Events of Translation: Intertextuality and Christian Ethnotheologies of Change among Guhu‐Samane, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Translation has long been a part of anthropology, and recently analysts have focused on the politics, poetics, and ethics of translations that account for much of the global flow of discourses. This literature can be thought of as histories of how translators forge denotational links between source and target texts and how communities engage with the texts that result. Here, however, I want to highlight a different mode of translation in which connections between source and target texts become models of transformation for communities that engage with them. Moreover, participants can actually enact transformations in ritual moments that foreground the relationships between translated texts. I focus on Guhu-Samane Christian communities of Papua New Guinea who use performances of the local-language translation of the New Testament to comment on the kind of Christian transformations they have experienced. This perspective offers a particularly compelling way to investigate Christian models of temporality.

Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

“…What this paper hopes to have shown is that this is in part a result of how sustainability is being culturally differentiated, as it travels across a wide variety of local contexts of discourse consumption. [2] I thank Nicholas Harkness for directing my attention to Silverstein's (2003) and Handman's (2010) discussion of translation.…”

“…Paying attention to those moments or those 'events of translation' (Handman 2010) when globally disseminated discourses are transformed and regimented in their meanings can facilitate an examination of the relationship between text and context and an understanding of how a sociologically observable movement of a trend arises across space through activities of semiotic mediation (Holland, Fox, and Daro 2008). In this paper, using ethnographic data gathered at what I call the 'Sustainability Education Institute' (a pseudonym, hereafter the 'Institute'), which was jointly created by a corporation and a college in Hawai'i, I analyse how a cultural language of sustainability is developed by local elites in corporate and higher education settings that reflects upon, rearticulates and 'refracts' (Vološinov 1973, 23) elements of both the mass mediating written discourse of sustainability and the local discourses of cultural heritage.…”

Christianizing Language and the Dis-placement of Culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea

“…In contrast to their view of local cultural practices as obstacles to conversion, like most Protestant missions, they regarded vernacular languages as critical to proselytizing and conversion (e.g., Handman 2007). APCM missionary-linguist Murray Rule described the vernacular as "the shrine of the people's soul" (1977:1341), evoking Edwin W. Smith's 1929 book on Bible translation, which articulated the language ideology that underlies many Protestant mission and Bible translation projects (Summer Institute of Linguistics, Wycliff).…”

“…2 Ironically, my analysis of social and linguistic processes that helped shape the early phases of missionization in Bosavi 1. For example, Handman's (2010) insightful analyses of language choice and translation practices in Protestant churches among GuhuSamane (PNG).…”

Betraying empire: Translation and the ideology of conquest

“…SIL translators see such "trade languages" (Handman 2010) as inherently corrupt for containing numerous foreign borrowings and grammatical "violations" of their European source languages. While heart languages are associated with the intimate spaces of home and family, trade languages are linked to the promiscuous contacts and indiscriminate solicitations of the marketplace.…”