Burning translations

2022FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12 (1): 277–284 COLLOQUIUM Burning translations Milad O D A B A E I , Princeton University This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as “burning translations” responds to the abolitionist call for “letting anthropology burn” by developing the urgency of translation amid histories of racialization. In contrast to foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutics of the other, burning translations are speculative approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally. Burning translations are risky not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline’s intellectual and institutional resistance, but because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as “concepts,” and not as “ours.” Keywords: translation, alterity, foreignization, fetishization, burning anthropology, Iran So we pause at the recitation of lost names and mumbled jargon where the rest of Uncle Toliver’s utterance remains unheard. In the space that jargon opens (a space off to the side or out-from-the-outside; an appositional spacing or displacement of the encounter in the interest of a complex presence that remains to be activated; a space not determined by the zero encounter that ruptures the subject or the nostalgic return to another subject before the encounter; a space where Uncle Toliver speaks through Tom and Henry—the sons of the master—and through the Workers of the Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration of the State of Virginia and through Leon Litwak to us: piercing and dispossessing disabling and enabling mediation and meditation), the rest is what is left for us to say, the rest is what is left for us to do, in the broad and various echoes of that utterance, our attunement to which assures us that we know all we need to know about freedom. —Fred Moten, Stolen life Philip Swift’s “Heathen hermeneutics” makes the case for a “foreignizing” mode of translation in anthropology. Contrasted with a “domesticating” approach, Swift describes this mode as an ethical and ontological translation of linguistic and social alterity that transforms “our” conceptual categories and “ontological assumptions” (Lloyd, in Swift p. 239). In what follows I echo Swift’s call for foreignizing translations while taking the opportunity to reflect on the limit imposed on foreignization when translation is conceptualized as a movement between an anthropological self and the other. To question what might emerge as a racial and monolingual conception of translation, I first highlight how key interventions in the 1980s debate on representation, including Talal Asad’s celebrated essay on translation, pointed to critical strategies to inhabit anthropology as a fraught discourse and reckon with the “partial” and “equivocal” nature of its mode of translation (Strathern 2004; Viveiros de Castro 2004; de la Cadena 2015). Second, I develop Swift’s foreignizing translations beyond a reference to the self. I conceptualize foreignizing translations that are not self-referential as “burning translations.” “Burning” references the abolitionist “case for letting anthropology burn” (Jobson 2019, emphasis added), while also responding to the simultaneous risks and urgencies of translation amid histories of violence that I HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, volume 12, number 1, spring 2022. © 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for the Society for Ethnographic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1086/719659 Milad ODABAEI 278 distill from the practices of translations of European social theory in contemporary Iran (Odabaei 2019, 2020). Iranian uptake of, and debates about, European concepts and theories demonstrates the limit of a racial and monolingual imagination of language and discourse. They suggest that concepts, theories, and discourses that we might heuristically identify as “ours,” “European,” “anthropological,” etc. cannot be analytically reduced as such. In contrast to the idea of foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutic of the other, burning translation is an encounter with what I recognize as “the outside” (kharij) and describe in relation to the impersonal and speculative capacity of language and discourse. Burning translations are neither what Swift describes as a reduction to One and dubs as “Christian,” nor a multiplication to Many, “heathen” or “pagan.” Rather, they are what can be described as approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally, and as such fall outside of anthropology. Burning translations are risky but not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline’s intellectual and institutional resistance. They are risky because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as “concepts,” and not as “ours.” In the 1986 essay, Asad argued that anthropological translations are indeed transformations. But he critically identified “the inequality of languages” (Asad 1986: 156) as the limit of experimental departures from representationalism. Reflecting on the modern history of translation of French and English discourses and genres (including “history” and “social science”) into Arabic, Asad noted the asymmetry of translation and transformation across languages. Such asymmetries, he argued, “signal