Ethnographic Encounters

Ethnographic Encounters: The Processes of Cultural Translation Shirley Ann Jordan School of Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP This paper explores some of the ways in which the contested concept of cultural translation has been interpreted in anthropology. It describes what cultural translation now involves for practitioners who research and teach within interdisciplinaryframeworks – particularly those frameworks constituted by the interface between anthropology and modern language learning. A variety of ethnographic encounters are examined, ranging from ethnography in fieldwork abroad to home and auto-ethnography. These encounters are presented as contexts in which students of modern languages can explore and experiment with the dynamics of cultural translation. Ce papier examine diverses rencontres éthnographiques afin d’explorer une tâche fondamentale mais controversée de l’anthropologue: la ‘traduction culturelle’. Il établit ce qu’implique actuellement ce concept pour ceux qui décrivent leurs enquêtes de terrain, et notamment pour ceux qui pratiquent l’éthnographie dans un contexte interdisciplinaire rassemblant l’anthropologie et l’étude des langues modernes.

Introduction This article takes as axiomatic the premise that, increasingly, we are all living in translated worlds1 and that language learning should provide frameworks to help us negotiate relations within them. My purpose is to reaffirm the importance of ethnographic encounters for language students and to examine some of the things that happen in them. I do not intend to cover systematically what various projects introducing ethnography to language learners look like, or how they work and would refer the reader interested in this level of detail to other sources.2 Instead I will focus on issues surrounding the fuzzy and contested concept of cultural translation and on related debates about how and where cultural translation might best be done. Ethnography is all about encounters and throughout the ethnographic process from fieldwork to text there are a myriad of small, inter-linked acts of translation. In Figure 1, journey 1 represents ethnographic encounters in the field. This is where experiential learning about self and other gets done, where meanings are tried out, where experience slowly becomes understanding and where encounters and fieldnotes are, in the best cases, constellated with minor epiphanies of the type: ‘So this is what it/he/she/they mean(s)!’ Journey 2 involves a sustained attempt to translate field experiences and findings (usually) into text for people who were not there, bridging as well and as reflexively as possible the gaps between presence and absence, between languages, understandings of the world, behaviours and beliefs. Journey 3 is made up of these encounters with an encounter undertaken by readers of ethnography – encoun-

1470-8477/02/02 0096-15 $20.00/0 Language and Intercultural Communication

96

©2002 S.A. Jordan Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002

Ethnographic Encounters

97

ters which within the academic world lead to critical debate about what ethnography should be and do. To represent these three journeys properly we should collapse the sides of the triangle in upon each other to form a palimpsest with 1 folded under 2 folded under 3, since all journeys remain present and reflect one upon the other but, for now, the triangle serves my purpose. In the last two decades debate within anthropology has been intensively focused on issues of power and authority, representation and rhetoric, and journeys 2 and 3 have been hogging the limelight. In this paper I wish particularly to ponder once more on translation as it happens within the primary journey, journey 1.

Figure 1 Ethnography from fieldwork to text

Defining Cultural Translation ‘Cultural translation’ is one of the many terms in anthropology that have become so thick with inappropriate and incriminating meanings that we have to slough off these layers like dead skin every time we want to use them. I should probably not proceed, therefore, without subjecting it to a little terminological exfoliation. I will draw on two essays by anthropologists which deal explicitly with the subject of cultural translation before offering my own – admittedly very broad – working definition and going on to look at a small number of examples of it in action. The first essay, Asad’s (1986) ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’ provides a useful overview of the various interpretations of the concept since the mid-20th century. The second, the more recent and radical of the essays which seeks to sound the death knell of the concept as a

98

Language and Intercultural Communication

working premiss, is Ingold’s (1994) ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous World’. For Asad (1986: 156), the job of cultural translation remains inherent in anthropological practice and he seeks not to negate it but to ‘make it more coherent’ . He examines Lienhardt’s uncomfortably pre-post-colonial but fundamentally solid assessment that the challenge faced by the anthropologist in describing ‘how members of a remote tribe think’ is ‘largely one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own’ (p. 142). He also presents Leach’s stimulating suggestion that ‘social anthropologists are engaged in establishing a methodology for the translation of cultural language’ (p. 142). Asad is, of course, aware that translation is a process shot through with historically situated power dynamics and that most cultural translations continue to be conveyed in powerful western languages and many in authoritative academic discourses. He spends much of his essay taking Gellner to task for his notion of translation as an elucidation – even a corrective – of the original. The nub of his attack reads thus: The privileged position that Gellner accords himself for decoding the real meaning of what the Berbers say (regardless of what they think they say) can be maintained only by someone who supposes that translating other cultures is essentially a matter of matching written sentences in two languages, such that the second set of sentences becomes the ‘real meaning’ of the first – an operation the anthropologist alone controls, from field notebook to printed ethnography. In other words, it is the privileged position of someone who does not, and can afford not to, engage in a genuine dialogue with those he or she once lived with and now writes about’. (p. 155) It is the idea of ‘affording not to’ which resonates with such intensity today, for none of us can afford not to engage in genuine dialogue. It is not the polished, coherent end product of a translation exercise that is important to Asad so much as the many small dialogic processes of translation which lead up to it, for ‘the anthropologist’s translation is not merely a matter of matching sentences in the abstract, but of learning to live another form of life and speak another kind of language’ (p. 149). To produce cultural translation is not a question of replacing text with text (although this may well form part of the endeavour) but of co-creating text, of producing a written version of a lived reality, and it is in this sense that it can be powerfully transformative of those who take part. Ingold, in his essay on translation, takes notions which have already been problematised in anthropology and seeks to discredit them definitively. His argument is designed to censure the very concept of culture and to debunk the idea of ‘cultural translation’ which he believes to be invidious and epistemologically wrong-headed. As he puts it: 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. (1994: 229) The idea of a world consisting of bounded, homogeneous cultural groups is, he

