Anthropology Comes In When Translation Fails

in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
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Anne-Christine Taylor Emeritus Directrice de Recherche, CNRS anchumir@gamil.com

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Abstract

Instead of focusing directly on the epistemological problems facing the anthropologist, this paper aims to reverse the ethnographic lens and reflect first on what the ethnographic situation does for the ‘ethnographed’: what kind of work do the subjects of an inquiry engage in when they consent to an ethnographic relation? What affordances does it offer them? Briefly put, my answer to this question would be that it allows them to experiment novel ways of giving shape to and translating forms of reflexivity that are always historically and politically situated. If this is the case, it follows that the ethnographer is involved in translating a process of translation he or she has elicited, indeed co-produced with the subjects of the inquiry. What might be the consequences of viewing ethnography as the translation of a translation – as opposed to the translation of ‘a culture’?

Au lieu de se concentrer directement sur les problèmes épistémologiques auxquels l'anthropologue est confronté, cet article vise à inverser la lentille ethnographique et à réfléchir d'abord à ce que la situation ethnographique fait pour les « ethnographiés » : quel type de travail les sujets d'une enquête engagent-ils lorsqu'ils consentent à une relation ethnographique ? Quelles sont les possibilités que cette relation leur offre ? En bref, ma réponse à cette question serait qu'elle leur permet d'expérimenter de nouvelles façons de donner forme et de traduire des formes de réflexivité qui sont toujours historiquement et politiquement situées. Si tel est le cas, l'ethnographe est donc impliqué dans la traduction d'une procédure de traduction qu'il ou elle a instiguée/suscitée (voire coproduite) avec les sujets de l'enquête. Quelles pourraient être les conséquences d'une vision de l'ethnographie comme la traduction d'une traduction – par opposition à la traduction d'une « culture » ?

It is the custom of ambassadors to dress in the fashion of the land to which they have been sent, for fear of appearing ridiculous to those they aim to please. It is true that this is not, strictly speaking, translation: but it is better than translation. (Perrot d'Ablancourt, 1638, via Leavitt 2014: 201)

Decades ago, just before Philippe Descola and I travelled to Ecuador for an extended period of fieldwork among the Aents Chicham (Jivaroan) Achuar of Eastern Ecuador, we went to see Claude Lévi-Strauss, our thesis supervisor, for a final briefing. We explained to him in tedious detail what exactly we were planning to do, when, how and with what aims in mind. After a while, he waved a hand dismissively, said ‘yes, yes, that's fine … ’, and rose to see us out. At the door, he added, with a characteristic shrug and ironic half smile, ‘surtout, laissez-vous porter par le terrain’ – ‘above all, let yourself be carried by the field’.

Since then, I've often thought about the meaning of that valediction, and in this brief paper I will follow Lévi-Strauss's recommendation by allowing myself to be carried (and likely carried away) by his formulation of it. Retrospectively, I understand Lévi-Strauss to have meant ‘let yourself be guided to whatever is of central interest to the people you work with’. I won't go into my reasons for thinking that this interpretation of Lévi-Strauss's intended meaning is not entirely fanciful, because I want to focus here on its implicit premise, namely that the people we work with – ‘the natives’, whoever they may be – must harbour something in the nature of a desire for engaging with the ethnographer in order to lead her to those elements of their culture they most value, and that they share to some degree the anthropologist's capacity to objectify – to stand at a distance from – their culture. The practice of anthropology, in this view, would be the art of detecting and tuning in to what I will call the ‘desire for ethnography’. In line with the questions posed by Joao Pina-Cabral in his introduction to this forum, my aim in this paper is to explore the dialectic of doubt, uncertainty and determination in the ethnographic encounter, focusing on the play between the “natives’ and the ethnographer's anthropological speculations and the issues of translation it raises. Inevitably, my perspective on this dynamic is coloured by my experience of fieldwork among a relatively isolated indigenous Amazonian group mainly during the late 1970s and 1980s. A ‘classic’ ethnographic situation, in other words, one in which a Western anthropologist goes out to study an exotic population – usually a small-scale, isolated group living in a formerly colonialised country – whose lived world seems radically different from the one he or she comes from. However, I will argue that some aspects at least of the ethnographic encounter as I describe it transcend the limits of this model and are in fact inherent to the ‘ethnographic gesture’.

