whorf describes how Hopi speakers conceptualize time, or when
Boas makes claims about Kwakiutl, they are imagining the native speaker caught
in the grips of the native grammar. But what if the Hopi or Kwakiutl speaker is
also a fluent English speaker? For a classical relativist, (s)he would be caught in
a sort of parallax in which competing constraints vie for causal impact on her or
his expressive and perceptual habits. Alternatively, the bilingual speaker might be
subject to both systems and their respective habitual patterns of expression, with
the dominant role at any moment played by whichever language the speaker is cur-
rently speaking. But this too is confounded by any variety of language mixture or
blending in which single utterances may contain elements from two or more lan-
guages. The scope of relativity would become a pragmatic problem, not a semantic
or grammatical one. And of course, bilingual speakers often translate, restate, and
paraphrase both between and within their languages. As an analytic method then,
translation underwrites relativity by providing evidence of cross-linguistic differ-
ence. As an endogenous social practice, though, it undercuts relativity by weaken-
ing the grip of any one language on the expressive habits of the bilingual speaker.
Another line of intersection between semantics, pragmatics, and translation
emerges in the work of the analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. In his
well-known book Word and object (1960), and in a series of related papers, Quine
argued that reference is ultimately inscrutable and translation between languages
is in principle indeterminate. Distinguishing observation sentences, like “this is a
rabbit,” from standing sentences, like “democracy is a social good,” Quine shows
that even the former are ultimately impossible to define with precision. The more
general standing sentences are, by extension, also impossible to pin down. In his fa-
mous thought experiment, the “radical linguist” (not to be confused with an actual
linguist) confronts an entirely unknown language, without the benefit of a mutually
understood contact language. Trying to determine the precise meanings of words
in this other language, Quine’s “linguist” finds it impossible to determine through
ostension alone what terms like “gavagai” mean (apparently “rabbit,” but perhaps
better rendered “undetached rabbit part,” “rabbit phase,” etc.). Quine presses this
dilemma, and the critique of empiricism it implies, from the limits on intelligibility
of an unknown foreign language all the way to limits on understanding our own
language, at which point reference truly goes “inscrutable.” Philosophers, linguists,
and some anthropologists were quick to pick up on the significance of his argu-
ment, which has remained a major position in the field today.
Quine’s thought experiment, and the very idea of radical translation, are ex-
plicitly distinguished from the actual practices of linguists and anthropologists in
the field. Nevertheless, there are certain distortions that call for comment because
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they put in question the applicability of his conclusions to actual translation. First,
Quine posits a monolingual native speaker who is evidently incapable of formulat-
ing meaning statements in his own language. That is, the native informant is never
given the opportunity to state in his own language what the term “gavagai” means,
nor is the radical linguistic given the opportunity to ask him, simply, “What does
gavagai mean?” It is clear that for Quine metalinguistic questions and responses in-
herit the very same limitations as the term they would seek to define. The problem
with this from a linguistic perspective is that it is empirically false: metalinguistic
statement may be multiplied, covaried with variations in the object term, and used
to establish an array of contrasting terms which, in the aggregate, severely con-
strain the possible semantic range of the object term. The result may be a range of
possible translations, but surely not an indefinite range. In a sense, Quine’s native
speaks a language in which neither paradigmatic nor syntagmatic contrasts can be
deployed in order to discern the semantic boundaries of a term. Yet these contrasts
are part of what any human language provides, and they are central both empiri-
cally and theoretically.
Second, Quine stipulates that in order to overcome indeterminacy, the linguist
must derive an exact meaning from ostensive reference alone, and, moreover, that
choice among alternative possible translations will ultimately turn on the linguist’s
assessment of what is most “natural,” in the sense of corresponding best to his own
(alien) sense of naturalness. Thus the linguist is, as it were, at sea without an inde-
pendent point of reference. Neither of these problems is insuperable in linguistic
fieldwork. The linguist gathers a wide variety of evidence for meaning hypoth-
eses, including usage, metalinguistic commentaries, the ways in which the target
term combines with others terms in syntactic constructions, analysis of the inter-
nal structure of the form (including morphology, compounding, etc.), and gram-
matical evidence of oppositions between the form and other forms in the language.