Ethnographic Encounters

99

claims, an alienating anthropological invention. Boundaries are unhelpful and deceptive because they push difference to the periphery and create artificial uniformity within a category, and boundaries were not always already there but were erected by anthropologists who have persisted, damagingly, in stressing discontinuity, contrast and hierarchical difference. People did not know they were from a culture until (western) anthropologists told them so, and these same anthropologists who have wielded the concept of culture have seen themselves as above it. They have lorded it in a specular relationship with their ‘subjects’ whom they have seen as caught fast in traditionalpatterns of belief and practice. To Ingold, it is this artificial idea of discontinuous bounded groups which generated the equally artificial need to translate between them and all this translation was taking place at the expense of what he calls ‘the experiential continuity of being-in-the-world’ (p. 230). For the world, he contends, is in reality a continuous world. Thus the familiar tropes within anthropology which stress borders, boundaries and discontinuities must be replaced with others conveying relatedness and unboundedness so that: ‘The category we […] expands indefinitely outwards from the centre where I stand to embrace others, along the lines of social relationships, rather than rebounding inwards on myself, from an exterior opposition with them‘ (p. 228). This is a very laudable aspiration and forging new metaphors can be instrumental in changing perceptions and inflecting interactions. Clifford’s (1992, 1997) acknowledgement of flux and ‘betweenness’ rather than fixity in his redefinition of culture as ‘travel’ or Street’s (1993) ‘Culture is a verb’ are excellent examples. Still more far-reaching for our understanding of intercultural relations is Bhabha’s (1995) ‘Third Space’ concept to which I shall later turn. But I do need to take issue with Ingold’s development of the ‘continuous world’ concept on three scores. First, his essay overlooks the fact that far from perceiving themselves to be ‘above culture’ today’s anthropologists are studiously keen to illustrate how their own cultural beings inflect field practices and findings. Ingold overlooks the empathy and the humility that positively radiate out of some contemporary attempts at cultural translation, and does not give any concrete indication of how adopting the trope of the ‘continuous world’ furthers current practices of conducting and writing about ethnographic encounters. Indeed, much contemporary ethnographic writing already shares his insistence that ‘views of the world’ be replaced with ‘views in the world’ and that ‘modes of construction’ be replaced with ‘modes of engagement’ (p. 224). Second, it is not anthropologists who must take sole responsibility for erecting conceptual boundaries and perceiving reality within insider/outsider, them/us patterns; indeed, to suggest this at all could be construed as a miscalculation as to the sphere of influence of the discipline. Children in playgrounds who have never heard of anthropology do it. Everywhere over the world where resources are tight and people are in competition for them, people do it. And who forgot, during this last year, to tell groups within the multicultural communities of Bradford and Oldham (the scenes of violent racial unrest) that they were living in a continuous world? Time and again studies of the changing face of Europe point out that there are likely to be more, not fewer, boundaries erected as the new spatial, political and economic entity evolves, and this prediction can be extended to the global scale. The truth is that people are groupers. They do parcel

