Translating Worlds Hau Books

TRANSLATING WORLDS Hau BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com TRANSLATING WORLDS T HE EPISTEMOLOgical SPACE OF TraNSLATION Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series Edited by William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi Hau Books Chicago © 2015 Hau Books Hau Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series (Volume 1) TheH AU Special Issues in Ethnographic Theory Series prints paperback ver- sions of pathbreaking collections, previously published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9861325-1-3 LCCN: 2015952083 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Contents List of Contributors vii INTRODUCTION Translating worlds: The epistemological space of translation William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi 1 CHAPTER ONE The space of translation William F. Hanks 21 CHAPTER TWO Transmutating beings: A proposal for an anthropology of thought Carlo Severi 51 CHAPTER THREE Powers of incomprehension: Linguistic otherness, translators and political structure in New Guinea tourism encounters Rupert Stasch 89 CHAPTER FOUR Healing translations: Moving between worlds in Achuar shamanism Anne-Christine Taylor 117 vi TRANSLATING WORLDS CHAPTER FIVE Bilingual language learning and the translation of worlds in the New Guinea Highlands and beyond Alan Rumsey 147 CHAPTER SIX Culinary subjectification: The translated world of menus and orders Adam Yuet Chau 175 CHAPTER SEVEN All translation is radical translation Bruce Mannheim 199 CHAPTER EIGHT Acting translation: Ritual and prophetism in twenty-first-century indigenous Amazonia Carlos Fausto and Emmanuel de Vienne 221 CHAPTER NINE Words and worlds: Ethnography and theories of translation John Leavitt 259 CHAPTER TEN On the very possibility of mutual intelligibility G. E. R. Lloyd 295 Index 313 List of Contributors Adam Yuet Chau (Ph.D. in Anthropology, 2001, Stanford University) teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow at St. John’s College. He is the author of Miraculous response: Doing popu- lar religion in contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2006) and editor of Religion in contemporary China: Revitalization and innovation (Routledge, 2011). He is currently working on book projects investigating the idiom of host- ing (zuozhu) and forms of powerful writing (“text acts”) in Chinese political and religious culture. Emmanuel de Vienne is Associate Professor at the University of Nanterre, France. He conducted fieldword among the Trumai in the Upper Xingu Region (Mato Grosso, Brasil). His topics of interest include shamanism, ritual, and jok- ing relationships. Carlos Fausto is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of Os Índios antes do Brasil (2000), Inimigos fiéis (2001) and Warfare and shamanism in Amazonia (2012). He is the coeditor (with Michael J. Heckenberger) of Time and memory in indigenous Amazonia (2007) and (with Carlo Severi) L’image rituelle (2014). William F. Hanks 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 viii TRANSLATING WORLDS the relation between grammar and communicative practices, colonial history, and contemporary shamanism among the Maya of Yucatán, Mexico. John Leavitt eaches in the anthropology department of the Université de Mon- tréal, specializing in linguistic anthropology. He has conducted field research in the Central Himalayas of northern India and in Ireland and has published on comparative mythology, oral poetry, and the history of linguistic relativity. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Philosophy and Sci- ence at the University of Cambridge and is now based at the Needham Re- search Institute. He has published twenty-six books, initially concentrating on ancient Greek philosophy and science and then embarking on detailed comparative studies with ancient Chinese thought. His three most recent books, which tackle the underlying philosophical problems of such comparisons and related issues in cognitive science, are: Cognitive variations: Reflections on the unity and diversity of the human mind (2007), Disciplines in the making (2009), Being, humanity and understanding (2012), and The ideals of inquiry (2014), all from Oxford University Press. Bruce Mannheim is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and a leading scholar of Andean languages, cultures, and history. His works span from a linguistic history of the Quechua language since the sixteenth century— and its shifting social ecology (the language of the Inka since the European invasion); to narrative; to ritual practices around places; and to Quechua ontol- ogy. His current research project is a theory of cultural replication—the ways in which cultural forms are stabilized across time and spread across populations. Alan Rumsey is a Professor of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. His research fields are Highland Papua New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia, with a focus on speech genres and on relations among language, culture, and intersubjectivity Carlo Severi 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 LIST OF Contributors ix the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2002–2003), and a Visiting Fellow at Cam- bridge (1990, 2012). He is the author of La memoria rituale (La Nuova Ita- lia, 1993), Naven or the other self (with Michael Houseman, Brill, 1998; French edition: CNRS Éditions, 1994), and The chimera principle (Hau Books, 2015; French edition: Rue d’Ulm-Musée du Quai Branly, 2007). Rupert Stasch is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cam- bridge. He is the author of Society of others: Kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place (2009). Since 1995, he has carried out twenty-one months of field- work with Korowai speakers of Papua, Indonesia. He is currently writing a book about interactions between Korowai and international tourists. Anne-Christine Taylor is a social anthropologist, specializing in the study of lowland South American indigenous groups. She is Directrice de Recherche Emeritus at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France), and headed the Department of Research and Teaching at the Musée du Quai Branly from 2005 to 2014. Introduction Translating worlds The epistemological space of translation William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi WHY TRANSLATION? Translation has played an important but equivocal role in the history of anthropology 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 framing 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 applicable to many or all languages (Benveniste 1974, 2012). This also implies translating object languages and their grammars into typological categories. The dynamic field of linguistic typology is an out- growth of this, with much to teach us about translation. Contemporary social and cultural anthropology are of course less formal 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 comparative, social and 2 WILLIAM F. HANKS AND CARLO SEVERI 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 translation—although the issue is coming back to the fore in the recent literature: see Pym (2010), Asad (2010), and Viveiros de Castro’s (2004) pro- vocative argument that translation rests

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