Observation is the outcome of a negotiation between expectation and experience
-Anon.
In one sense anthropologists do nothing but "cultural translation" - it is the rationale for our proffered explanations and interpretations - and this entails that we have an intellectual bias towards the discovery of difference.
This has often meant that the only kinds of explanation that could be offered were those constructed through our own cultural categories, since the appreciation of difference meant that others were irreducibly enigmatic to interpretation.
However, if anthropology has no special, extra-cultural and extra-social basis for its theory then no amount of engagement with others - fieldwork - can bypass this epistemological barrier to objective representation and valid interpretation
On the basis of these kinds of theoretical analysis anthropology therefore has been seen as hopelessly contaminated by its colonial origins, remaking others according to a set of categories generated by the pragmatics of colonial conquest.
In consequence anthropology must perforce uncover, among other oppositions, either monstrosity or marvel among its data - for why else would anthropology be required, if not to then contextualize these categories as, for example Amazons and Cannibals?
The project which I am currently engaged in necessarily deals with such issue of cultural translation in multiple ways since it centers on the production of a new edition of that classic of sixteenth century cannibal literature - Hans Staden's True History and Description of a Land belonging to the wild, naked, savage, man-munching people, situated in the New World, America. (Marburg, 1557).
This work is a fundamental text in the history of the discovery of Brazil, the earliest account we have of the Tupi Indians from an eyewitness who was captive among them for over seven years, and a key reference in the burgeoning debate on the discourse of cannibalism, in the same way that it was to the earlier speculations of Michel de Montaigne (who conversed with Tupi captives in France), as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke for whom the Tupi were a key empirical case.
Despite this there has not been an English language edition since 1929, and no translation into modern German since 1942. Neither has there been a critical introduction which brings direct ethnographic experience of ritual anthropophagy, as i have had, to the task of interpretation, and which makes use of other anthropological research on anthropophagic discourse, as well as literary critique of the cannibal trope.
The problem is then how to improve both translation of Staden's 16th century German text, and the claims it embodies, as well as the performance of cannibalistic violence in the contemporary world.
Recent debate in anthropology concerning the historical and ethnographic interpretation - or "translation"- of other cultures, has been overwhelmingly concerned with one issue, deriving from the insights of literary theory.
That is - given the culturally dependent nature of both historical and ethnographic representation, this cultural bias (and its hegemonic tendencies) are a feature of European writing on non-Europeans that must be factored out, accounted for or otherwise made overt.
This concern is actually self-defeating since it was precisely this kind of factoring out or suppression of the time dimension that first created the functionalist fiction of the 'ethnographic present`; precisely the reason that anthropologists have been so concerned to hystericus their analyses over the last few years and in any case the view that the existence of a cultural bias in European accounts necessarily misleads one as to the nature non-European cultures seems to me to vastly over-privilege the moment of first contact.
Therefore, it is significant that the locus of many such literary and anthropological analyses that emphasize the mutual incomprehension and cultural incommensurability are on the beachheads of the ever expanding European colonial system; whether Columbus in the Caribbean, Ralegh in the Orinoco, or Staden on the Brazil shore.
Certainly it is no longer possible or desirable to imagine that we can directly or naively 'read` other cultures through colonial text but it would be my contention that an understanding of the tropes through which western historiography has been constructed represents only one element in the methodology of interpretation which an historical anthropology must bring to its sources of data.
Thus, alongside of this critical reading of text itself we must also consider native social and cultural practice, particularly native tropes, as retrospectively constructed through the artefactual, visual and oral records.
While the description of this native praxis is obviously an initial object of European textual description, that native praxis is itself an equally necessary and viable context for the interpretation and analysis of European texts quite literally it is that which is con-text, which 'goes with` the text.
Equally, since no single text can be said to adequately represent any other culture, by the same token our knowledge of others cannot be adequately assessed by the critique of a very limited selection of such texts, in this way the readings that are made of Columbus's Diario, Ralegh's Discoverie, or Staden's True History must address their place within the wider range of textual production that took place during European colonial expansion; without this exercise it becomes quite impossible to say what their relationship to native praxis might be
This is not to suggest that the problems of theory alluded to above are easily resolved, but rather that the implicit assumption that such a text can only be understood as an act of colonial appropriation of another culture is not invariably borne out by close acquaintance with that text and the conditions, both European and American, of its production.
In short, a wholly self-referential character in these texts is belied by the way in which native cultures are registered in those texts, and by the way that various tropes which Ralegh and Staden employ are matched by native ones.
This may allow a renewal of the significance of the anthropological approach in two ways firstly by demonstrating the relevance of the ethnological literature within the interdisciplinary critique of culture and knowing, secondly by contributing to the novel domains of analysis that are produced by our growing appreciation of the symbiotic nature of cultural flows.
