TALAL ASAD

The Concept of Cultural

Translation in British Social
Anthropology

Introduction
All anthropologists are familiar with E. B. Tylor's famous defJ
llillon of culture: "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethno
graphic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief,
art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits ac
quired hy man as a member of society." It would be interesting to trace
how and when this no~ion of culture, with its enumeration of "capabil
ities and habits" and its emphasis on what Linton called social heredity
(focusing on the process of learning), was transformed into the notion
of a text-that is, into something resembling an inscribed discourse.
One obvious clue to this change is to be found in the way that a notion
of Language as the precondition of historical continuity and social
learning ("cultivation") came to domjnate the perspective of social an
thropologists. In a general way, of course, such an interest in language
predates Tylor, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it
tended to be central to varieties of nationalist literary theory and edu
cation (cf. Eagleton 1983 :ch. 2) rather than to the other human sci
ences. When and in what ways did it become crucial for British social
anthropology? I do not intend to attempt such a history here, but
merely to remind ourselves that the phrase "the translation of cul
tures," which increasingly since the 1950S has hecome an almost banal
description of the distinctjve task of social anthropology, was not al
ways so much in evidence. I want to stress that this apparent shift is
not identical with the old pre-Functionalism/Functionalism periodiza
tion. Nor is it simply a matter of a direct interest in language and
meaning that was previously lacking (Crick 1976). Bronislaw Mali
nowski, one of the founders of the so-called Functionalist school,
wrote much on "primitive language" and collected enormous quan

14 2

T AL.o\L ASAD

lItles of linguistic mate ria l (prove rbs, kinship terminology, magical

s pe lls, a nd so on) for anth ro pological analysis. But he never thought

of his work iin ter m s of the translation of cultures.

Godfrey Lien h ard,'s paper " Modes of Thought" (1954) is possibly

one o f the earl iest- certainly one of the most subtle- examples of the
use of Ilnis l'1otion of translation explicitly to describe a central task of
social anthropology. ""Fhe problem of describing to others how men2.
bers of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one-"f'
translaLion. of making the coherence primitive thought has in the lan- : ~
guages it rcally lives in , as clear as possible in our own" (97). This state
ment is quoted and crit.icized in the article by Ernest Gellner that I
an alyze in the next section, and I shall return to it in the context of
Gelln er's argument. Here I draw attention briefly to Lienhardt's lise of
the word "translation" to refer not to linguistic matter per se, but to
"modes of thought" that are embodied in such matter. It may not be
withollt sign ificance, incidentally, that Lienhardt has a background in
En glis h literature, that he was a pupil of F. R. Leavis's at Cambridge
before h e became a pupil and collaborator of E. E. Evans-Pritchard's
at Oxford.
Oxford is, of cou rse, famous as the anthropological center in Brit

ain Illost self-conscious about its concern with "the translation of cul

tures." The best-known introductory textbook to emerge from that

center, J o hn Beattie's Other Cultu.r" (1964), emph asized the centrality

of the "problem of translation" for social anthropology a nd distin

guished (but did not separate) "culture" from "language" in a way that

was becoming familiar to anthropologists- though not necessarily

therefore entirely clear (see pp. 89 - 90).

It is inte resting to find Edmu nd Leach, who has never been associ

ated with Oxford, employing the same no tio n in his conclusion to a

historical sketch of social ant hropology a decade later:

Let me recapitulate. We started by emphasizin g how diffe rent a re "the

or.hers"- a nd made them nOl only different but remote <md inferior. Se nti

mentally we then took th e opposite track and a rgued that a ll huma n beings

are alike ; we can understand T rob riand ers o r (he Barotse because their Olod

vations are just the sa me as o ur ow n; but that didn't work eit her, "rhe othe l's"

remained obstinately othel'. But now we have come to. ~ee that the esse nti~

.l...problem is o ne of transla ti o n, T he ling uists have show n us that all translation

is difficult, and that perfecluanslatio n is usually impossible . And yel we know
that for practical purposes a tOle rably satisfacto ry translation is a lways pos
sible even when the o ri g in al "text" is highl y abstruse. Languages are di.ITere_llt
but not so different as a ll that. Looked at in this wa y socia l anth ropologists are
engaged in establishing a methodo logy for the translation of cultural lan
guage. (Leach ' 973 :77 2)

The Concept of Cultural Trans lation

'43

Even Max Gluckman (197 3: 905), responding shortly afterward

to Leach, accepts the centrality of "cultural translation," while propos
in g a very different genealogy for that anthropological practice.
Yet despite the general agreement with which this notion h as been
accep,ed as part of the self-defini tion of British social anthropology, it
has received little systematic examina tion from within the pro fession.
One partial exception is Rodney Need ham's Belief, Language, and Expe- I l~, .
'riente ('97 2). This is a complex, scholarly work tha t deserves extended
treatment. Here , however, I wis h to concentra te o n a shoner te xt.
Ernest Gell ner's "Concepts and Society," which appears to be fairly
widely used in undergraduate courses a t British universities and is still
available in several popu lar collections. I propose, therefore, to d evote
the next sectio n to a detailed examination of that essay and then to
take up some points tha t e merge from m y discussion in the sectio ns
that follow.