So, back to the ‘desire for ethnography’: what is the nature of the natives’ anthropological desire and what are its sources? What affordances do they see in the ethnographic relation, what kind of ‘unhinging’ are they aspiring to when they consent to it?

It is a remarkable fact that we have no ready answer to these questions, no ‘jurisprudential’ precedent to turn to for a ready illustration of – let alone solution to – the problem. For all the discipline's obsession with reflexivity and its incessant quest for new fields of inquiry, it has yet to produce an empirically grounded, in-depth study of the experience of being the subject of an ethnographical investigation. So far as I know, this kind of investigation has never been carried out, at least in the Amazonian world I am familiar with.

Still, despite this absence we are not without some elements of response to the question I have just raised. Since the reflexive turn of the late 1970s, much has been said about the textual representation of the ethnographic relation and its problems. Further, since no ethnographic study can now dispense with a reflexive take on the anthropologist's ‘placement’ in the field, how she interacted with, reacted to and was reacted to by her hosts, we have also gained some insight into the pragmatics involved in an ethnographic study. We have equally learnt much from the self-proclaimed dialogic ethnographies about the way the anthropologist and certain ‘native informants’ conclude a pact to produce works that stand outside both of the worlds they connect: how, for instance, V. Crapanzano and a Moroccan tile-maker named Tuhami together elaborated a text, the reality of which ‘belongs neither to the reality of the observed not to that of the observer’ (1985:IX); how – and to some extent why – Reichel-Dolmatoff's native assistant Antonio Guzman provided him with an elaborate, ready-made model of Desana cosmology (1971); how a specific historical event (the first landing on the moon) impelled P. Gow's Piro informant to recount to him a particular myth at a particular time (2001); how and why Davi Kopenawa came to use Bruce Albert as a conduit and translator for his vision of his world and of that of the Whites (2014). But these great works (among many others not mentioned here) do not tell us, or only hint at, how their native interlocutors understood – or misunderstood – what an ethnographic inquiry is about, what kinds of reflexivity about their culture it triggered, how, in their own view, their idiosyncratic voice as the ‘native interlocutor’ related to shared cultural knowledge; in short, how they conceptualised the relation between their ‘I’ and the ‘We’ they were taken to stand for, and how the ‘I’ of the ethnographer related to his or her ‘We’. These are things that can only be guessed at, inferred by abduction, Ginzburg-style, from the traces deposited both in the written texts finally produced, in the stories anthropologists tell each other about their field experiences (but still rarely write about), in fiction and, increasingly, in the native productions that have emerged in the aftermath of the ethnographic experience.

Let me begin with a simple fact: the ‘native informants’ I have mentioned above are all deeply worried people; worried both by the threat of unwanted change hanging over their life-ways and by the implications for them of standing between two worlds. Because worry is becoming a global predicament – now more so than ever – we tend to forget that it has long been a defining feature of our subjects (in every sense of that word). Since its beginnings, anthropology has always worked preferentially with people who had (and still have) very good reason to be worried by the spread of ‘Modernity’ and who, long before us, have lived through the ‘collapse of the future’ (Ardener 1985: 57). This primary orientation of anthropology toward people who are collectively experiencing existential disquiet does lead one to wonder whether worried subjects are in fact necessary for the practice of anthropology. Would it be stretching things to claim that being in a state of trouble about the disjointed condition of the lived world is a requisite for the emergence of the ‘desire for ethnography’, itself a precondition for the unfolding of the ethnographic relation? It may be apposite here to recall Lévi-Strauss's narrative (parable, rather) of his visit to the Mundé, in chapter 31 of Tristes Tropiques (1955). These Indians were in 1938 an anthropologist's dream: an uncontacted group, promising the exceptional chance of actually living the inaugural moment of anthropology and carrying out first-contact ethnography. But the experience was a bitter failure. Though the Mundé showed no hostility toward their visitors, they offered them no sign of a willingness to communicate and evinced no interest in engaging with them. As Lévi-Strauss tells it, it was like coming up against a glass wall: he and the Mundé could see each other, but nothing happened between them. Nothing happened, according to him, because these Indians were still oblivious of the looming presence of History as it is produced by Whites and had not yet been distanced from themselves by its workings. In a word, they were still too unworried to feel any desire for ethnography.

