1st Edition

Representing Others Translation, Ethnography and Museum

By Kate Sturge Copyright 2007
    210 Pages
    by Routledge

    210 Pages
    by Routledge

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

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

    1. Introduction


    2. Translation as metaphor, translation as practice 

    The translation of culture    

    Culture as translation    

    Translation without language difference? 


    3. The translatability of cultures

    Translatability, untranslatability and relativism 

    Alterity and familiarity in ethnographic translations


    4. Historical perspectives    

    Colonialism and the rise of British anthropology 

    Translation practices in 'classical' ethnography 

    E.E. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer  


    5. Critical innovations in ethnography

    Confession and the translator's preface   

    Dialogical ethnography    

    Quotation      

    Thick translation      

    Ethnography at home    

    Ruth Behar's Translated Woman   


    6. Ethnographic translations of verbal art

    Early twentieth-century collectors   

    The performance dimension   

    The use of layers     

    Retranslation     

    Translating into target-language canons 


    7. Museum representations

    The museum as translation   

    Shifting contexts     

    Ideologies of arrangement: the Pitt Rivers Museum

    Faithfulness and authenticity   

    Verbal interpretation in the museum  

    Museums as contact zones  


    8. Ethical Perspectives

    Ownership and authority    

    Dialogue and difference    


    9. Conclusion      

    Biography

    Sturge, Kate