Similarly, it is not what appears natural in the linguist’s native language that guides
his or her choice among alternative translations, but rather all that is known of
universals of language, and the possible arrays of distinctions that are encoded in
lexical forms. Quine is very clear that radical translation is a philosophical thought
experiment and not a description of empirical research, but the point is that the
problems that arise in his thought experiment arise from a deeply distorted set
of assumptions about both languages and how they are analyzed. A third critique
from linguistics would observe that for many expressions, it is not the semantic
boundaries of words that distinguish them, but their focal or most prototypical
meaning (as in the extensive literature on color terms). The implication of this
is that the apparent imprecision of some semantic boundaries is to be expected,
and need not reflect inherent limitations on what the foreign linguist can discern.
Finally, Quine shifts inconsistently between “the anthropologist” and the “radical
linguist” in his experiment, yet the two disciplines have quite different views of lan-
guage and their methodologies are correspondingly distinct. One of the main goals
of this special issue is precisely to bring the two disciplines together.
Focusing on the difficulty of translating technical terms from ancient science into
the language of modern science (and by extension between any two scientific para-
digms separated by revolution), Thomas Kuhn (2000, 2012; Kuhn et al. 2000; see also
Hallen and Sodipo 1997) famously developed the concept of incommensurability.
2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
William F. H and Carlo S 6
Kuhn, a historian-philosopher, is more careful than Quine to acknowledge the rela-
tion between translation, language learning, bilingualism, and the actual practices
of translators. Unlike Quine, Kuhn rejects the equation of meaning with reference,
insisting on the importance of style, nuance, and the difference between translation
and interpretation. In his later work, he puts translation—its limits, potentials, and
unavoidability—at the center of his views, and he proposes to view scientific com-
munities as speech communities (Kuhn 2000: 166) where many forms of translation
are constantly carried on, despite the theoretical incommensurability of paradigms.
Translation ceases to be defined as an abstract impossibility. The challenge posed
by the constant confrontation of “incommensurable” (yet translated) paradigms be-
comes in itself, on the contrary, a field for ethnographical inquiry.
Ethnography as translation
For most field linguists and ethnographers, translation is of limited utility. The
empirical evidence for a social or linguistic category or practice must always be
from the native language, not from a translation. It is common sense that if you do
not work in the language you are trying to describe, you are missing your object.
Interlinear glosses, explanations, and such in a European metalanguage are heuris-
tic devices for the reader to follow distinctions made in the object language (e.g., a
description of Kuna [object] in French or Spanish [metalanguage of description]).
However, it is also clear that ethnography, from a theoretical point of view, is
unimaginable without translation. As Conklin has remarked, “The problems of
ethnography are in the largest sense those of translation” (1968: 12). This is true
not only because almost any ethnographer faces the task of translating words and
concepts from one language to another, but also because to “do ethnography” is to
make descriptions, judgments, actions, and theories proper to a specific culture un-
derstood in the language of social anthropology (a scientific community in Kuhn’s
sense). Seen from this point of view, translation ceases to designate only a linguistic
technique. It becomes the definition of the core strategy of social anthropology itself.
Clearly, translation is a multidimensional phenomenon. A first dimension natu-
rally concerns language. Jakobson (1959) and Benveniste (1974), in dialogue with
Peirce (1955), both distinguished standard linguistic translation from one lan-
guage to another from intralinguistic translation (restatement, gloss in the same
language), and eventually from cross-modal translation (e.g., words to gestures,
or verbal description to pictorial blueprint, or vice versa). However, even in a rela-
tively language-centric view of translation, there are massive questions regarding
the criteria under which some expression may be considered a “translation” of
some other. In the last fifty years of research, linguistic anthropologists have made
enormous strides toward understanding speech practices, developing socially em-
bedded pragmatics (in the Anglo-Saxon sense based heavily on Austin [1975] and
Grice [1989]), the ethnography of speaking, the study of indexicality, metalanguage
and reflexive language, metaphor, style, conversation analysis, and increasingly the
study of multimodal relations between speech, gesture, and material setting. As
ever more aspects of communicative situations have been shown to frame talk,
the question of what a source text even means has only become more subtle, let
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alone which aspects of meaning should be conveyed (under what circumstances)
in a valid translation. If the translation is into language, as opposed to some other
medium, then it too has all these elements of meaning. The simple pairing of head
terms in one language with translations in another, as in bilingual dictionaries,
obscures the fact that even the simplest lexical translation is multidimensional.