And of course, our ‘subjects’ are not the only ones to be worried. Long before our own future began to collapse and worry – over climate change, the threat of pandemics, the growth of inequality and the uncontrolled spread of commodification – became a universally shared mood, anthropologists have always been existentially troubled people, drawn to their vocation by some sense of unease with, or distance from, their own society as well as their place in it, and practising their discipline with an inbuilt reflexive pessimism. This they carry into the field – itself the ultimate disquieting experience – and something of this multi-layered unease is inevitably perceived, however equivocally, by the people we study; no doubt we can all recall occasional expressions of solicitude on the part of our hosts, prompted by their sense of our isolation and confusion.

This, then, would seem to be the paradigmatic setting of the ethnographic relation, the context within which a desire for ethnography may emerge: an encounter between people who are anxious, for different but sometimes partially converging reasons, who experience and express unease in different ways, and who are aware of their interlocutor's disquiet, however they choose to interpret its origin. It could be argued that this depiction holds primarily, if not exclusively, for the ‘classic’ ethnographic situation; its relevance for much of contemporary anthropology may therefore seem doubtful. If you are studying extreme right-wing groups in Germany, businessmen in Liverpool, the controversies over anti-Covid vaccination or transnational digital networks, existential worry and the kind of reflexivity that it cues may not be a salient mood of your interlocutors. Yet I would claim that even in such settings subjects’ consent to engage with an ethnographer in some form or another must be motivated by the pull of reflexivity, a willingness, however fleeting and grudging, to ‘stand outside’ of themselves and their convictions, if only for purposes of justification or social recognition; by a tacit admission, in short, that there might be a gap between self-perception and perception by others. This disposition may not be worry in the strict sense of the word, but it is a gateway to a questioning of one's place in the world and its times. And a shared sense of ‘worry’ in this sense, however diffuse and fraught with ambiguity, makes for a good meeting ground in pragmatic terms, because it implies the possibility of empathy combined with a degree of wariness about each other's moral dispositions; an uncertainty that is fed and shaped by the history of relations between our subjects of inquiry and representatives of dominant societies such as state agents, NGO workers, missionaries, spokesmen for corporations … and other anthropologists. The suspicion is further compounded by the language problem, regardless of how great or small the differences may be between the speech usages of the anthropologist and his hosts. Still, linguistic incomprehension is no barrier to communication (Hanks and Severi 2016) and it also has its upside: it makes room for time, play, deceit and ambivalence – and of course it focuses the attention of all parties concerned on the issue of translation.

Some of the reasons why it might be desirable to engage with an anthropologist are obvious enough. Amazonianist ethnographers are all at least partially aware during fieldwork of the uses they may be put to by their hosts, as pawns in local power games, as witnesses to be produced in dealings with State or international agencies, as guarantors of the fact that they possess a culture and are thus entitled to certain rights and benefits, and so on. But there is clearly something more than considerations of political opportunism at play in the natives’ consent to the presence of an ethnographer. Using the anthropologist as an idiot utile does not necessarily entail a willingness to engage in any form of ‘transduction’, to use Jakobson's term for the transportation of semantic content from one cultural context to another; indeed, such uses could well work – and sometimes do – as a strategy for tightening the boundaries of cultural intimacy and refusing to participate in the work of translation.

If equivocally shared anxiety over the uncertainty of what is happening to them and the world, and between the natives and the anthropologist, constitutes the ecological setting of the anthropological relation, surely part of the natives’ desire for ethnography lies in the fact that it offers them an opportunity for close, first-hand observation of a representative of the world that is causing their worry, in other words for conducting reverse ethnography and trying to get a handle on what is of central interest for Whites. This kind of investigation, mirroring our own enquiries, is something that we are not always aware of during fieldwork and that at best we only come to perceive much later, once we start realising and analysing what our ethnographic experience has done to our sense of self, our language and our concepts.