inequalities in the power (i.e., in the capacities) of the respective languages in relation to the dominant forms of discourse that have been and are still being translated” (Asad 1986: 158). “The relevant question,” he suggested, “is not how tolerant an attitude the translator ought to display toward the original author (an abstract ethical dilemma), but how she can test the tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms” (Asad 1986: 157). The limit imposed by a particular linguistic situation on translation (and not by language as an abstract system) limits conceptual transformation within that situation. This is why Asad suggestively wondered if the task of foreignization might not be best achieved through “a dramatic performance, the execution of a dance, or the playing of a piece of music” (Asad 1986: 159). Thinking through images and audio-visual media in what is today called “multimodal anthropology” (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017), as well as Stefania Pandolfo’s approach to ethnographic writing as “visualization” (ta’bir) (2017, 2018), suggest imaginative strategies of foreignization that are cognizant of the limit of conceptual translation as transformation. Beyond epistemology A feminist community Swift identifies Talal Asad’s essay, “The concept of translation in British social anthropology,” as a signpost for anthropological arguments for foreignizing translations. This essay first appeared in the landmark volume Writing culture (1986). It offered a unique intervention into the 1980s debates about epistemology and representation that were inspired by postfoundational thinkers that included Paul Feyerabend and Jean-François Lyotard, which together inspire Swift’s argument for foreignization. However, Swift sets aside what I take to be a crucial component of Asad’s intervention in this and his subsequent writing on translation (Asad 1995, 2013, 2018). Namely, Asad’s reflections on translation are at the same time reflections on the limit of liberal language ideologies and anthropology as a secular discursive and institutional practice. In his contribution to Writing culture, the late Paul Rabinow observed that beyond academic politics (Bourdieu 1988), the 1980s critical debates point to the inheritance of an incomplete modernity and ethics of postmodern inquiry (Habermas 1983; Foucault 1984). In the shift away from self-assured representation of “other cultures,” what had emerged in focus was “a (nonthematized) concern with traditions of representation, and metatraditions of metarepresentation, in our culture” (Rabinow 1986: 251). To face the limit of one’s own tradition (in this case, anthropology) Rabinow drew on Marilyn Strathern’s distinction between “feminist anthropology” and “anthropological feminism” (Rabinow 1986: 254). The former is a disciplinary subfield organized around a set of questions and themes. The latter “aims to build a feminist community, one whose premises and 279 goals differ from, and are opposed to, anthropology” (Rabinow 1986: 254). Strathern helps Rabinow identify anthropological feminism as the capacity of inhabiting a fraught discourse marked by difference and conflict as the historical conditions of identity and knowledge. In ways resonant with Asad (Lebner 2020), for Strathern and feminist scholars in conversation with her (Povinelli 2001; Mahmood 2005; Giordano 2014; de la Cadena 2015; Butler 2019), categories of knowledge are part of social relations (Strathern 1988, 2004). As such, they are at best only partially legible outside those relations. It is important to emphasize that the feminist thematization of incommensurability and untranslatability is not reducible to an argument for pluralism or what Swift, following João de Pina-Cabral (2017), calls “an ecumenical anthropology.” As Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (2013) observed in relation to secularism, the pluralizing attempt fails to appreciate the universalizing thrust of modern projects (here anthropology) while translating difference into the terms of that project (here “religion,” “culture,” “epistemology,” “ontology,” etc.). Elizabeth Povinelli (2001) echoes this conclusion when she observes that liberal ideologies of language use and public reason in contemporary anthropology tend to render radical worlds quite unremarkable. As Rosalind Morris (2017) has shown, forms of anthropological translation that elide the constitutive place of alterity in modern economies of recognition enact fetishistic processes of exchange and normalization such as those critically analyzed by Marx and Freud. When pressed by Richard Rorty to locate himself within the norms and values of a given community, Foucault’s response describes what I take to be the lesson of anthropological feminism since the 1980s: But the problem is, precisely to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible. (Foucault, in Rabinow 1986: 261) Burning anthropology Anthropology today confronts not only the calls for self-reflexivity and decolonization but also the case for incineration and abolition. The postwar liberal-democratic formations of “the social,” including the institution of the university and practices of “social” inquiry, have been epistemologically and politically challenged by BURNING TRANSLATIONS the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing populism (Brown 2015, 2019). As William Mazarella (2019) has suggested, anthropologists find it difficult to reckon with the populist challenge to liberal democracy insofar as they occupy the institutions and discourses of liberal politics while espousing populist commitments against liberal translations. Scholars who make “the case of letting anthropology burn” (Jobson 2019) confront this situation by foregrounding what they take to be the constitutive exclusions and conceits of liberal democratic politics, particularly colonial racism and the inability to meet planetary challenges such as climate change. In conversation with Mazarella (2019) and Savannah Shange (2019a and b), Ryan Jobson questions the anthropological tendency to take up liberalism as a foil and yet perpetuate a liberal discourse of moral perfectibility through ethnographic valorizations of radical alterity. Shange has advocated for an abolitionist transformation of anthropology into a “genre of black study” (Shange 2019b). This is necessary, she suggests, because fields of anthropological research are nested within and aside old and enduring fields of racialized exploitation. Burning anthropology is the refusal to participate in structures of dispossession that make the anthropological enterprise possible. I read “the case for letting anthropology burn” also as a case for burning translations. The call for abolition locates anthropological practice in relation to the foreclosure of alterity in racialized economies of recognition. This is what David Marriott (2018) identifies, following Frantz Fanon, as “racial fetishism.” As a structure (and not a representation) racial fetishism inscribes onto every action of the oppressed a racial ontology. This suspends symbolic transformations, thereby interrupting the nonhumanistic process of entering the realm of the human (Marriott 2018: 5; see also Pandolfo 2018: 6). Marriot argues that racial fetishism renders ontology irrelevant for understanding racialized existence. This is because, in Fanon’s words, racial fetishism denies the racialized the access to “a zone of nonbeing. . . . [where] a genuine new departure can emerge” (Fanon 2008: xxi). The categories of “ethics” and “politics,” too, cannot model racialized existence insofar as they are grounded in an ontology. In this situation, Marriott cues philosophical thinking to anthropological translations that are “idiomatic and singular” (Marriott 2018: 5) (as opposed to classificatory and cartographical, or even, “ethical” and “political”). Eschewing modernity as a foil, burning translations occupy it as a fraught philosophical discourse Milad ODABAEI and a history of violence. They test the capacity of language and discourse for the translation of what can be thematized, following Fred Moten in the opening lines of this essay, as “lost names and mumbled speech” (Fred Moten 2018: 95). The fate of this translation is unknown and unknowable because neither the capacity of philosophical discourse for translation, nor of the living to perceive and receive it, is taken for granted. The struggle of burning translation is a struggle for a learned community of freedom. Translating Iran What in anthropology we might recognize as “our” concepts and theories are debated as part of urgent conversations beyond anthropology that can be described, following Marriott (2018) as idiomatic and singular (Shekholeslami 2017; Odabaei 2019, 2020; Bardawil 2020). In contemporary Iran, for example, social theory and continental philosophy are hotly contested as part of popular and scholarly debates on history, tradition, and politics that have come to formulate “Iran” as a historical-philosophical problematic (Tabatabai 2020). The question “What is Iran?” can be traced to the midtwentieth century and the reformist and revolutionary reaction to the Pahlavi modernization project. But it is only in the last two decades, in the wake of the 1979 Revolution and in a self-proclaimed Islamic Republic that translating Iran has acquired a renewed urgency. This is a period where “Islam” was taken up as a cultural ontology and as the basis of social engineering and statemaking. Paradoxically, however, this period has been marked by the emergence of the practices of reading and translation of European discourses at the center of the intellectual practices of a diverse group of social actors. The Iranian public and counterpublics (Warner 2002; Hirschkind 2006) of translation includes statespersons, Shi’i seminarians, academics, and activists, as well as middle-class youth who are well versed in English while awaiting migration to the West. Across these groups, the figure of the motarjem (translator) is a socially valorized figure. It is celebrated by some as an intellectual vanguard who contributes to civil discourse and condemned by others as an agent of cultural imperialism and moral decay. More fundamentally, translation is also debated in relation to a condition of cultural disablement that makes people in Iran and the Middle East more generally consumers in the global market of theory. My research in Iranian universities, Shi’i seminaries, and private spaces of pedagogy in Tehran and Qom, 280 which was informed and enabled by experiences of education, life, and politics in Iran in the postrevolutionary period, has discerned two modalities of