| Title: | Translating the field |
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| Authors: | ID Telban, Borut (Author)
ID Eickelkamp, Ute (Author) |
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| Files: |  URL - Source URL, visit https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.70074
 PDF - Presentation file, download (264,77 KB)
MD5: DB00C23B37E5775C6D83394AE5D7FD83
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| Language: | English |
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| Typology: | 1.01 - Original Scientific Article |
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| Organization: |  ZRC SAZU - The Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
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| Abstract: | Ethnographers observe and engage the field. Theylive with, play with, eat with, dance with, feel with,and, increasingly, write or film with their interlocu-tors. But most of all, they listen and converse. As theyenter the lingual ecology of their hosts through a rangeof practices of communication, ethnographers begin amulti-faceted journey of translation—as do their inter-locutors. Translation—of words, tone of voice, gestures,facial expressions, musical sounds, images, and a wholearray of signifiers—is always an act of interpretation,of translating worlds. Thus, how do we know if, for in-stance, the Tok Pisin bodi corresponds to the modernEnglish body? Furthermore, ethnographers and hostsocieties not only translate one word as entity into an-other and into academic technologies of representation(scholarly writing), they also inevitably translate andtransfix concepts, meanings, and classifications. Thus,language is grounded in cultural practices, ontologies,and epistemologies, which, in turn, are politically andlife-historically situated. As ethnographers, we dependon our interlocutors' gift of translating their world andknowledge to us, while we respond on the grounds ofour own lingual-epistemic-biographical situatedness.Our discussion of translation as a method of inquiry, un-derstanding, and knowledge exchange is based on theview that translation is an inevitable and fundamental relational practice. As such it deals with multiple epis-temological realms in which anthropologists find them-selves before, during, and after fieldwork. We hereunpack the significance of the language/s used in ourfieldwork in Germany, central Australia, and the EastSepik region in Papua New Guinea, demonstratingthrough concrete examples the work of ʻturning overʼwords and worlds. |
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| Keywords: | epistemology, fieldwork methods, indigenous concepts, semiosphere, translation |
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| Publication version: | Version of Record |
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| Year of publishing: | 2026 |
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| Number of pages: | str. 64-76 |
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| Numbering: | Vol. 37, issue 1 |
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| PID: | 20.500.12556/DiRROS-31870  |
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| UDC: | 39:001.8 |
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| ISSN on article: | 1035-8811 |
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| DOI: | 10.1111/taja.70074 |
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| COBISS.SI-ID: | 286265347 |
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| Copyright: | © 2026 The Author(s). |
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| Publication date in DiRROS: | 13.08.2026 |
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| Views: | 48 |
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| Downloads: | 25 |
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| Metadata: |    |
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