The Achuar of Western Amazonia I began to work with in the late seventies (my ‘natives’ of reference) were clearly nonplussed by our questions about their ‘customs’, because at that time they did not know they possessed a culture, although they had begun to grasp that ‘culture’ lay at the core of what the Whites saw as the primary factor of differentiation between them and the natives. As I came eventually to understand, one of the main reasons for their perplexity rested in the fact that while we anthropologists seemed to think that their particularity lay in what they thought and in the reasons for their practices, they assumed that our particularity as Whites lay in the nature of our bodies. In line with the ‘multinaturalist’ premises built into their way of construing the world (Viveiros de Castro 2002), they held that bodies – more precisely bodily forms and their species-specific ethological behaviour – are the crucial site of difference between kinds, the source of the point of view on the world proper to each class of being, and therefore the source of these species’ way of engaging with and acting on the world (species understood as collectives of similar bodies). By contrast, what we term culture was for them a locus of non-differentiation, since all beings (human or non-human) who can see themselves as humans necessarily have a language, the knowledge required to sustain their life-ways, to perform rituals, to interact in the proper manner – in short, possess ‘culture’, a generic, universal feature of ‘humans’ that as such cannot be the source of their bodily incarnated difference.1 This is why Amazonian Indians, as all their ethnographers can testify, are so interested in our bodies and the way they function. ‘Their sociology is a physiology’ (Seeger et al 2020 [1979]); thus, what we eat, how we walk, sleep, defecate, make love, quarrel … are all vital clues to essential distinctiveness. Having a White at hand allows them to constantly re-enact, figuratively speaking, that primal scene of Americanist anthropology, Oviedo's description of how the natives of Hispaniola immerged Spanish corpses to see whether they rotted and thus verify if these outsiders were humans or gods – a story famously used by Lévi-Strauss in Race et Histoire (1973 [1952]) to frame the contrast he drew between Amerindian and Western ways of relating to radical alterity. In short, while we are observing them as ethnographers, they are observing us as naturalists.

Amazonian natives are acutely interested not only in observing what White bodies habitually do; to further explore their particularities, they seek to try them out. Thus, to get a handle on White's obsession with ‘culture’ as a principle of differentiation, they test some of the White bodily practices they see the ethnographer performing – or perhaps, more accurately, they try to perform indigenous practices they see as commensurable with White practices as if they were performed by White bodies. Many of the most telling ethnographic vignettes in Tristes Tropiques are rooted in this kind of ambiguous mimesis. By all accounts, Lévi-Strauss did not converse much with his native hosts – there is almost no record in the book of actual conversations with Indians – but he was constantly occupied at looking (often through the lens of a camera), writing and drawing. Thus it should come as no surprise that the Nambikwara ‘chief’ undertook in experimental vein to reproduce the act of writing, or that the Caduveo engaged with the anthropologist by offering him their drawings of facial tattooing, or that the Bororo consented to perform rituals under the camera's eye in order to experience what it is like to be observed from the outside.

Such acts of ‘playing the anthropologist’ clearly play an important role in the elaboration of our ethnographic reports. By his own account, as relayed by Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971), Antonio Guzman equated the kind of knowledge sought by anthropologists with the specialised knowledge on myths and ritual acts held by Desana savants and by assisting Reichel-Dolmatoff he set out to become simultaneously an indigenous savant and an anthropologist. His is by no means an isolated case. The bulk of the ethnographic literature on North-West Amazonian groups focuses on the exegesis of the mythical and ritual knowledge developed and transmitted by such local specialists who assumed that this knowledge was what anthropology is about. Likewise, Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomami as ‘fierce people’ may be (as indeed has been suggested) largely a reflection of his own confrontational style – who knows how much of the ritual duelling he highlighted as a symptom of native ‘ferocity’ was not in fact cued by his disposition to engage with others in agonistic mode?

The kind of works being currently produced by indigenous people is equally revealing of the reciprocal mimesis involved in the ethnographic relation. It is surely no accident that native authors from Northwestern Amazonia focus on mythical knowledge, that Xinguano film-makers concentrate on ritual – locally the main currency of intercultural relations – and explore thereby the scopic dimension of our brand of anthropology, that Aents Chicham (Jivaroan) persons favour autobiographical narratives, just as do many of the outsiders (such as missionaries, military officers, NGO collaborators … ) involved with them.2 Much of what we present as ‘culture’ thus stems from the acts of commensuration carried out by our native hosts in response to our own operations of commensuration. And these latter are always enmeshed, as Povinelli reminds us (2001), in the innumerable acts of commensuration that minority groups are subjected to by the State, particularly the modern liberal State, and as such are necessarily suspect from the native point of view: do questions about kinship terms or myth belong – or not – to the same ‘language game’ as questions about who suffers from malarial fevers, how many guns they possess, how much land they cultivate, and so on?