100

Language and Intercultural Communication

themselves into bounded groups. They do define themselves, at least in part, through contrast – through saying what they are not. Third, nowhere in his essay does Ingold analyse translation as a linguistic activity. His failure to engage with this central dimension of the processes – the dimension upon which, arguably, all else depends – allows us to highlight a common lack in many ethnographic writings about cultural translation. Although contemporary anthropology is only too keenly aware that it is language-bound, its examination of linguistic issues is sporadic and fragmented. Much critical attention is lavished upon the politics of writing and the imperative to remain alert to the invidious power of words. There are, as Clifford (1997: 39) reminds us: ‘no neutral, uncontaminated terms or concepts’, only ‘compromised, historically encumbered tools’. We might expect a text such as Clifford’s Routes (1997), which takes the companions travel and translation as dominant themes of the late 1990s, to enter linguistic terrain and the author does stress the knotty complexity as well as the urgency of translation for a world beset by transcultural predicaments. On the whole, however, like Ingold he evades the linguistic. On the two occasions in this very rich text upon which he defines what he understands by translation it is clear that he is focusing on the global communicative scope, across boundaries, of what he calls ‘translation terms’. These are ‘[words] of apparently general application used for comparison in a strategic and contingent way’ such as the ‘travel’ which he prefers to ‘displacement’, ‘nomadism’, ‘pilgrimage’ or ‘migration’ (1997: 39) and so on. Clifford’s main aim is to point out that because some of the layers of meaning within the term ‘travel’ call to mind issues of ‘class, gender, race, and a certain literariness’ (p. 39) it carries with it an automatic reminder of the problems of translation. Another approach to language within anthropology is illustrated by a key debate in the discipline, a debate introduced by Ingold with the assertion that: ‘When it comes to language and culture, it seems that anthropologists will have to go back to the drawing board’ (Ingold, 1996: 153). The proposed motion, ‘Language is the essence of culture’, is preoccupied, above all, with questioning the enduring assumption that culture comes into being only through language. This is a chicken and egg dance around Wittgenstein’s thesis that the world is a linguistic invention. It is about the insoluble issue of precedence, about whether ‘language calls into being the cultural worlds in which people live’ or whether these worlds take shape and gain meaning through ‘a cognitive engagement that precedes language, and to which language gives no more than superficial and incomplete expression’ (p. 149). The argument is conducted on an abstract level. It is an ontological one and respective positions are not backed up by empirical evidence. It does not advance our understanding by examining praxis. It does not, in other words, take us very far towards a heightened understanding of language in, and from, the field. There are, nevertheless, approaches which do inject into the ethnographic endeavour a more intensive focus on issues of how informants speak their worlds and perform their identities through language, and educators involved in the teaching of language and culture have drawn upon these. They include linguistic anthropology (e.g. Duranti, 1997; Holland & Quinn, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the related fields of interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication (e.g. Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Gumperz, 1982; Gumperz &

Ethnographic Encounters

101

Hymes, 1972; Saville-Troike, 1982). They involve the examination of speech events (Hymes, 1966, 1972, 1974) and of communicative styles and speech communities (Gumperz, 1968). They also include ethnosemantics, a linguistically oriented approach to ethnographic interviewing which involves the study of key words used by informants to talk about their worlds (Agar, 1991; Spradley, 1979). Roberts et al. (2000) contains a detailed account of how such approaches have been drawn on within ethnography for language learners. I shall now provide my own working definition of cultural translation within ethnography. I use translation with the breadth its etymology suggests. I mean everything that goes into committed acts of understanding and of clear and determined telling. Cultural translation is a holistic process of provisional sense making. It implies trying to render accessible and comprehensible, first to the self and then to others, one’s experience of aspects of ways of life – either one’s own life made strange, or lives which are different from one’s own. We are constantly involved in translating self to other and other to self; it is, fundamentally, how we communicate but, contrary to what Ingold suggests in his essay on translation, no darkly suspicious project of appropriation need lie behind this. It need not involve entrapping the other in our own webs of meaning, or being ourselves entrapped in theirs, but consciously, deliberately, weaving something fresh together in what is currently being referred to, after Homi Bhabha (1995) as the ‘Third Space’. I would like to linger for a moment on the Third Space, as one of the most richly enabling spatial metaphors inflecting contemporary practice in anthropology – and particularly as one which is immensely fertile as far as cultural translation and language are concerned. Straddling travel and boundary tropes and evoking new practices of mobility and displacement the notion of the Third Space reconceptualises the field as well as suggesting what happens between people within it. It reminds us that while cognitive and affective self-displacement are necessities for cultural translation, physical displacement may be less so; time–space compression, global mobility and communication technologies mean that sites of otherness are in the path of the everyday self which passes through them and that the field is everywhere. In other words, the Third Space notion slows us down and highlights the culturally ambivalent arenas on and around our doorsteps. It is, therefore, especially good in terms of addressing questions such as the following, posed by Rapport (2000: 73) in a recent study of narrative as fieldwork technique: ‘So: what of the practice of anthropological fieldwork in a world in motion? When “there” is not a place?’. It encapsulates and caters for the ‘open-ended, somehow “placeless” nature of much contemporary fieldwork’ (Norman, 2000: 120). Referring to ‘space’ as opposed to ‘place’ not only delineates a notional terrain, but encompasses ideas of what might happen within it in terms of self-other relations and the production of meaning. The Third Space is what we might call an everyday space apart, an interstitial space which ‘innovates and interrupts the performance of the present’ (Bhabha, 1994: 7). It is a highly reflexive and constructive breathing space – a space for reflection on intercultural issues in need of resolution, on political issues concerning dominance and inequality. It is also the creative, dynamic space of action and interaction, the space for negotiating worlds through words. It is an ethical space, demanding self-knowledge,