Accordingly, it is now appropriate to consider the issue of establishing hermeneutic principles to be applied to colonial texts since it is the particular expectations which one brings to such a reading experience that produces observational claims
Pratt (1992) uses the concept of "transcultural representation" to refer to the way in which those defined as culturally different appear in the texts, both literary and visual, of a given society.
"Transcultural" is defined broadly across time, so that it includes our own history, as well as across geographical space, so that it includes other societies and their past. In consequence this notion is as appropriate to the case of the socially internal representations of Western society, which might include Jews, women or blacks, as much as it is to the familiar paradigm of the "savage" or "foreigner".
However, discussion of colonial and modern South America is very relevant to these categories of classification since "Guiana" and "the Amazon" hold pre-eminent positions in the intellectual history of the West as the locus for ultimate forms of savagery, as evident enough in the philosophical writings of such Enlightenment luminaries as Locke, Rousseau, or Montaigne.
In less intellectual musings the tropical forests become a green hell populated by head-hunters, cannibals and savage animals. But this trope of the monstrous works with another, that of the marvelous where the noble native mystically attunes to the intricate wonders of a vast and virgin ecosystem, as Greenblatt (1992) has forcefully reminded us.
However, if mimesis, understood as the active attempt to seek convergences in meanings and the conscious incorporation of symbolic similarities into cultural repertoire, if mimesis is simultaneously present and logically connected to the production of difference, this would contradict the anthropological presumption of most recent theorists who stress only the alterity and the incommensurability of cultural forms.
Thus the theoretical question for anthropologists has now become (Taussig 1995) how we are able to do justice to that socio-cultural commonality, without imposing the usual typologies of ethnological classification or anthropological analysis. The suggestion here, in recognition of the force of the historicist critique, is that this can only be achieved as regards the form that analysis takes, not as regards the object of analysis.
The form of analysis suggested is therefore one that pays explicit attention to the metapragmatics of social cultural discourse "discourse" being understood as both intellectual semiosis and physical exchange (Barraud et al 1994, Vinck 1996). By such means it may be possible to integrate historical time with ethnographic observation, and to understand historical time as integral to the performance of the present.
Clearly such semiotic principles are particularly important for understanding the mimetic process in colonial contexts, as well as the differentiating potential which is more often the focus of comment. Since colonial processes are by no means restricted to the context of European expansion after 1492, past and present themselves then become powerful "signs in society".
We may wonder then if subtle rhetorics of identity, revealed in mimetic borrowing from native forms, are not themselves as much a product of encounter as the production of difference and that they are at least as important as the rather obvious discovery of "marvelous monstrosity", to the socio-political course of the colonial project.
In which case we also have to ask why this aspect of encounter, the production of difference, is selected as a theoretical starting point for a hermeneutic exercise rather than the production of identity.
It could be argued that mimesis may have been less significant as a matter of the particular history of colonial conquest in America, but that does not mean that it can be ignored. Moreover, that fact that this difference must be continually produced suggests that the social contexts that drive the encounter also work towards the production of symbiotic identity in a conceptual and physical space such as the literary "contact zone" of Pratt or the anthropological a Tribal Zone (Ferguson & Whitehead 1992).
In the Tribal Zone the intimacies of economic partnership, political dependency and military engagement, all key experiences in the formation of "Europeans" and "Indians" in South America, continually call into question the ideologies of the "savage" and the "civilized". But these intimacies then require the cultural production of new modes of difference in a dialectical recognition of the mimetic, but also the simultaneously polluting consequences, of such contacts.
The failure to perceive this cultural mimesis does not invalidate the comments by literary theorists such as Greenblatt or and historians such as Pagden (1993) for they tell us much about the production of certain key images of "America", and in particular alert us to the ideological character of the emphasis given to the pristine and marvelous, for which discovery and monstrosity were ideological counterparts.
But such commentaries tend to deal only with a very limited kind of textual material - that is the printed publications of overt ideologues such as Oviedo (1959) or Las Casas (1962) - not the vast array of other colonial text which is found in the archives.
When this material is brought into consideration the rhetorics of difference are certainly present and even find practical application, as in the "discovery of cannibals", but they are also challenged by the routine nature of quotidian interactions.
Therefore the effect of concentration on only one kind of text is to suggest two incommensurable worlds in which the achievements of the colonizers become all the more heroic but which does not accord with the character of their activities as suggested by the more mundane documentation.
By the same token the Amerindians were not the isolated and insulated people that is required by a rhetoric of difference and their active engagement in the colonial world produced a convergence of symbolic usages.
This occurred in the case of cannibalism, to signify anti-European political allegiances whatever the prior meaning of such praxis had been within native societies.