To sum up, while we are busy ‘imagining a culture for people who do not imagine it for themselves’, as Wagner (1981: 27) memorably phrased it, they are engaged in a parallel endeavour to get at what is really of ‘central interest’ to the ethnographer and the collective he stands for. In this sense, the native and the anthropologist are, as Hertzfeld put it, ‘engaged in directly comparable intellectual operations’ (2001: 7). For example, the kinds of reflexivity involved in these parallel but different anthropologies are no doubt similar, as are the problems of translation they are linked to. Hanks and Severi (2016) have recently reminded us that translation is a permanent process in any and every culture – is in fact the stuff of what we call culture – and is necessarily tied to specific kinds of reflexivity, since, beyond the automatic reflexivity built into any form of interaction with an Other (the ongoing, semi-conscious monitoring of attitudes, speech usages, gestures, both ourselves’ and our interlocutors’), the internal switching of codes and registers constitutive of culture imply some form of mental objectification of both the source and the target ‘text’ (for example, in the transposition of verbal utterances to their musical or visual key). What is specific to the ethnographic context is that these kinds of translation become problematic, because neither party involved knows what the other knows or doesn't know. This context leads to a further kind of reflexivity of a ‘non-ordinary’ sort, perhaps akin in some ways to varieties of ritual reflexivity. This is particularly so in Amazonia, given the anthropologist's identification, by virtue of his or her foreignness, as a being hovering somewhere between the figures of the enemy, the White boss, a spirit and a kinsperson. Like ritual, the ethnographic situation triggers a heightened sense of contrastive identity (regardless of the kind of ‘I/We’ this might refer to), a sense of engaging in something that is outside of routine interaction and, finally, perplexity about what it is really about (as we all know, performing a ritual doesn't mean one fully understands why one is doing it and what it is meant to achieve). Such experiences, shared equally by both parties involved since the ethnographer is just as uncertain as the native about the nature, intent and implications of their interaction, are bound to lead to a heightened stance of speculative reflexivity, an imaginative scanning of known interactive scenarios to which the current relation could be compared to. While reflexivity about one's own shared life forms – and therefore about others’ – is a built-in feature of culture in general, the intensified form it acquires in the context of the anthropological inquiry thus opens a space for new, always historically situated narrative elaborations of this reflexivity. This, I believe, is the imaginative affordance that leads worried people to engage in the ethnographic relation, as a testing ground for novel accounts of individual and collective placements and trajectories.

Not surprisingly, the ‘desire for ethnography’ closely ties to political imaginaries. In the Amazonian setting, the kind of reflexivity triggered by wondering what the anthropologist is really interested in draws on Lowland Indians’ predisposition to value difference over sameness and thus to aspire to some kind of relation with ‘outsidedness’. This feature of Amazonian cosmopolitics is what Lévi-Strauss, in Histoire de Lynx (1991), called ‘l'ouverture à l'autre’, by which he referred to the principle that relations are necessarily predicated on a difference between the terms they connect. The greater the difference, the more significant the relation becomes. There are two sides to this gravitation toward alterity, both of which have been abundantly discussed in Amazonianist literature. One side is the drive to capture elements of alterity – such as names, trophies, songs, live or dead beings – considered necessary for social/biological reproduction, via a process of incorporation that C. Fausto labelled ‘familiarizing predation’ (2001, 2012). The other side is the impulse to ‘become other’, to change into and experience another type of corporality, a metamorphosis that entails affiliating with the collective this type of body belongs to. This is what shamans routinely do (while taking care to preserve their ties to their own ‘kind’) and it is also a process that is salient in war-related ritual performances, where the killer may gradually morph into the enemy, assume the position of a God or become an animal. However, this aspiration to become other is by no means limited to war practices. It is also evident in the record, dating back to pre-conquest times, of outbreaks of millenary movements such as the well-known Tupian quest for the ‘Land without evil’ or the Western Arawakan uprising fired by Juan Santos Atahuallpa. These episodes of millenarism generally imply a radical shift away from ordinary or customary practice and behaviour, and while many of them seem to be initiated by persons who are marginal to the group or stand at least partially outside it, they do not necessarily require the presence of a prophet figure. C. Fausto (2012) documented a revolutionary movement of this sort among the Parakana, when one faction decided to separate and live in a manner quite different from the one they formerly shared with the rest of the tribe. A similar process occurred among the Huaorani of Ecuador, divided between a group largely opened to relations with the outside world and a small band of irréductibles who refused any contact with ‘foreigners’, including their former kinsmen (High 2013, 2015). In fact, the so-called ‘isolated groups’ of Amazonia whose rare sightings so excite the media are all the products of such abrupt decisions to experiment a future different from the one they sense coming to them.