When we move to pragmatically enriched utterances, the task becomes astronomi-
cally difficult. Therefore we must ask which elements of a putative meaning (in the
source text) need to be present in a valid translation (the target text). Once we have
answered that, we must decide which aspects of the translation itself must carry
the critical information. Thus we confront the irony that valid translation gets ever
more difficult to conceive the more we know about languages.
What we can know as anthropologists, how we can know it, what counts as
warrant for knowledge, how we can express it in the language of our discipline, the
sources and limits of anthropological knowledge—all of these questions engage
translation either in principle or as a matter of fact in the practice of anthropology.
The problems of inscrutability, indeterminacy, and incommensurability raised by
Quine and Kuhn, for instance, all presume that the problem lies in capturing in
one language meanings expressed in another. But when we look at translation as
a historical practice, as Hanks (2010) does for the translation of Catholic doctrine
into colonial Maya, we find a very different set of factors. For one thing, the target
language is altered in the process of translation, which is pervasively and system-
atically neologistic. For another, translation is one part of a much broader colonial
process involving religious conversion, conversion from hieroglyphic to alphabetic
writing, and the reorganization of the political geography. Here not only is transla-
tion required on our part to capture this social world, but translation in the colonial
setting produces the objects of our historical knowledge.
An analogous problem arises when we consider intracultural translation between
significantly different registers of the same language. For example, can the language
of a shaman in performance, or a ritual performer more generally, be rendered accu-
rately in the ordinary nonritual versions of the language? Can it be translated into or-
dinary talk? Or more broadly, can the nonspecialist, say the patient, understand what
the shaman is doing, and at what level of understanding? In fact there are significant
differences between what the shaman in his own terms is doing in performance, on
the one hand, and what the patient thinks he is doing from an everyday frame of
reference, on the other. The asymmetries in their respective knowledge of what is go-
ing on are great, but they do not cause breakdown in communication. Hanks (2006,
forthcoming) argues that the asymmetry of knowledge between participants, and
the constraints on translation between the esoteric language of shamanism and ordi-
nary Maya, are actually resources for shaman–patient interaction, not impediments.
This in turn suggests that meaningful and consequential interaction can proceed in
the absence of mutual translatability, or perhaps even intelligibility.
Translating worlds: Cognition, ontology, and the science of translation
All we have seen until now suggests that there is more to translation than language.
In cultural practices, translation constantly goes beyond it, for at least two reasons.
2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
William F. H and Carlo S 8
First, this is because the concept of translation implies all forms of “social traduc-
tions.” It designates the exchange not only of words, but also of values, theories,
and artifacts from one culture to another, for instance in such processes as religious
conversion, cultural mimesis, or messianic movements (Severi 2002, 2004).
The second reason translation exceeds language is because nonlinguistic forms
of translation are constantly present in cultural traditions (Severi 2012). Words are
translated into images, music into words, and gestures into objects. Furthermore,
even within a single culture, translation processes enable the passage from one con-
text of communication to another. Virtually everywhere, such formal contexts of
the expression of meaning as ritual action, play, and other forms of performance
generate their specific “ontologies.” Things, artifacts, and living beings may then
crucially change their nature, as in the famous “qualitative analogy” which trans-
forms a cucumber into an ox in Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of the Nuer sacrifice
(1940). In these cases, the interpretation of such formal contexts of cultural repre-
sentation transforms translation into a way to translate “worlds” (defined as “ori-
ented contexts for the apprehension of reality”), not just words, or other ways to
express meaning.
