The Problem of Translation

Recently, I gave the distinguished lecture for the National Library of Jamaica in commemoration of its fortieth anniversary. This is a biennial event, and I was invited because my collaborators and I have made extensive use of the library's audio-visual archives for our films about state violence in Jamaica. The library staff, who are continually asked to justify the expenditures their existence requires, wanted me to talk about the importance of archives generally, and, implicitly, their relationship to nation-building. I began the talk with Michel-Rolph Trouillot's (1995) important critical insights about archives: his insistence that we position archives not as static sources of information, but as dynamic spaces where knowledge is produced. Trouillot's argument, of course, was that both the materiality of history and the interpretations of that materiality are constructed. By this, he meant that archives are mediated rather than transparent, and that they are mediated by the particular historical conjunctures in which we find ourselves. Archiving, when understood in this sense, produces silences and absences as well as presences. I went on to discuss the disavowals these silences and absences can maintain—in this case, regarding the relationships among slavery, coloniality, and contemporary state violence. I used this discussion as a platform to consider our film work and its attempt to bring these relationships to light by generating affective responses to the various forms of violence that condition our attentiveness to those most affected by violence. Our aim, I asserted, has been to cultivate a sense of mutuality that would expose the ways we are complicit in the perpetuation of violence and that would demand collective accountability. This year, the library also wanted to do something different. While the event usually features a speaker followed by a question-and-answer session, they wanted to use this year's lecture to provoke a broader conversation, so they organized a panel discussion to follow my talk. The panel included Major General Anthony Anderson, currently the commissioner of police and formerly the deputy director of the Jamaican Defense Force (the army); Paula Llewellyn, the director of public prosecutions; and Reverend Dr. Devon Dick, past president of the Jamaica Baptist Union. While I was making a case for us to think differently about the place of the past in the present, and how the past conditions the ways we address people living in politically volatile communities in downtown Kingston, two of the panelists sought to justify the forms of police and military action that build on and create the conditions of insecurity in these spaces and to highlight the urgency of the violence facing the society as a whole. The police and the lawyers were in the trenches (indeed, they are), and I, in their view, had the luxury of academic distance, and thus the inclination to believe the “lies” people told us, “lies” that also appeal to foreign donors funding nongovernmental projects oriented toward putting an end to extrajudicial violence. In the audience, there were representatives from a number of civil society organizations that have worked extensively on violence prevention and community development, yet during the panel, there was little space for reflecting in more complex ways about the broader forms of historical and structural violence that create the conditions for criminal involvement or for the ways these limit our ability to apprehend current events in terms other than blanket designations of criminal and innocent, law-breaking and law-abiding, lies and truth. The event itself thus instantiated the deep divisions within Jamaican society. It highlighted the problems of translation between and among representatives of the state and civil society, the government and the people. Translation is, in fact, a central concern among many of the pieces in this issue, and has sometimes been seen as the bread and butter of anthropology itself—making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, or, in other language, making non-Western societies legible to Westerners, either for purposes of governance, or, in more contemporary contexts, to create sustainable biomedical, historical, or environmental interventions. Indeed, a number of the pieces in this issue interrogate the following questions: What kinds of knowledge does collaboration produce? How is expertise defined and made legible to various stakeholders? Who is foregrounded and what is erased in the processes of translation that must accompany collective knowledge production? What kinds of projects do these processes serve? Emily Yates-Doerr offers the framework of “careful equivocation” in her exploration of global health projects in highland Guatemala. Her article, “Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with Careful Equivocation,” draws from Marilyn Strathern's elaboration of the “awkward collaboration” between feminism and anthropology to lay a foundation for the questions that not only underlie the event I discuss above but also unsettle anthropological and practical binaries more generally. Yates-Doerr's contention is that attending to the differences that shaped her interactions with scientists and health practitioners in Guatemala can help us to understand how the methods, interests, and goals of epidemiologists, anthropologists, and a Mam–Spanish translator converge and diverge. By thinking through “careful equivocation” rather than collaborative unity, she argues, we recognize that the terms we use for collaboration often have different valences for different collaborators, valences that are rooted in histories of inequality. Yates-Doerr wants us to think about the way translation has the effect of erasing the nondominant, therefore jettisoning our attempts to control misunderstanding. “Co-laboring,” she argues, reveals the ways “some methods and languages come to dominate others even as they