Equally, through time, this social interaction engenders a process of mimetic elaboration - that is the putative discovery of Cannibals, Amazons or El Dorado becomes an opportunity for the cultural elaboration of that theme by Amerindian and European alike.
The negative case confirms this since the relative importance of Sciopodi and Acephali in the European writing on the New World is related to the relative importance of those icons in native thought as well - the dog-headed people, centaurs and minotaurs do not appear with the same frequency because they were not part of the native repertoire.
In any case various monstrosities are present in Amerindian ethnology prior to European contacts and so cannot be dealt with as an aspect of European literary projection or Amerindian acculturation to these projections and this holds true even if any given text cannot be relied upon ethnographically, since the evidence is also archaeological.
Thus it is not the epistemological status of any one report, such as Staden's, taken alone that is the issue but the epistemological status of such a text as part of a whole series of such reports from different sources, including native ones.
This is translation of cannibalism does not therefore picture it as in the the positivist exercise of the verification of anthropophagy by examination of texts, bones or coprolites but an analytical procedure in recognition of the fact that cannibalism is always symbolic even when it is real.
The basis for a mimetic elaboration of a discourse of violent hunger (cannibalism) between Europeans and Amerindians was shared and passionate interest in the idea of cannibalism, reflected in the doctrinal strictures of both Catholic transubstantiation and the divine hunger of the Amerindian pantheon.
It is therefore significant that the Amerindians, no less than Europeans, used the trope of physical incorporation to explicate political context. The prior significance of a trope of cannibalism to both European and Amerindian is precisely then testimony to the mimetic quality of the accusation in the text of Staden - for it was the Europeans who had come to eat out the native inhabitants, not the fiercesome Tupi warriors.
The subsequent progress of the cannibal trope in European usage is fairly familiar already, so I will remark only on its contemporary deployment by Amerindians in Amazonia and how that remains attuned to the mimetic propensity of the Europeans.
My current ethnographic research in Amazonia has clearly indicated ways in which ideas of "tradition" and "modernity" are mediated through the violence of a kanaim assassination.
Kanaim killers are highly practiced shamans for whom the secret killing and cannibalization of selected victims is part of a cosmological system of ideas in which such violence is seen as sacrificial, rather than political or criminal.
The purpose of such sacrifice is certainly to augment the personal power of the kanaim shaman, but is also empowers other Amerindians indirectly through the way in which it is culturally read by outsiders, particularly Guyanese and Brazilians, as a warning to stay clear of, and not to harass, Amerindian people.
This is achieved not just through the instrumentality of the violence but also because a killing in the manner of kanaim involves highly specific kinds of mutilation and wounding that have exact symbolic and ritual meanings, and it is precisely the form of that violence that marks a death as kanaim not murder or political revenge.
A kanaim killing therefore sets up a field of socio-cultural significance that speaks to both the immediate relations of the victim, but also to the wider community, other ethnic groups in Guyana, and the institutional structures of the nation state.
This cultural force is engendered not just by the vivid physicality of what is done, but also by the way in which such acts recall the history and traditions of a indigenous war against the colonial occupation, and so suggest the fragility of post-colonial nationalisms and their institutions throughout the region.
In this way we are able to translate more fully the meaning of the cannibal act, both past and present since it is produced through the never-ending refraction of meaning down the long corridors of historical symbiosis between colonizer and colonized.
Native semiosis of cannibalism pictures the divine Lord Jaguar ever-thirsty at the throat of mundane humanity and this is indeed a fitting emblem of mimetic elaboration of the cannibal trope for the shared experience of colonialism - whether by them/us or self/other - is the certainty of oppression, and the inevitability of domination by the violent hunger of all-consuming desires
In sum - cannibalism challenges our ability to make cultural translation in a very direct way, not because of its alterity, but because it is so heavily prefigured in the western observer's imagination. In this way it also becomes the critical test case for the ability of anthropology to provide explanation and translation of difference through understanding the sources of similarity though anthropologists often celebrate difference in its own right it would be a culturally solipsistic approach to expect translation "in its own terms" since then nothing would have been explained or understood - and that seems to be an irreducible, if paradoxical, element of translation that belies the popular expectation that such translation should show a fidelity to original form. But just as there can be no direct or perfect linguistic translation of a text only an attempt to represent the language game which arises from a particular form of life in which that text functions, so too the demand for literal meaning can only be one element in a representation of the culture which gives rise to the speech-act in which case it is the need to make overt and informed choice as to the purposes of translation that appears as the hermeneutic key to unlock the world of others
Professor Neil L. Whitehead
Dept. of Anthropology, UW-Madison,
1180 Observatory Drive,
Madison, WI 53706-1393.