These examples among many others testify to the importance and permanence of Amazonians’ aspiration to ‘become other’ and their readiness to try out different ways of inhabiting and acting on the world. This rich imaginary of alternative ways of life evidently forms a central strand of the relation they develop with their ethnographers. In some cases, anthropologists even come to play an active role in the development of indigenous ‘revolutionary’ movements of the kind I mentioned. For example, it has been shown (e.g. Menta 2017) that the re-emergence of Indian groups in the Brazilian Nordeste owes much to the work conducted by Brazilian anthropologists between the 1930s and the mid-century to incite the natives to ‘return to their traditional rituals’ – in actual fact to invent and/or borrow practices presumed to correspond to White expectations of what indigenous rituals should look like. The same can be said for the Ecuadorian Zaparo, a tribe long considered extinct but who re-emerged in recent years from their former embedded existence among Forest Quichua groups, with the help of an ethnographer serving to record and publicise a remarkable oneiric ‘tradition’ held to lie at the core of their specific tribal identity3 (Bilhaut 2011).

Evidently, these are exceptional situations: anthropologists do not normally initiate or participate in such radical processes of social (re)invention. But the ethnographic setting most certainly triggers the memory of the imaginaries feeding these movements, the nostalgie du futur that inhabits them. And this inevitably combines – or collides – with the nostalgia for the past that is built into anthropology. Nostalgia is not only a mood common to many anthropologists; it is parcelled into the discipline's tool kit, insofar as we routinely rely on comparison between past and present states of the society under study to understand the nature and direction of the changes that have affected it. And who, among those of us who work in ‘classic’ ethnographic situations, would deny being drawn to the ‘before’ of our natives’ lives – before their villages were disfigured by cement and tin roofing, invaded by radios and TVs, money, tourists, petroleum cowboys and so on, before, in short, their world came to resemble ours – en pire – and ceased offering the image of a truly different one? Remember Lévi-Strauss’ fantasy in Histoire de Lynx (1991) about rewinding the course of history and somehow deviating the juggernaut of colonialism by making of a Montaigne-like figure the lone ‘discoverer’ of America, in place of Cortez, Pizzaro and their cohorts. While Amerindians compare their present to an imagined future, we use the past – theirs and sometimes ours – as a resource for imagining an alternative world for ourselves; and surely something of our brand of nostalgia is conveyed to our hosts through our obvious interest in their past, indeed our devotion to the idea that the past is the key to the present. Thus, in yet another instance of productive misunderstanding, the natives’ nostalgia for the future and our nostalgia for the ‘before’ fuel each other's political imaginaries, combining in a joint aspiration for a different kind of difference – a different sort of relation between social beings different from what history has made them.

So far I have been focusing on the parallels between the kinds of ethnographic enquiry the native and the ethnographer are pursuing, as well as on the work of internal translation – let's call it first-order translation – that sustains them. Communicating such translations – that is, passing to a second-order translation, explicitly describing and justifying the flow of evocations and comparisons packed into the exchanges between the native and the outsider – is another matter. As Viveiros de Castro (2004) forcefully reminds us, the similarity of the mental operations that both the native and the ethnographer engage in does not imply direct translatability of these intellectual processes, because their framing can be quite distinct, rooted in sharply divergent unquestioned premises – hinges, in Wittgenstein's sense – about what it is to be human, to communicate, to think, to aggregate in ‘societies’ or to ‘possess’ culture. As B. Cassin stressed (2004, 2014), insights about such ‘hinges’ in fact only emerge when the work of translation begins to falter, when it comes up against knots of conceptual obscurity, tangles of non sequiturs and zones of pronominal confusion (e.g. ‘who is this unmentioned enunciator who has suddenly joined the conversation?’). This why equivocation, as Viveiros de Castro argues (2004), is constitutive of anthropology – of anthropology as the effort to understand why the native's way of misunderstanding the anthropologist is not the same as the anthropologists’ misunderstanding of them, to borrow once again from Wagner's (1991) writings. In short, anthropology kicks in when translation fails, as the effort to ‘naturalise’ semantic incongruity; by this I mean the endeavour to understand how and in what contexts utterances such as ‘manioc plants are people’ or ‘that deer was a dead person’ may be taken as factual statements about reality. Inevitably, this work of translation leads to a simultaneous destabilisation of the implicit categories and premises built into the language used by the anthropologist in his analyses – as Viveiros de Castro puts it, “a good translation … betrays the language of destination, not the source language” (2004: 5). Thus, the quality of an anthropological work can be measured by its power to question the hinges articulating our own grasp of reality, its ability to expose the ‘naturalities’ of our own world while revealing those of another world, thereby adding yet another layer of uncertainty to those inherent to the conversation between the native and the ethnographer.