translation: first, as the instrumental replication of European concepts and discourses in Islamic garb (i.e., the creation of an Islamic Republic, Islamic social sciences, Islamic diplomacy, Islamic cinema, and Islamic self-help), and second, as the attempt to welcome the alterity of history in order to encounter it, narrate it, and conceive of collective life anew. The first mode of Iranian translations is a “mimetic gesture of power” (Asad 1986: 158). Following Morris and Marriott, it can be identified as fetishistic, insofar as it takes gharb (the West) as an “ontology” and enacts “Iran” as a boomi (indigenous) and islami (Islamic) counterpoint. As I have shown elsewhere, this mode is enshrined in the revolutionary agenda of the Iranian state in the domain of culture and education (Odabaei 2019, 2020). It can be described as a manifestation of a colonial and racial dialectic of recognition that translates Iran’s difference from Europe, in terms of language (“Persian”), race (“Aryan”), and religion (“Islam”) (Anidjar 2008; Mahmood 2015; Kia 2020). Whereas prior to the 1979 “Islamic” revolution, the pre-Islamic history of Iran was fetishistically translated as its “difference” from Europe, after this event “Islam” has also been interpreted as such. The everyday imagination of Iran as a monolingual, predominantly Persian and/or Persianspeaking, Muslim nation-state, both in Iran and in anthropological discourse, is the manifestation of this mode of translation. If it appears as natural it is because it has been naturalized as such. While the first mode of translation has been part of the violent economies of the state and revolution in the modern period, the second mode confronts repetitions of unrest and their suppression by the state. It does so by relating social and political violence to a condition of illegibility and unknowing that Iraqi artist Jalal Toufic diagnoses as “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster” and Iranian philosopher Javad Tabatabai (1995) theorizes as the realization of the epistemological limit of inherited traditions. I conceptualize the second mode as burning translation because it extends beyond existing communicative (in)capacities and economies of exchange to address the very possibilities of meaning— what Walter Benjamin (1996a and b), following Kant (1992), described in terms of “translatability” and “communicability” (Mitteilbarkeit). Following Benjamin, these translations can be said to animate the afterlife of European, Persianate, and Islamic discourses in contemporary 281 Persian, thereby activating the poetic and speculative capacities of language for the development of discourse and debate. The space of experience and the horizon of expectation of these translations define “Iran” beyond linguistic, racial, and religious fetishism. The outside of anthropology I understand burning translations as a reparative opening not to “the other” but to “the outside,” one that confronts the loss and limitations of inherited genres as well as the conditions of narrativity and historiography (de Certeau 1986) towards yet-unknown futures. This understanding is partially informed by Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of language as “the outside” of epistemic formations of knowledge and subjectivity (Foucault and Blanchot 1987; Foucault 1994). As Claude Lévi-Strauss anthropologically rejected the colonization of “wild thinking” by Jean-Paul Sartre’s dialectical history (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 245), Foucault moved away from both ethnology and dialectics to identify the “singular event” (Foucault 1994: 441) that enabled the speculative launch of anthropology and history and their foreignizing translations. Swift’s provocative tracing of the ontological turn to eighteen-century Germany and to Herder points to the limit imposed on translations by what Foucault described as the “unconscious” of modern human sciences. To be clear, the point is not to condemn the onesidedness of anthropological translations but to problematize the limit imposed on the exploration of alterity by the projection of an anthropological self and its unconscious. The problem this continues to pose is that anthropologists who take for granted the epistemic possibilities of human sciences as they move beyond it cannot but reduce alterity to alterity from their projected selves. Burning translations set this normalizing projection aflame to illuminate alterity beyond a reference to the self. Swift observes that “in the City of God, Augustine plays merry hell with pagan multiplicity” by projecting “a monistic hermeneutic reflex, the explanatory model of reduction to One.” But Swift, as an anthropologist, can champion “multiplicity” from the interests and gods of “informants” by taking for granted (or “ontologizing”) the anthropological episteme that can establish “ethnographic facts” as facts and produce “empirical imperatives” as ontological and ethical imperatives. This is perhaps when Swift’s anthropological calculus (or monism) is closest to “Augustine’s Christian calculus” and furthest from philosophers of science such as Paul Feyerabend BURNING TRANSLATIONS (but also Thomas Kuhn, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem) who ventured beyond any one paradigm in order to theorize it. My conceptualization of translation