102

Language and Intercultural Communication

clear-sightedness, a readiness to listen and a preparedness to change. It is not always already there like some parallel dimension into which we may inadvertently wander; the conditions for its existence are ever present but its main characteristic is that it is co-created through acts of will. It springs from a desire to better understand what happens when cultural ‘others’ meet. Third Space practices are not new; we engage in them routinely in everyday interaction. As Hammersley (1991: 2) suggests when he comments that ethnographic methods are ‘not far removed from the sort of approach we all use in everyday life to make sense of our surroundings’ we are all unconscious ethnographers. Conscious ethnographic practice, however, brings Third Space issues to the surface of our thought and action, making us more responsive and reflexive about their call for empathy and tolerance of difference. In short, Third Space practices are cognitive, affective and ethical.3 Bartlett (2001) in ‘Use the Road: The Appropriacy of Appropriation’ shows what can happen when researchers working in the emerging Modern Languages tradition of anthropological studies spend some time at Ingold’s (1996: 153) ‘drawing board’ . Bartlett’s essay demonstrates the politics of the Third Space concept in action through a study of his work as an English teacher among groups of Makushi Amerindian L2 learners in Guyana. He outlines how commercial and political negotiations require increased contact between these groups and English-speaking Coastlanders and points out that wider use of English is needed to ward against ‘the immense power of translation [being] concentrated in the hands of a few intermediaries’ (p. 24). Bartlett’s argument is that minority groups can challenge hegemony through appropriating the language systems of dominant groups. He gives a linguistic gloss to Habermas’s notion of appropriation and combines this with Bhabha’s (1994: 15) notion of politics as performativity to explore language as it is used during ‘everyday encounters with the system’ (p. 25). There emerge from his study directions for what he calls ‘an emancipatory ELT’, including the investigation of ways in which dominated groups may develop the competence required to ‘challenge presupposed subject positions within the “discourse location” of their routine practice’ (p. 26). This competence he defines as ‘the competence to be thrust into cultural interstices linguistically armed and culturally knowledgeable‘ (p. 30). His ‘Collaborative Pedagogy of the Third Space’ (p. 35), a pedagogy devised pragmatically with community leaders to facilitate the creative appropriation of English in real-life, everyday encounters, is a good concrete example of what Third Space language politics might mean. Returning briefly to Ingold to conclude this section of my argument, I would like to highlight one aspect of his essay which seems to me to be just right and to tell us something instructive about Third Space practices within ethnographic encounters. I refer to his emphasis on what he calls ‘the relational baseline’ (Ingold, 1994: 223). For me, forging this ‘relational baseline’ is the best way to begin translating meaning from the inside. It is what experiential learning is all about and it is why the ‘participant’ in ‘participant observation’ should be stressed. It is to do with getting one’s hands dirty together, sharing the same food, smelling the same smells, walking the same paths, catching the same buses, doing the same things. It is pre-verbal, sensory, sometimes visceral stuff, very particular and very micro, that defines the relational baseline, and all attempts at

Ethnographic Encounters

103

communication, understanding, meaning-making and translation will benefit if they are built on this. Clifford (1983: 119) makes this point in an essay on ethnographic authority which stresses that: ‘participant observation obliges its practitioners to experience, at a bodily as well as intellectual level, the vicissitudes of translation’. Coffey (1999: 131) likewise refers to the importance of sensory experience when she comments that ‘Fieldwork involves placing our physical, embodied selves among the lives, selves and bodies of others’. Indeed, Coffey suggests fieldwork should be rethought so that fuller account is taken of ‘[its] physicality […] and the embodiedness of the fieldworker […] “I was there” evokes physical as well as mental meaning and presence’ (p. 131). Cultural translation, I would therefore contend, is translation with the whole person. The following is a succinct list of what its practitioners may aspire to. Cultural translation within ethnographic encounters: • is heuristic, extended and multi-level; • does not involve translating a given text, but creating that text and progressively translating as one goes along; • uncovers the processes of meaning-making within the ‘Third Space’; • dramatises conflicts, tensions and resolutions; • shows translation getting done; • does not present a translation without a self-reflexive infrastructure; • may have inspirational flashes but is not uniformly smooth and polished; • is porous, fragmentary, ragged and open-ended; • is aware of the history, politics and power dynamics within which it is taking place.