Uncertainty therefore is not an epistemological problem waiting to be evacuated by the exercise of proper scientific procedures, a congenital weakness of our discipline that could be rooted out if only its ‘subjective’ dimension could be properly straightjacketed. It is, rather, the bedrock of our discipline. If anthropologists did not experience and carry back from the field a sense that part of their material resists translation, they would be in the business of explanation rather than interpretation. It is their burden of ‘untranslatables’ (in Cassin's meaning) – things such as Stephen Palmie's Tomàs, Evans-Pritchard's Zande witches, Joao Pina-Cabral and Ashley Lebner's Devil – that impels them to create discursively worlds in which such things become part of the possible furniture of reality, as a means of communicating their understandings of the origins and effects of their problems of translation.

It is in the space of this ‘third-order’ translation, played out within the confines of a certain kind of scientific language game (as opposed, say, to the game of ‘fiction’), that we encounter our discipline's zones of determinacy or relative ‘certainty’ (though that is a term which belongs, I think, to the vocabulary of ethics rather than science), that is to say provisionally stabilised areas of shared understandings of various kinds of phenomena. This is the function of theory, a device we use to attract consensus over a certain kind of ordering of the relationships between our ‘facts’. It may seem perverse to speak of theories as places of ‘accordment’ necessary for dealing with uncertainty, knowing that theories – whether explicit or implicit – are the discipline's main arena of dissension, subject to ceaseless controversy, critical revision and refinement. But it is their quantum of robustness – the extent of their capacity to illuminate the widest array of phenomena in the most economical and persuasive way – rather than their existence as such that is the focus of disagreement: no anthropologist, however contentious, could forego all theory all the time, an exercise that would be simply tantamount to producing yet another theory. In other words, it is the uncertainties we carry back from the field that impel us ceaselessly to search for islands of firm ground on which to stand, while simultaneously breeding endless doubt about the firmness of our islands’ ground. Since the work of translation is never ending, how could it be otherwise? Such is the peculiar dynamic of anthropology, perennially trapped in the critical cross-fire between those demanding truths and facts (rather than wonderings about their facticity) and those pushing for ever more purification, as if the uprooting of all the possible biases lurking in our approaches would finally lead to the land of transparency.

Notes

1

This is a very sketchy résumé of a type of cosmology that has been abundantly discussed in Amazonianist literature, following a series of foundational papers by Seeger, da Matta and Viveiros de Castro (2020 [1979]), Fausto (2001), Vilaça (2002), Taylor and Viveiros de Castro (2006), to mention just some of the landmarks in the line of argument I'm following here.

2

A notable feature of the long history of relations between Whites and Jivaroans (more properly Aents Chicham, as they now choose to be called) is the amount of fictional and/or confessional writing it has triggered, from Juan L. Mera's novel Cumanda (1879; a classic of Ecuadorian literature) to Vargas Llosa (1965) and L. Sepulveda's (1989) novels, from Up de Graaf's sinister telling of his adventures among the Awajun (1923) to the accounts of missionaries or lay volunteers of their years spent among Chicham Aents (e.g. Arnalot 2007 [1978]; Calderon de Ayala 1995; Warren 2020). It would seem that the Jivaroan's tradition of narrating their life histories (mainly war stories) has in some sense ‘contaminated’ the outsiders who interact with them by cuing reflexivity about their own lives, and now these White writings have in turn become a template for native authors producing a written version of their autobiographies (Deshoulières 2019).

3

The kind of dreaming the Zaparo claim as their tradition revolves around visits to a vast library filled with innumerable stone books storing their ‘ancestral’ knowledge. The content of these ‘books’ remains largely undefined and is only alluded to; what counts is the oneiric experiences of wandering through the library (Bilhaut 2011).

References

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    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
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    • Export Citation
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Contributor Notes

ANNE-CHRISTINE TAYLOR is emeritus Directrice de Recherche at the CNRS, affiliated to the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparatives (LESC-EREA), Université de Paris Nanterre. She is a specialist of Upper Amazonian indigenous groups. Her main topics of research are native regimes of historicity, ethnohistory, and the study of indigenous conceptualisations of ‘psychological’ processes. Email: anchumir@gamil.com; ORCID: 0000-0002-8920-7440.