Translation is still, most of the time (see, e.g., Sammons and Sherzer 2000; Rubel
and Rosman 2003; Silverstein 2003), with few exceptions (e.g., Keesing 1985), dis-
cussed only in technical terms. As an epistemological principle, it seems almost ab-
sent from the contemporary epistemological debate in the discipline. Two domi-
nant trends in particular, cognitivism and ontologism, seem unable to understand
what an epistemology of translation could be. For many cognitive anthropologists,
and particularly for those adopting what Levinson (2003) has called “simple nativ-
ism” (e.g., Sperber 1996; Bloch 1998; Baumard, Boyer, and Sperber, 2010), this lack
of understanding is a consequence of their denial of the epistemological import of
cultural variations. If cultural differences have no fundamental influence on hu-
man cognition, where concepts (such as “continuity, solidity, gravity and inertia”
[Spelke et al., 1992]) already exist independently from language, then translation
is merely an ability to express a preexisting mental representation in the “phonetic
clothing” (Levinson 2003: 28) of a specific language. It has, in itself, no cognitive
relevance. As, for instance, Pinker puts it, “Knowing a language ... is knowing how
to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa” (1994: 82). Levinson has
recently pointed to the two main difficulties generated by this approach: “First it is
impossible to reconcile with the facts of variation across languages. Second, it is a
theory of innate (thus biological) endowment outside biology” (2003: 26).
Ontologism raises other questions. Descola ([2005] 2013), for instance, distin-
guishes animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism as implying different on-
tologies—different ways of going beyond any simple construal of nature vs. cul-
ture vs. other. In perspectivism, as developed by Viveiros de Castro, translation
emerges as a sort of “controlled equivocation.” So if the Jaguar offers manioc beer
and what you find before you is human blood, thick and frothy, you have a per-
spectivist difference on the world of objects (Viveiros 1998, 2004). But what about
the grey zones between perspectives or between modes of existence? What of the
blending or grading or switching between systems, which surely occurs over the
history of colonialism in the Americas, for example? Any typological schema will
face the question of blends, and if we use translation to name the process(es) that
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cross between types, then we will have to deal with blending, and the emergence of
new types or varieties. How, then, shall we translate ontologies, given that they are
emergent and not static, blended and not pure?
We think the proper starting point of a new theory is neither preemptive uni-
versalism (which is almost always Eurocentric) nor typological divisions (which
bound off individual types of ontology, even as they pluralize their space), but in-
stead the study of processes and principles of translation. Given the scope of trans-
lational practices and the history of our field, the epistemological stakes of this
(late-)Kuhn-inspired approach are high.
We should consider the study of these processes and principles of translation not
only as an important way to improve a number of key technical operations for the
interpretation of ethnography, but also as a new way to reformulate the general
epistemology of our discipline.
The contributions
In this issue, we have gathered a number of papers where these questions are treat-
ed from different points of view. In his paper, William Hanks argues that intracul-
tural translation plays a constitutive role in the social life of any human group, and
not only in mediating between different groups and languages. This is evident in
all varieties of reported speech, paraphrase, commentary, and exegesis. These share
with translation two features that distinguish it from other kinds of interpretation:
a translation both refers to and paraphrases its source text. Hanks argues that it is
the target language into which one translates that ultimately constrains the process.
An adequate target language must be functionally capable of self-interpretation
through metalanguage. Cross-linguistic translation presupposes intralinguistic
translation. Historical examples of languages changing through intertranslation
abound in (post)colonial contexts in which authoritative texts in a dominant lan-
guage are translated into a subordinated language. This process inevitably alters the
semantics and pragmatics of the subordinate language. The direction, scope, and
depth of change are historically variable. Examples are adduced from modern and
colonial Yucatec Maya and Spanish.