Cultural Translation in the Field I wish now to illustrate the type of cultural translation within contemporary ethnography which we can most usefully present as a working model to undergraduate students of foreign languages on periods of residence abroad. I am going to draw concrete examples from just one recent text, Bradburd’s (1998) Being There: The Necessity of Fieldwork. It is an account of getting to know and trying to describe the Komachi nomads of southern Iran through living with them and participating in their migrations. I have chosen it because part of its purpose is systematically to demonstrate that extended fieldwork is the terrain in which cultural translation can best be done. Bradburd explains the motivation behind his book in the following way: Being There […] is intended to stress the importance of a long-term, cumulative encounter. One aspect of my annoyance at postmodernist criticism of fieldwork and ethnography is that it has, rightly or wrongly, served to validate non-anthropological ‘multicultural’ study based on flying visits, brief encounters, and highly selective readings. I do not see this as an effective way of advancing knowledge or understanding’. (p. 173) Bradburd is thus pitting a traditional Malinowskian model of deep and focused understanding acquired over time against what he sees as less authentic, alternative Third Space investigations generated by different constraints, new patterns of mobility and new communication devices and strategies. One may

104

Language and Intercultural Communication

take issue with his ‘either/or’ position; indeed, seeking to invalidate the latter range of encounters and dismissing any possibility of their producing cultural learning or enhanced understanding seems rather radical. In a world where short or flying visits are more common than year-long sojourns, a world increasingly characterised by cultural brassage, brief encounters need to be understood, theorised and built upon rather than discounted. Bradburd’s model does, however, remain as a resistant, baseline model. It keeps us grounded in one ideal – if not always practicable – framework of practice and it remains the most appropriate ‘fit’ for students of language and culture who are learning, during periods of residence abroad, what processes of cultural translation involve. As one of these students comments in an echo of Bradburd: ‘the conclusions that you come up with (in) ethnography, you can’t come up with them if you’ve just seen it once. So you need to spend a hell of a long time actually looking at it’ (Roberts et al., 2000: 225). Bradburd’s project is not a systematic, overarching attempt to describe Komachi culture in its entirety, but is rather episodic and anecdotal, focusing on the difficulties or insights presented by specific encounters, which are related in chronological order. Each aspect of Komachi belief or behaviour he translates for us stresses the heuristic, cumulative process of arriving at understanding over time, the misunderstandings which participants have to unravel, the loose ends of things still not fully understood and the sheer complexity of translation between parties involved. For example, there are challenges in coming to understand the layers of information conveyed by cover terms. One morning visiting a neighbouring tent Bradburd is alarmed to be told that a young Komachi woman has ‘gone mad’ but he needs to learn a great deal in order to understand and then convey what that madness, referred to as ‘eshk‘, meant (pp. 133–5). Over time, he comes to an understanding that it is a kind of yearning, crazy romantic desire – very real but also rendered public in a most theatrical way and strategically used by young men and women to exert a degree of control over who their marriage partners are. ‘Eshk‘ is contrasted with the companionable, comfortable affection which is ‘dust‘ and the situated meanings of both terms become clear only as they are tracked through a variety of contexts. Language students who have undertaken fieldwork have commented on how different this layered translation over time is from the rapidly conducted textual translation of the classroom. Christiane, a student returning from ‘living the ethnographic life’ (Rose, 1990) during a period of fieldwork abroad, commented: ‘I would tend to use the dictionary’s interpretation or meaning of certain words and OK that’s very interesting but what is even more interesting is how people see that word, rather than what the dictionary says’ (Roberts et al., 2000: 227). Students are encouraged to work creatively and sensitively with the verbatim data they record and to consider approaches which may lead to enhanced understanding. Ethnosemantic work on drawing out rich words and on eliciting the key categories informants use in order to make sense of their cultural worlds provides examples of how this can be achieved. Thus Sandra, a student attempting to understand the meanings embedded in and created by the Sevillanas dance, spent a lot of time attempting to come to grips with the term ‘gracia‘ which was often applied to certain dancers. This was heavy with layers of significance