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  • Expand
  • Ardener, E. 1985. Social anthropology and the decline of modernism, in J. Overing (ed.), Reason and morality, 4669. Asa Monographs 24. London: Tavistock.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Arnalot, J. 2007 [1978]. Lo que los Achuar me han ensenado. Quito: Abya Yala.

  • Bilhaut, A.-G. 2011. El sueno de los zàparas. Patrimonio onírico de un pueblo de la alta Amazonia. Quito: Abya Yala/FLACSO.

  • Calderon de Ayala, E. S. 1995. David Samaniego Shunaula: Nueva crónica de los indios de Zamora y del Alto Maranon. Quito: Abya Yala.

  • Cassin, B. (ed.) 2004. Le dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Paris: Le Seuil.

  • Cassin, B. 2014. ‘Traduire les intraduisibles: un état des lieux’, Cliniques Méditerrannéenes 10: 2536.

  • Crapanzano, V. 1985. Tuhami: portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  • Deshoulières, G. 2019. “Le “je” de l'écrit: autobiographie visionnaire, guide de vie exemplaire et contre-histoire personnelle parmi les Jivarophones de l'Equateur”, séminaire d'anthropologie américaniste, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, 22/03/2019.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Fausto, C. 2001. Inimigos Fieis: Historia, Guerra e Xamanismo na Amazonia. Sao Paulos: EDUSP.

  • Fausto, C. 2012. Warfare and shamanism in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Gow, P. 2001. An Amazonian myth and its history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Hanks, W. and C. Severi 2016. ‘Translating worlds: the epistemic space of translation’, special issue HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hertzfeld, M. 2001. Orientations: anthropology as a practice of theory, in M. Hertzfeld (ed.), Anthropology: theoretical practice in culture and society, 120. London: Blackwell/Unesco.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • High, C. 2013. ‘Lost and found. Contesting isolation and cultivating contact in Amazonian Ecuador’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3: 195221.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • High, C. 2015. Victims and warriors. Violence, history and memory in Amazonia. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

  • Kopenawa, D. and B. Albert 2014. La chute du ciel – paroles d'un chamane Yanomami. Paris: Plon.

  • Leavitt, J. 2014. ‘Words and worlds: ethnography and theories of translation’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4: 193220.

  • Lévi-Strauss, C. 1955. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon.

  • Lévi-Strauss, C. 1973 [1952]. ‘Race et histoire’, in Anthropologie structurale deux, 377422. Paris: Plon.

  • Lévi-Strauss, C. 1991. Histoire de Lynx. Paris: Plon.

  • Menta, C. 2017. ‘Peuplements: transmission de rituels des Indiens Pankaruru aux Indiens Pankararé, Nordeste du Brésil’, PhD thesis, EHESS.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mera, J. L. 1879. Cumanda o un drama entre salvajes. Quito: Fernando Fé.

  • Povinelli, E. 2001. ‘The anthropology of incommensurability and inconceivability’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 319334.

  • Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. 1971. Amazonian cosmos. The sexual and religious symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Seeger, A., R. da Matta and E. B. Viveiros de Castro 2020 [1979]. ‘The construction of the person in indigenous Brazilian societies’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9: 691703.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sepulveda, L. 1989. Un viejo que leia novelas de amor. Santiago de Chile: Tusquets Editores.

  • Taylor, A.-C. and E. B. Viveiros de Castro 2006. Un corps fait de regards, in S. Breton and M. Coquet (eds.), Qu'est-ce qu'un corps?, 148199. Paris: Musée du quai Branly.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Up de Graff, F. W. 1923. Head hunters of Amazon. London: Herbert Jenkins.

  • Vargas Llosa, M. 1965. La Casa Verde. Barcelona: Seix Barral.

  • Vilaça, A. 2002. ‘Making kin out of others’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8: 347365.

  • Viveiros de Castro, E. B. 2002. Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na America Indigena, in A Inconstancia da alma selvagem, 345400. Sao Paulo: Cosac & Naify.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Viveiros de Castro, E. B. 2004. ‘Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation’, Tipiti 2: 320.

  • Wagner, R. 1981. The invention of culture, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

  • Warren, P. 2020. Aints: novela etnohistoric. Quito: Abya Yala.

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