A Theoretical Text
Gellner's "Concepts a nd Society" is concerned with the way in
which Functio nalist anthroPQlogists deal with problems of inter pret- '
ing and tra nslating the discourse of alien societies. His basic argume nt
is that (a) contemporary anthropologists insist on interpreting exoti!:
concepts and be lie fs within a social context, but that (b) in doing SO j
the y ensure that apparently absurd or incoherent as~~r~ions are al
ways given an acceptable meaning, and that (c) while the contextual \
method of interpretation is in principle valid, the "excessive ch~_r.Lt..y lt
that usually goes with it is not. The paper contains several d iagrams
intended to fix and clarify the relevant cultural processes visually.
Gellner introduces the problem of interpretation hy refere nce to
Kun Samuelsson's R eligion and Economic Action (1961), which is a n
economic historian's attack on the Weberian Protestant-ethic thesis.
Samuelsson takes issue witb the fact that Weber and his supporters
have reinterpreted religious texts in a way that. enables them to extract
meanings that confirm the thesis. Gelln er presents this example merely
to bring out more sharply the contrasting position of the Funct.ionalist
anthropologist:
I am not concerned, nor competent, to argue whether Samuelsson's employ
ment, in this particular case, of his tacit principle (hat one must not re
interpret the assertions one actually finds, is valid. What is relevant here is
that if such a principle is made explicit and generalized, it would make non
sense of most sociological studies of the relationship of belief and conduct. We

'14

TALAL ASAO

sha ll find a nthro pologists d"jven LO employ the ve r y o pposite p,-inciple, th e

insistence rather tha n refusal of con l.exlual re- ime '-p'-etatio n . (20)

But this mod est disclaimer of com petence allows too llla ny in ter
esting questions 10 drift by. To begin with , it calls for no great com pe
te nce to note that Sa muelsson d oes not hold 10 the principle that one
must never reinte rpre t. Nor does he insist that there is never a sig ni fi
canl con nectio n between a religious text a nd its socia l context. but
o nl y that the concl usion the Weber thesis seeks 10 make can not be es
tablished. (See, e.g., SamuelsS!", '96, :69.) There is, fu rthermore, a
real contrast that Gellner mig ht have picked up between the Samuels
son example and the typical a nthropo logist's predicament. For eco
no mic hislOria ns a nd socio logists in volved in the We ber d eba te, his
torical texts a re a primary d atum in relatio n to which the soci.~l
co ntexts must be reconstructed . The a nth ropological field worker be
with a social situation within which somethin g is saj d~ and it is the
cu ltural signifICance of these e nunciations that must be reco nstructed,
This is not to say, of course, that the historian ca n ever a pproach his
arc hi val material wi LilOU L some conceptio n of its historical context, o r
that the field worker ca n define the social situation independ emly of
what was said within it. The con trast, such as it is, is one of orienta
tion, which follows from the fact thauhe historia n is given a text and
the e thnograp he r has t o C011S/ruet 01le.
Instead of investigating this importa nt contrast, Gellner rushes
along to define and commend what he calls " modera te Functional
ism" as a method, which

rglns

consists of th e insistenc.e on the fan th at conce pts a nd be liefs do no t exist in

isolation , in texts o r in indi vidual Ininds, but in the life of me n and socielies.
':rhe activities a nd instiuHions, in the co nleXl o f which a wOI'd o r phrase o r set
of phrases is used, must be known before that word o r those phrases can be
understood, before we can reall y speak of a concept Or a beLief. (22)

This is well put, and. even if it has been said before, it is worth
restating. At this point the reader might ex pect a d iscussio n of the dif
fe rent ways in wh ich la nguage is e ncounte red by tne ethnographer in
the field, how utterances are produced . ve rbal meanings organized,
rhetorical effects a ttai ned , a nd culturally appropriate res po nses elic
ited. After all, Wittgcnstein had alread y se nsitized British philoso
phe rs to the complexity of lang uage-in-use, and J. L. Austin had set
up distinctions betwee n the different levels o f speech prod uction and
reception in a way that fo reshadowed what anthropologists would
later call the ethnography of speaking. But Gellner had previously re
jected the suggestion that this philosophical mo vement had a n y th ;~g
of value to teach (see his polemic in Words a.nd Things '959), a nd like
o ther critics , he always insisted that its co ncern with understa nding