Ethnographic Encounters

105

and teasing out its nuances as it was used in various contexts became a large part of her project (Roberts et al., 2000: 232). There are some conceptual challenges which are more problematic, such as Bradburd’s attempt to grasp the complexity of Komachi decision-making processes. The way they decided to move camp was based on principles at the opposite end of the planning spectrum from that at which Bradburd routinely operated. He had assumed moving would be an ‘active’ choice, predicated on ‘positive criteria’ whereas in fact the Komachi strategy was simply to sit tight until options were so reduced that ‘the only possible time or way emerged’ (pp. 42–3). This foxes and frustrates Bradburd and it is some time before he can explain satisfactorily to himself the elusive process and the allusive way his hosts referred to it. Giving accounts of the self and one’s home world present similar challenges of cultural translation, as Bradburd discovers when he tries to respond to a question about whether wheat is grown in America. The exchange reveals another impasse of translation for the Komachi ‘had never seen vast, continuous stands of any vegetation’ (p. 47) and simply could not understand. Similarly, Bradburd never quite got his hosts to comprehend what he and his wife did for a living. When the couple overheard how the Komachi described them to others they heard things like: ‘They live in a tent; they travel around; they ask questions like, “Who lives in this tent?” or “Who was your grandfather?”; they are on a tafrih [roughly, a pleasure trip to the country]’ (p. 154). Processes of cultural translation in the field also have tangible and immediate consequences since they often involve overcoming potentially damaging mismatches of frame in order to maintain harmonious relations. Patterns of behaviour stemming from very different understandings of the meaning and value of solitude resulted in a number of face-threatening incidents between the Bradburds and their hosts. Whereas the former prized their ‘own space’, the virtue of togetherness was so integral to Komachi understandings of society that they persisted in referring to the couple as ‘deltang‘ (homesick) (p. 130) and sent over company the minute one or the other was left alone. Even to sit apart and refuse tea while others were drinking was enormously offensive, as Bradburd discovered to his cost. It was interpreted as a sign of anger and a threat to the social fabric (p. 94). There were many other cumulative acts of cultural translation which, small though they may appear, made a very real contribution to the satisfactory co-existence of people from different worlds. For instance, it was only once Bradburd had learned the meaning of ‘meat’ to the Komachi that he could form strategies to relieve them of the obligation to feed it to him and to relieve himself of the obligation to eat so much of it (pp. 86–9). For Bradburd, then, fieldwork is precious precisely because ‘it [brings] into sharp focus the difficulties inherent in making apparently easy translations, showing why it is sometimes difficult to securely reach common understandings even on what seem simple, descriptive points’ (p. 45).

Home and Away Monographs like Bradburd’s Being There are, as I have suggested, testimony to the continued importance of the classic Malinowskian ethnographic ‘situation’ but as I have also suggested there are many other kinds of ethnographic encoun-

106

Language and Intercultural Communication

ter going on at the start of the 21st century. Embarking upon fieldwork has never been such a rich proposition for the contours of ethnographic encounters are constantly evolving, providing an inviting set of experimental frameworks for us to investigate with our students. There are numerous studies of small groups, defined perhaps by a common activity such as Edelman’s (1994) shunters in a Swedish railway yard or Palisson’s (1994) Icelandic skippers whose words and worlds are translated for us in Beyond Boundaries, the collection where Ingold’s essay on translation is to be found. Encounters with aspects of home cultures, historically neglected in anthropology, are increasingly popular and available. Augé’s (1986) recently republished examination of métro travel in his native Paris involves the kind of deliberate, sustained act of ‘making strange’ I encourage my students to perform. Recently an ethnography of an Australian bar in the same city was published (Conord et al., 1999) which has a number of insights about the nocturnal practices of groups of young people and which provides a useful extension to the pub observation task I have often got students to do as a first ‘taster’ of participant observation. Declerck’s troubling Les Naufragés (2001), a product of his fieldwork amongst the tramps of Paris, studies from the inside the question of extreme social exclusion and necessitated some particularly demanding – even dangerous – ethnographic encounters of the kind I spend ages persuading my students not to undertake. There are also some bottom-up rather than top-down ethnographic encounters taking place (in other words the ethnographer gaining access to a milieu of privilege and power). Le Wita’s (1994) study of the usually very private family networks of France’s haute bourgeoisie is just one example. Finally, ethnographic encounters with the self constitute an interesting strand of contemporary experimental practice which borders, in some instances, on catharsis and therapy (Ellis & Bochner, 1996). Cultural translation, then, may now focus on the issues which stem from translating self and home to other and elsewhere. Both home ethnography and auto-ethnography can produce Third Space processes and opportunities for cultural translation which students can explore when they are not conducting fieldwork in (literally) foreign places. As Reed-Danahay (1997: 123–4) suggests, ‘The growth of interest in home or native anthropology represents a questioning of the dominant thinking in anthropology that you must leave home to do good ethnography’. Language students can usefully see the home as field and conduct a ‘home ethnographic project’ as a way of learning about the dynamics of ethnographic research before their period of residence abroad (Roberts et al., 2000: 185–209). The latest batch of student home ethnographic projects I have received give a flavour of the variety of home fieldwork. Patsy investigates how a family group of six grown-up sons and a father keep on reconstructing themselves as a family through family narrative and jokes. Joanne explores how locals in a local pub in West Sussex act out and talk about their shared identity as ‘locals’. Elisa attempts to translate something of what it feels like to be a member of a group of fox hunters in Cornwall and explores aspects of the group’s discourse. Lois makes strange an unexpected place by investigating the ‘bonding’ activities which take place between young women in ladies’ toilets. These she describes as gendered rituals, seen by her young female informants as an essential part of ‘a girl’s night