Carlo Severi is concerned with the relationship between translation and thought
processes. He argues that forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “sys-
tematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses” to the causal theo-
ries studied by Evans-Pritchard in witchcraft, have generally been interpreted as an
expression of a specific language or “culture.” In this paper, he discusses this way of
defining thought. Three classic objections are examined: (1) Societies sharing the
same “system of thought” may speak different languages, and vice versa. (2) If a re-
lation between language and thought exists, it is an indirect and controversial one,
and we should never take it for granted (or infer qualities of thought from language
structures) without further investigation. (3) The languages that we use to qualify
different kinds of thought are constantly translated. Through a discussion of the
context of translation, Severi argues that instead of seeing the possibility of trans-
lation as a theoretical difficulty for defining thought, we could, on the contrary,
consider the ethnography of translation as a chance to observe the dynamics and
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William F. H and Carlo S 10
structure of thought processes, and to study how they operate in different cultural
contexts. Using three Amazonian examples, Severi describes the kind of cogni-
tion involved in the form of translation that Jakobson calls transmutation. From
this ethnographic analysis, we can derive not only a better (both wider and more
precise) idea of some, rarely studied, cultural translation processes, but also draw
from it a new way to define the concept of “cultural ontology,” both for Amazonian
cultures and in more general terms.
Rupert Stasch presents a case study in the historically common phenomenon
of a contact community between persons lacking any common language, such that
their linguistic interactions are focused on linguistic otherness as such, or are me-
diated by a miniscule number of translation specialists. Stasch first explores con-
trasts in how international tourists and Korowai of Papua each take up the other’s
difference of language as a figure around which to express primordial definitions
of their relation. He then examines how mutual incomprehension is valued as a
resource for staying separate. Finally, he analyzes how the role of tour guide, qua
translator, embodies a political model of authoritative speakerhood that is antipa-
thetic to Korowai egalitarianism, but nonetheless fosters egalitarianism-oriented
paths of engagement with the quite different political formation of tourists’ home
social orders.
Anne-Christine Taylor’s paper analyzes a series of intra- and intercultural trans-
lations involved in the shamanic practices of the northern Jivaroan Achuar. First, it
shows how certain states of suffering, experienced as an unwanted metamorphosis
of selfhood, are reframed in the course of shamanic healing rituals as the symptoms
of an insidious process of disempowerment and “whitening” unleashed by other,
enemy Jivaroans. The curing session conflates the victim’s sickness and the history
of interethnic relations, construed as a painful process of involuntary qualitative
change. A further series of translations come into being when the cure fails and the
patient abandons his Jivaroan identity and moves into a lowland Quichua identity;
this involves mapping the implicit autobiography of a Jivaroan moving from illness
toward recovered health and social agency onto Quichua narratives of their own
history. However, owing to increasing closure of ethnic groups, Jivaroans nowadays
have to deal directly with the spoken and written words of the Whites, and this in-
volves new forms of translation evoked in the final part of the paper.
Alan Rumsey’s paper deals with two kinds of translation among Ku Waru peo-
ple in the New Guinea Highlands: (1) translation between the local language and
the national lingua franca within everyday interactions between young children
and their caregivers; (2) intercultural translation between the story world of a lo-
cal genre of sung tales and the contemporary lived world of Highlands PNG as
practiced by skilled composer-performers of the genre. Although these two kinds
of translation take place on very different planes, they both operate in terms of
a well-developed set of procedures establishing equivalence, between words and
worlds, respectively. On both planes a key role is played by parallelism, suggesting
a connection between equivalence in the ordinary sense of the word and in the
specific sense of it that was developed by Jakobson with respect to parallelism—a
connection which is significant for the understanding of translation in general.
In his paper, Adam Yuet Chau starts from a couple of questions: How would
one translate the word “menu” (i.e., restaurant menu) into the native language of
2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
11 T
an (imaginary) tribal people (with no writing and no restaurants)? And how would
you explain to them how ordering from the menu works? It quickly becomes clear
that translating the word “menu” entails translating not only the world of restau-
rant-going and ordering from the menu but also our (i.e., ideal-typically Western)
very conceptual and social world, which is another way to say that what seems to
be a humble piece of paper listing a certain number of dishes is itself made by the
world in which it is found and in turn contributes in a significant way to making
that world. In this paper, Chau examines the restaurant menu as a world-making
social and translocutional/transinscriptional technology (the menu as menu-logic
and cosmo-menu). As a kind of text act that is situated at but one of many “itera-
tive/inscriptional stations” along an indeterminate and continuous chain of trans-
locutions and transinscriptions, the menu highlights the temporal dimension of
all kinds of translations (translingual, intralingual, transmodal, transcultural, etc.).
