Metaphors and practices of translation in anglophone anthropology

Abstract

This article argues that while translation as a metaphor was prominent in anglophone anthropology for most of the second half of the 20th century, the practices of interlingual translation that are often central to the production and circulation of disciplinary knowledge have tended to attract much less attention. The first main section begins by briefly reviewing debates about the idea that anthropology crucially involves ‘the translation of culture’ or ‘cultural translation’. This use of translation as a metaphor to characterize the discipline emerged within both UK and US anthropology in the 1950s, but subsequently became subject to sustained criticism. The focus of the article then shifts in the second and third sections to practices of translation in, respectively, anthropological fieldwork and the international circulation of anthropological texts. More specifically, it examines the difficulties associated with interlingual translation in fieldwork and ethnographic writing; the hidden or invisible ‘translation work’ undertaken in the past by the assistants and spouses of ethnographers; and the translation of anthropological work into other languages. The article concludes by calling on more anthropologists to publish detailed accounts of their own translation practices, arguing that in so doing they will be able to draw on valuable historical antecedents from within the discipline, important collections of anthropological reflections on translation that have appeared over the past 30 years, as well as on relevant work by translation studies scholars and sociologists of translation.