Ethnographic Encounters

107

out’. Short and tentative they may be but each of these projects is a valuable record of the student’s early attempts to get an insider feel for other lives and to grapple with the issues involved in translating cultures. As educators, we can also draw on and experiment with the whole spectrum of auto-ethnography. It reinforces the importance of starting with the self, making strange of one’s own practices and learning to articulate them afresh from another, more reflexive, stance. Undertaking ethnographic fieldwork makes language students self-conscious in a positive sense, open to self-scrutiny and as exploratory about themselves as they are curious about others and borrowing from auto-ethnography gives frameworks within which this curiosity can be exercised. Auto-ethnography explores the self in different ways and through different textual formats. It includes writing whose main purpose is to scrutinise the relations between self and informants in the field, foregrounding issues of the anthropologist’s political responsibility (Okely & Callaway, 1992). It embraces personal narratives in which people who were formerly the subjects of ethnography explore ‘the textualisation of [their] own group, and the emancipation from the ethnographer’s gaze this entails’ (Van Maanen, 1995: 8–9). It incorporates writings which straddle autobiography and whose purpose is to foreground the political dimensions of self-representation (Lejeune, 1989; Reed-Danahay, 1997). It also involves, perhaps more controversially, intensely personal testimonies from practitioners whose purpose is to articulate intimate discoveries about issues surrounding the families, loves, bodies, illnesses and traumas of themselves or of those close to them (Ellis & Bochner, 1996). Powerful though these latter texts may be, such confessional cross-generic experiments push the elasticity of ethnographic writing to its limits and lay themselves open to charges of solipsism and egocentricity. Coffey (1999: 155–6) presents the argument that they are ‘self-indulgent writings published under the guise of social research and ethnography’ and questions ‘whether utilising ethnographic strategies to write autobiography really ‘counts’ as ethnography at all’. Perhaps this is also what Goodall (2000: 91) refers to when he suggests that some ethnographic writing veers towards the ‘self-ish’. In the context of this debate, it is interesting that as newcomers to ethnographic research and writing, language students may, at some stage, become somewhat over involved in self-discovery and self-examination, in charting the changes brought about in the self by particular fieldwork experiences. The same cautionary notes as those made by Coffey and Goodall redress the balance but the importance of home and auto-ethnography for language students lies in their explicit acknowledgement that self-narration is inescapably one of the things we do when we write and translate culture, that this can still retain scholarly qualities and that there will always be, in cultural translation, a tension between field diary (the self) and field notes (the other).

Conclusion Thinking about and attempting to do cultural translation within ethnographic encounters provides students with a special kind of intercultural competence which is not limited to interaction within one given culture but provides a

108

Language and Intercultural Communication

generic framework for all situations involving encounters with difference. This framework, which a number of educators are now attempting so strenuously to feed into language and culture programmes, is especially important given (at least) four tendencies of contemporary life. The first is that people are travelling more often and further. The second is that they are contacting each other more: new modes of electronic and long-distance communication are becoming one of the major vehicles for cross-cultural encounters and pedagogic research must develop ways in which these media may be productive of learning. The third is that ‘home’ cultures are not comfortably bounded as the word ‘home’ implies but are, in most cases, rapidly transforming multicultural and multilingual fields. The fourth is that young people are currently exposed to a wide range of modes of cross-cultural consumption, many of which militate against our efforts. The ethos of such cultural consumption is epitomised by the pseudo-ethnographic encounter as cheap entertainment which we see on certain television reality shows.4 These dramatisations feed on discomfiture and embarrassment and are geared to illustrate people defeated by the difficulties of difference. They place little emphasis on the subtle mediation and patient accommodation required if such encounters are to be productive and rewarding. Could there, I wonder, be a link between this brand of superficial encounter and the now almost routine process of round-the-world student travel known in the UK as ‘the gap year’? In gap years large numbers of young people snatch whiffs of alterity as they pass through a vast, practically undifferentiated field of otherness, often barely remembering the names of places they have seen. They talk more about the best ways of moving between places than they do about being there. They pass fluidly through the well-developed, cushioned infrastructures which have been set up to cater for the new market they represent. They ghettoise on the ether, conversing not with indigenous people but with people like themselves who are already known to them and situated outside the country they are purporting to discover. Young people may thus acquire the illusion that they are well acquainted with and competent in dealing with difference but as Braburd put it, ‘being there’ is not enough. In the midst of such tensions educators need to think creatively about new possibilities, new models to engender meaningful processes of cultural translation at home and away. We are moving, however, in the right direction. The practices of cultural translation in which I see my students involved are demanding, rewarding and transferable in a range of ways that my own university experience of translating passages of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves into French or Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée into English, was not. With Bradburd, I believe that ethnographic awareness can and often demonstrably does affect how we conduct ourselves in our encounters with others, whether these be ordinary, everyday others still very much like ourselves, or exoticised or demonised others with a capital ‘O’. Ethnographic encounters within the field and the multiple acts of translating and negotiating meaning they entail can help to bridge cultural divisions and provide the best framework I have encountered so far for preparing young people to negotiate translated worlds. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Shirley Ann Jordan, School of

Ethnographic Encounters

109

Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP, UK ([email protected]). Notes 1.