In their paper, Emmanuel de Vienne and Carlos Fausto focus on a specific case
of translation that was attempted in 2006 by a Kalapalo Indian (from Mato Grosso,
Brazil). This man in his forties created a radically new liturgy and cosmology by
combining elements borrowed from local shamanism and mythology, Christianity
and TV shows, among other sources. He thus managed to convince entire villages
to take part in spectacular healing ceremonies. Since one of these rituals was filmed
by two Kuikuro filmmakers, it is possible to examine the precise mechanisms of
this cultural innovation, and therefore address with fresh data and methodology
the old issue of Amerindian prophetism. They propose the concept of translating
acts as a means to describe this native practice of translation, which consists as
much of gestures and ritual actions as of linguistic expressions, emphasizes practi-
cal effects more than the negotiation of semantic equivalences, and is subject to
constant reorientations in the course of interaction.
In the Colloquia section, John Leavitt argues that the idea of translating worlds
depends on the possibility that there are worlds to translate between. This has not
always been the case in translation theory. This paper traces out some key moments
in the history of translation theory in the West, which has shown an oscillation be-
tween what have come to be called “domesticating” and “foreignizing” approaches.
The former seeks to present the referential meaning of the original work in an eas-
ily recognized and absorbed form for the reader. The latter seeks to preserve ele-
ments of the original work, and by implication its world, forcing the reader to work
to reorient him- or herself, to cross a boundary into what is potentially another
world, initially another language-world. The paper concludes with some examples
drawn from Central Himalayan oral traditions.
In the Forum section, G.E.R. Lloyd acknowledges that the issues of translation
and of translatability are general and concern the possibility of mutual intelligibility
in many registers, including within a single natural language. Both anthropologists
and ancient historians are faced with such problems, where the historians are at
a disadvantage in not being able to check their understandings with those whom
they are seeking to understand. But faced with seemingly paradoxical statements,
beliefs, or practices, we must and can avoid the apparent dilemma (either those
statements must be rendered in or reduced to our terms or we must admit they are
strictly incomprehensible) by insisting on the revisability of our existing concep-
tual framework, especially in relation to such key terms as personhood, agency,
2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
William F. H and Carlo S 12
causation, and nature. Instead of insisting on the dichotomy of literal and meta-
phorical, we should allow that any term may exhibit what is here called semantic
stretch. Moreover, if we accept that the phenomena described are multidimension-
al, then the goal of a single definitive translation is a mirage. The open-endedness
of translation is no threat to mutual intelligibility, but its precondition.
Conclusion
As we have seen, social anthropology mobilizes translation at many levels, from
ethnography to comparative analysis, to the formulation of general theories. The
analysis of these different processes of translation of means of expression and con-
text of communication can enable us to account for what both cognitivists and on-
tologists do not see: the essential plurality both of mental operations and of “on-
tologies” which always exist within a culture, as well as in different cultures. From
this perspective, the foundations of social anthropology (and, more specifically, the
ground for comparison between cultures) are no more to be found in “a” universal
cognitive endowment, which would exist independently from any cultural phe-
nomenon. Nor should we look for the foundations of our discipline in a number
of ontological “modes of inference,” which would define the essence of a group of
cultures, separated from the others. Our proposal is that, in order to understand
“cultures” (and the kind of mental operations that the representation of cultural
knowledge imply), we should focus not only on “differences,” but also on the con-
stant work of translation of languages, nonlinguistic codes, contexts of communica-
tion, and different traditions, which constitutes the field of “cultural knowledge,”
both within a single tradition and in different societies.
The analysis of these processes can provide for a new way to define translation,
not only as a key technique for understanding ethnography, but also as a general
epistemological principle. Since Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, anthropologists have de-
fended the idea that every language elaborates the world in its own way. In this
perspective, translation has been considered, at best, as an artificial and difficult
process, a way to struggle against the constitutive differences that distinguish each
language from others. In this way, however, a general and important fact has passed
unnoticed: every language and every culture are not only different from each other;
they are also translatable into each other. No untranslatable language, or culture,
has ever existed. This quality of being translatable is inherent in all forms of human
communication, as well as in the generation of cultural differences.