as an opening to “the outside” also recalls the Shi’i pedagogical style that recognizes unprecedented cases as falling kharij (outside) of existing discourse and the ethical formation of the community. Such cases constitute a challenge for authoritative discourse and are addressed by the most senior scholars in highest level of Shi’i pedagogy, which are identified as dars-e kharij (the outside lesson). In the space of the outside, the scholar mobilizes all sources of judgment and walks students beyond the epistemological and ethical limits of the discursive tradition to offer a “learned judgment” (ijtihad) on the case at hand.1 The scholar’s judgment is at best an approximation of authoritative truth because the gulf between human and divine knowledge is unbridgeable. Unlike prophets and their heirs (such as the Pope in Catholicism), Shi’i scholars do not embody prophetic powers of judgment. Their judgments are singular approximation of prophetic voice in the languages of the humans. As such, the encounter with the outside constitutes a trial for both the particular scholar and the lay Shi’i who choose to defer to his judgment. However, the fate of this trial, which is also the fate of the ethical community, ultimately remains unknown and unknowable by humans. My point is not to translate Shi’i doctrine as a social fact or pose it as a contemporary authoritative tradition as it is possible to do within the pluralist discourse of anthropology of religion. I am trying to translate and reflect on the urgency of translation amid the withdrawal and impossibility of tradition. I invoke kharij and ijtihad to conceptualize burning translation as speculative and imaginative opening to the outside in the condition of epistemological and ethnical uncertainty. Beyond my work in Iran, historical and anthropological studies that have ventured past linguistic, religious, and racial foils of alterity include an archive of what I’ve been calling burning translations. These include, for example, Omnia El Shakry’s (2017) and Sarah Pinto’s (2020) studies of psychoanalysis in, respectively, Egypt and India. They 1. Allama al-Hilli (1250–1325) describes the practice of ijtihad in the following terms: “In ordinary language ijtihad means ‘exerting oneself to the utmost of one’s ability in order to accomplish a difficult action,’ and in the technical language, ‘the jurist exerting himself to the utmost of his ability to attain a probable opinion (zann) about a ruling in the Sacred Law’” (Hilli1988: 243). Milad ODABAEI also include the practices of translation, archiving, and documentation that Marisol de la Cadena (2015) thinks through with her Andean interlocutors and Amiria Salmond (2014) describes in her work with, and for, the Te Aitanga a Hauiti Māori people in New Zealand. Across these cases, burning translations confront unknowing and uncertainty by opening to the outside of knowledge and community as its condition of possibility. Anthropological debates about translations are belated reckonings with a particular history of translation and the more general circulation of ideas, things, and power that give rise to the question of boundaries and problematization of alterity. When they are not, at the same time, a reflection on anthropology, they limit the conversation about translation to anthropology. Anthropologists first move across languages, cultures, traditions, ideologies, worlds, etc., and then question the generalizability of these very terms as concepts. In their selfreflexivity as a community of discourse, anthropologists enact translations in and in between languages and between language and other mediums before theorizing “translation” (Jakobson 1959; Hanks and Severi 2014; de la Cadena 2015). While debates about translation can be waged as a defense of the discipline or a particular interpretative paradigm (dialogical anthropology, the ontological turn, etc.), they can also be seen as the critical recognition of difference and alterity as the condition of possibility of translation and knowledge more generally. Affirming Swift’s call for “radical ‘radical interpretation,’” I have suggested the need to radicalize foreignizing translations beyond a reference to the self. Burning translations do not assume “anthropology” and do not assume that anthropological terms and theories are “ours.” They set fire to terms and concepts to illuminate situations that precede and exceed economies of recognition and exchange, including anthropology itself. Burning translations are neither reduction to One but also not simply proliferations of Many. They can perhaps best be described as urgent speculations that are idiomatic and singular. 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Milad ODABAEI is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. His research explores the intersections of anthropology and critical theory around questions of history and historiography of Iran, religion and politics, violence and subjectivity, as well as translation and migration. His writings have appeared in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Iranian Studies, Debates do NER, Comparative Islamic Studies, and the edited volume Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906 and narratives of the Enlightenment (edited by Ali Ansari, Gingko Press, 2016). Milad Odabaei modabaei@princeton.edu