A version of this article was presented as a keynote paper at the IALIC Conference 2001 (Living in Translated Worlds: Languages and Intercultural Communication) Leeds Metropolitan University, 1–2 December. 2. See Roberts et al., (2000) for one extended example and for further details of others. 3. For recent discussions of the ethical issues inherent in intercultural communication see Language and Intercultural Communication (1, 2001). 4. For example the Channel 4 series Going Native (2001) which followed a South London family as they spent ten weeks attempting to integrate in a rural community in Swaziland.

References Agar, M. (1991) The biculture in bilingual. Language and Society 20 (2), 167–81. Asad, T. (1986) The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology. In J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp. 141–64). Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California University Press. Augé, M. (1986) Un Ethnologue dans le métro. Paris: Hachette. Bartlett, T. (2001) Use the road: The appropriacy of appropriation. Language and Intercultural Communication 1 (1), 21–39. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bhabha, H. (1995) Cultural diversity and cultural differences. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds) The Post-colonial Studies Reader (pp. 206–9). London and New York: Routledge. Bradburd, D. (1998) Being There: The Necessity of Fieldwork. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Clifford, J. (1983) On ethnographic authority. Representations 1 (2), 118–46. Clifford, J. (1992) Travelling cultures. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies (pp. 96–116). London and New York: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coffey, A. (1999) The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage. Conord, S., Mouhid, Y., Gisquet, E. and Deprée, C. (1999) Regards anthropologiques sur les bars de nuit. Paris: L’Harmattan. Declerck, P. (2001) Les Naufragés: avec les clochards de Paris. Paris: Plon. Duranti, A. (1997) Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, A. and Goodwin, C. (eds) (1992) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edelman, B. (1994) Acting cool and being safe: The definition of skill in a Swedish railway yard. In G. Palisson (ed.) Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse (pp. 140–61). Oxford: Berg. Ellis, C. and Bochner, A.P. (eds) (1996) Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Walnut Creek, London and New Delhi: Altamira Press. Goodall, H.L. (2000) Writing the New Ethnography. Walnut Creek, Lanham, New York and Oxford: Altamira Press. Gumperz, J. (1968) The speech community. In The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (pp. 381–6). London: Macmillan. Gumperz, J. (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, J. and Hymes, D. (eds) (1972) Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Oxford University Press. Hammersley, M. (1991) Reading Ethnographic Research. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

110

Language and Intercultural Communication

Holland, D. and Quinn, N. (eds) (1987) Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, D. (1966) Introduction: Towards ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist 66 (6), 12–25. Hymes, D. (1972) On communicative competence. In J. Pride and J. Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics (pp. 269–93). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hymes, D. (1974) Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ingold, T. (1994) The art of translation in a continuous world. In G. Palisson (ed.) Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse (pp. 210–30). Oxford: Berg. Ingold, T. (ed.) (1996) Language is the essence of culture. Key Debates in Anthropology (pp. 147–98). London and New York: Routledge. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lejeune, P. , Eaken, P.J. (ed.) and Leary, K. (trans.) (1989) On Autobiography . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Norman, K. (2000) Phoning the field: Meanings of place and involvement in fieldwork at home. In V. Amit (ed.) Constructing the Field. Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World (pp. 120–46). London and New York: Routledge. Okely, J. and Callaway, H. (eds) (1992) Anthropology and Autobiography. London and New York: Routledge. Palisson, G. (1994) Household words: Attention, agency and the ethnography of fishing. In G. Palisson (ed.) Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse (pp. 117–39). Oxford: Berg. Rapport, N. (2000) The narrative as fieldwork technique. processual ethnography for a world in motion. In V. Amit (ed.) Constructing the Field. Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World (pp. 71–95). London and New York: Routledge. Reed-Danahay, D.E. (ed.) (1997) Auto/Ethnography:Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford and New York: Berg. Roberts, C., Byram, M., Barro, A., Jordan, S. and Street, B. (2000) Language Learners as Ethnographers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rose, D. Living the Ethnographic Life. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Saville-Troike, M. (1982) The Ethnography of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Spradley, J. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Street, B. (1993) Culture is a verb. In D. Graddol, L. Thompson and M. Byram (eds) Language and Culture (pp. 23–43). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters/British Association of Applied Linguistics. Van Maanen, J. (1995) An end to innocence: The ethnography of ethnography. In J. Van Maanen (ed.) Representation in Ethnography (pp. 1–35). Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage. Le Wita, B. (1994) French Bourgeois Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.