might seem to be unified,” and thus can identify divisions that might otherwise be papered over in the attempt to create stability. She urges us to attend to what our terms mean and why we use them, and argues that this constitutes “a practice of care work,” with caring here meant to both constitute and transform the field. María Luz García's article, “Translated Justice? The Ixil Maya and the 2013 Trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt for Genocide in Guatemala,” also addresses issues related to translation in her exploration of the role of language in the constitution and reproduction of inequalities in Guatemala. García focuses on the Ixil Maya who testified in the Ríos Montt genocide trial. While their testimonies—which involved detailed discussions of acts of torture during the decades-long war against indigenous people in Guatemala—positioned them as brave heroes, they were also rooted in divergent forms of speech and expression that are connected to different identities and ways of expressing and understanding history. These differences resulted in what many identified as “miscommunications.” However, she argues that the issues that arose with Ixil Maya testimonies were not simply problems of translation or communication, but instead represented profound differences in subject positions read through the relationships between language and culture. The linguistic-discursive space of the courtroom, she argues, did not constitute a shared epistemology; it excluded Ixil modes of communication, and therefore marginalized the speakers themselves, who were silenced in various ways. The discursive expectations in the courtroom that García outlines are further examples of how translation marginalizes and erases nondominant languages and forms of expression. They also obscured the ways Ixil attempted to contest the systems of power that suffuse both the courtroom and their lives outside of it. Within solidarity work, García concludes, we must learn to listen differently. Maximilian Viatori's article also explores public testimonies of expert witnesses. In “Uncertain Risks: Salmon Science, Harm, and Ignorance in Canada,” he investigates the 2009 Canadian federal commission held to interrogate the drastic decline of sockeye salmon returning to British Colombia's Fraser River. This commission was intended to elicit expert assessment of the problem that would serve as the foundation for new policy. However, Viatori argues, “neoliberalized approaches to evaluating harm and risk enable the production of uncertainty as a political strategy for blocking regulation and letting markets solve ecological crises.” He shows how translating the unknown into the known is a process of “converting future uncertainties into risks” that can then be “tamed” through a calculation of probability. During the hearings, however, probability-based scientific assessments of uncertainty were at odds with standards of proof desired by government and industry, and thus scientific uncertainty was framed as ignorance. Through his analysis of these processes, Viatori demonstrates that contemporary debates about risk and uncertainty are not just the domain of scientists but also negotiated publicly among scientists, bureaucrats, activists, and others who hold competing assessments of harm and different visions for the future. The article, therefore, raises the following questions: How is knowledge circulated, and by whom? How do experts constitute authority? And how do competing frames of reference and notions of authority influence the development of ecological policy and ideas about environmental harm? Matthew Wolf-Meyer's article, “‘Human Nature’ and the Biology of Everyday Life,” opens a different vantage point through which to think about competing claims, this time in relation to biological and cultural approaches to human sleep patterns. Wolf-Meyer uses the phrase “biology of everyday life” to conceptualize the relations among behavioral expectations, cultural norms, and biological plasticity. His ethnographic and archival research on human sleep patterns reaffirms that the expression of sleep needs varies within and between societies. This leads him to argue that patterns of human sleep are shaped not by biological needs but by cultural norms, and that these are themselves shaped by the institutions and infrastructures that constitute everyday life. Drawing from the work of laboratory scientists, epigeneticists, social theorists, and ethnographers, and building from the early Marcel Mauss essay that made a case for the co-constitution of biology and culture, Wolf-Meyer positions scientific knowledge alongside other forms of knowing bodies and the worlds they inhabit, and thus also interrogates the history of scientific and medical traditions in their constitution of this knowledge. “The Powers in PowerPoint: Embedded Authorities, Documentary Tastes, and Institutional (Second) Orders in Corporate Korea” by Michael Prentice continues our attention on expertise and authority in this issue. Prentice explores the use of PowerPoint among corporate workers in South Korean office spaces. He asks: What does a PowerPoint presentation say not only about the institution but about the individuals who create it? How do institutional actors embed sociality into the material mechanisms they produce? Prentice shows that workers spend hours crafting and recrafting presentations, but that these presentations often go unused. He documents a tension, therefore, between workers’ production of documents—intended to demonstrate organizational knowledge and thus align with institutional purposes—and the need to cater these documents to the individual tastes of superiors. The work embodied within PowerPoint presentations is thus revealed as a process that cements the value of attention to hierarchies and relationships with others, even more so than it is to further the work of the organization. He argues, “Navigating the politics of the Korean office means learning