The recognition of the universality of translation as a principle can provide for
the basis of a new way to look at cultural cognition, which would no longer be
founded on an ideal (postulated) unity of the human mind, but rather on the em-
pirical study of the cognitive processes involved in the various forms of transla-
tion of languages, means of expression, and contexts of communication of cultural
phenomena. In this way, we could pass from a conception of cognition founded
on a sort of universal cognitive grammar of human culture (a kind of logical form,
postulated in a Platonic-Chomskyan perspective, which prevails today in the field
of social cognition) to a Wittgenstein-inspired (1958) universality of cognition,
conceived as an epistemological principle of translatability of language games,
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13 T
nonlinguistic codes, contexts of communication, and different ontologies. The
concept of ontology would no longer refer to “conceptions of the world” linked to
different languages, but to a plural and unsystematic way of constantly activating
different forms of thought.
In this new perspective, social anthropology would be defined not only as the
study of cultural differences, but also and simultaneously as a science of trans-
lation: the study of the empirical processes and theoretical principles of cultural
translation.
Acknowledgments
This collective volume originates from the symposium on “Cognition and Cultural
Translation” held at the Fyssen Foundation, Paris, March 20–21, 2014. We want to
express our gratitude to the Foundation for its help and support.
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Traduire les mondes : L’espace épistémologique de la traduction
Résumé: La traduction a joué un rôle à la fois crucial et ambigu dans l’histoire
de la linguistique et de l’anthropologie sociale. Au moins depuis Saussure et Boas,
on a insisté sur le fait que les différences entre les langues (et les cultures) rendent
la traduction idéale extrêmement difficile. Dans le même esprit, Quine a pu sou-
tenir que la traduction, si on la considère en termes abstraits, ne peut être que
vague, indéterminée, et, en dernière analyse, impossible. Nous prenons ici un point
de vue différent. En nous référant aux travaux de Thomas Kuhn, nous soutenons
au contraire que la confrontation constante entre des paradigmes théoriquement
incommensurables (mais, de fait, constamment adaptés, modifiés et traduits) peut
devenir un nouveau terrain d’enquête pour l’anthropologie. Dans cette perspective,
2014 | H: Journal of Ethnographic eory 4 (2): 1–16
William F. H and Carlo S 16
les défis posés par la pratique de la traduction deviennent un espace épistémolo-
gique nouveau où on peut repenser à la fois les techniques d’analyse et les principes
d’ articulation entre Linguistique et Anthropologie. L’anthropologie sociale, quant
à elle, se définirait non plus comme l’étude des différences culturelles, mais aussi
et simultanément comme l’analyse des processus empiriques et des principes de la
traduction culturelle.
William F. H received the Joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology
from the University of Chicago in 1983 and currently teaches in the Department
of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Director of
Social Science Matrix, a cross-disciplinary research institute. He investigates the
relation between grammar and communicative practices, colonial history, and con-
temporary shamanism among the Maya of Yucatán, Mexico.
William F. Hanks
Berkeley Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology
Professor of Anthropology
Affiliated Professor of Linguistics
Department of Anthropology
Kroeber Hall 232
University of California
Berkeley 94720
USA
wfhanks@berkeley.edu
Carlo S is Professor (Directeur d’études) at the École des Hautes études en
Sciences Sociales and Director of Research (Directeur de recherche) at CNRS. A
member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France since
1985, he has been a Getty Scholar at the Getty Institute for the History of Art and
the Humanities in Los Angeles (1994–95), a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in
Berlin (2002–2003), and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge (1990, 2012). He is the
author of La memoria rituale (La Nuova Italia, 1993), Naven or the other self (with
Michael Houseman, Brill, 1998; French edition: CNRS Éditions, 1994), and The
chimera principle (H Books, forthcoming; French edition: Rue d’Ulm-Musée du
Quai Branly, 2007).
Carlo Severi
Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale
Collège de France
52 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine
75005 Paris
France
severi@ehess.fr
