The art of translation in a continuous world

Abstract

Just as literary translation involves taking ideas expressed in one language and ‘carrying them across’ into the terms of another, so — it is said — anthropology involves the translation of the ideas and concepts of other cultures into terms comprehensible to a western readership. The anthropological representation of ‘other cultures’ involves a process not of translation but of inversion. Philosophers have long speculated on the predicament of the anthropological fieldworker, set down in the midst of an alien culture whose members speak a quite different language, and who organise their world according to a conceptual scheme as yet unknown. To construe the anthropological project in general as one of translation is to assume a world of humanity already parcelled up into discrete cultures, each having a distinctive essence and credited with the power to ‘construct’ the experience of the people living under its sway.

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