to properly embed the authority of others in documents and make one's contribution known in subtle ways.” Stephen J. Lycett and James D. Keyser's article, “Time's Arrow: Toward a Social History of Crow Biographic Art Using Seriation and Multivariate Statistics,” uses quantitative scientific techniques (as well as a kind of multimodal framework) to create a chronology of biographic artworks produced by Crow warriors during the nineteenth century. They argue that these artworks must be seen as historical documents, not just as narratives of important events in individuals’ lives. But to be social histories, they must be connected with other artworks over time. Lycett and Keyser thus build a chronological framework through seriation and statistical analysis in order to reveal broader narrative frames as well as stylistic changes over the nineteenth century. The presence and absence (and transformation) of various stylistic features within the artworks is meant to broaden our understanding of the relationships between artistic production, community formation, and action over time. These artworks are not merely “picture writing,” they argue, but provide insights into the changing social context of the production of narrative through animated images. In “Creating Nature in the Yucatan Peninsula: Social Inequality and the Production of Eco-Archaeological Parks,” Sarah Kurnick uses a relational analysis of space in order to think about the production of touristic archaeological spaces in connection to the historical production of nature and wilderness. Her examination of two contrasting sites raises a number of questions: What are the relationships between “nature” and control? What are the relationships between the production of natural spaces (“nature”) and political, social, and economic inequality? How might the designation of certain spaces as “nature” or “wilderness” both exacerbate these forms of inequality and provide resources for indigenous populations to contest them? Ultimately, Kurnick is interested in whether archaeological tourism can create spaces through which indigenous people develop forms of self-determination and in the extent to which community-based archaeology can be a way to decolonize anthropological practice. Anouk de Koning and Anick Vollebergh's article is also concerned with the relational construction of space. In “Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe,” they explore the iconization of particular ethnically diverse neighborhoods within Europe, focusing on Antwerp and Amsterdam. They show how racialized public discourses shape the lives of residents in these sites, using the notion of “ordinary iconic figures”—like “Moroccan youth”—to understand the connections between the local and the national, themselves framed through and within a context of intensified immigration and ethnic diversity. By asking how inequalities limned within public discourses shape the everyday lives of those they reference, de Koning and Vollebergh reveal how battles over who can rightfully belong to the nation come to matter within people's perceptions of themselves and others. Ultimately, they argue that these iconic figures haunt relations among people in these urban spaces, creating deeply felt (and anxious) narratives about the future of national society. This issue also features our year-in-review articles—authored by Joseph Sung-Yul Park, Melanie Martin, Kristin Doughty, and Steve Kosiba—which outline the trends within linguistic, biological, sociocultural, and archaeological anthropology in 2018. We are also thrilled to present a Vital Topics Forum organized by Deborah A. Bolnick, Rick W. A. Smith, and Agustín Fuentes. This forum, “How Academic Diversity Is Transforming Scientific Knowledge in Biological Anthropology,” emerged from a panel at the 2017 AAPA meetings, and was elaborated for the journal. In it, contributors reflect on the ways increased representation of historically marginalized groups in science produces significant and critically important intellectual shifts, generates innovative theoretical perspectives, and creates new methodological and ethical imperatives. Our World Anthropologies section this issue focuses on epistemological hierarchies and interrogates the limits and possibilities of decolonizing knowledge production. Beng-Lan Goh's exploration of inter-Asia dialogues and interculturalism is followed by insightful commentaries by Hyang Jin Jung, John Gledhill, Shu-min Huang, Andre Gingrich, and Hylton White, all of whom contend with the pluriverse of anthropological theory and practice. We also feature a film review section on Jane in the Multimodal Anthropologies section, as well as an essay (which is also a provocation) by Stephanie Takaragawa, Trudi Lynn Smith, Kate Hennessy, Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Jenny Chio, Coleman Nye, and Shalini Shankar called “Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal,” originally presented as a panel during the 2018 AAA meetings in San Jose. Within the Public Anthropologies section, housed as usual on our website (http://www.americananthropologist.org), we feature a new addition to the “De-Provincializing Development” series examining the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Jessica Cattelino explores SDG #6, “Water and Sanitation,” thinking through the inequalities that are reproduced—in this case, around gender—through the focus on “local communities” as primary stakeholders. Also on the website is the latest episode of our podcast, Anthropological Airwaves, addressing anthropology and humanitarianism. And we are excited to include a “From the Archives” collection about temporality and the future, coordinated and interpreted by Nandita Badami, a graduate student at UC Irvine. As always, we are pleased to publish a wide range of book reviews, and this issue ends with an obituary of Paula G. Rubel (1933–2018), penned by Lesley A. Sharp.

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