The Concept of Cultural Translalion

'45
everyday language was merely a d isguise for defend ing establ ished
ways of speakin g about the world, for denying tha, it was possible for
such speech-ways to be illogical or absurd. Gellner h as always been de
term ined to maintain the distinction between defending and explain
ing "concepts and beliefS" and to warn against the kind of anthropo
logical translation that rules out a priori the critical distance necessary
for explaining h ow concepts actually function, for "to understand the
w01'king of the concepts of a society," he writes, "is to understand its
instit.utions" (p. ,8; see also note, on the same page).
This is why Gellner's brief statement about moderate Functional
ism quoted above leads him imm ed ia tely to a discussion ofDurkheim's
Elementa.ry Forms of th.e Rehgio'us Life, which, besides being "one of the
fountainheads of Functionalism in general" (22), is concerned to ex
plain rather than to c1efend concepts- to explai n , more p recisely, " lhe
compu lsive nature of our categorial concepts" (22) in terms of certain
collective processes . Thus:
Our contempo rary invocations of the functional , social-context approach to

the sLUdy and interpretation of concepts is in various ways very different from
Du rkheim's. Durkheim was not so much conce rned to defend the concepts of
primitive societies: in their sening. they did not need a defence. and in the
setting of modern and changing societies he was not anxiolls to defend what
was archaic, nor loath to suggest that some intelleclualluggage might we ll be
archaic, H e was really concerned lO explain the cOf!.lpulsiveness of what in
practice did not seem to need any defence (a nd in so doing. he claimed he was
solving the problem of knowledge whose solution had in his view evaded Kanr.
and oth ers, and to be solving it. without falling into either empiricism or a pri
orism), Whether he was successfu l I do no t propose to discuss: for a var iety of
reasons it seems (0 me that he was not. (23)

It is clear th at Gellner has recognized the basic project of Elemen

tary Forms- namely, its attemp t to explain the compulsive nature of
socially d efined concepts- but he moves too h astily from a cons idera
tion of what might be involved in such a problem to a dismissal of
Durkheim's attempt a t explanation. The possibility that a pl'iori de
nunciation may not further the purposes of explanation any better
than defense does not seem to be envisaged in "Concepts and Society."
Instead, the reader is reminded, by way of quotation from Lienhardt,
that the contemporary anth ropologist typically "appears to make it a
condition of a good translation that it conveys the coherence which he
assumes is there to be found in primitive thought" (26). So we have
here what I think lS a misleading contrast-Durkheim's attempt to ex
plain versus the contemporary anthropologist's attempt to defend. I
shall return to this point later, but here I want to insist that LO a rgue
for a form of coh erence by which a discourse is held together is not
ipso facto to justify or defend that discourse; it is merely to take an

'4 6

TALAL ASAD

essential step in the prohlem of explain ing its compulsiveness. Anyone

familiar with psychoanalysis would take this point quite easily. We

might put it another way: the criterion of abstran "coherence" or
"logicality" (Gellner tend s to use these and other terms interchange
ably) is not always, and in every case, decisive for accepting or reje([~
ing discourse. This is because, as Gellner himself correctly observes,
"Language functions in a variety of ways other than 'referring to ob
jects'" (25). Not every utterance is an assertion. There are many things
thal language-ill-use does, and is intended to do, which explains why we
may J-espond positively to discourse that may seem inadequate from a
narrow "logical" point of view. The functions of a particular langu age,
the intentions of a particular discourse, are of course part of what

every competent ethnographer tries to grasp before he can attempt

an adequate translation into his own language.

Gellner does seem half-aware of this poi11l, but quickly brushes it

aside in his eagerness to display to Functionalist anthropologists their
"excessive charity" in c ultural translation.

The Concept of Cultural Transl;llion

'47

Have we not got here some very curious assumptions, which no

practiced translator would ever make ? The first is that eva luative dis
crimination is always a matter of choosing between polar alternatives,
a nd second , that evaluative distinctions are finall y reducible to "Good"
and "Bad." Clearly neidler of these assumptions is acceptable when
stated as a general rule. And then there is the suggestion thell the
translator's task necessarily involves matching sentence for sentence.

But if the skilled translator looks first for any principle of cohe rence
in the discourse to be translated, and then (ries to reproduce that co
herence as nearly as he Can in his own language, (here cannot he a
general rule as to what units the translator will employ- sentences,
paragraphs, or even larger units of discourse. To tUfn my point

around: the app ropriaten." of the unit employed itself depends on

the principle of coherence.
But Gellner's parable of the anthropologist- translato, requires the
assumption that it is sentences that the latter matches, because that
makes it easier to display how the sin of excessive charity occurs. Hav
ing n1ade an initial equivalence between a sentence in the local lan

The situation , facing a social anthropo logist who wishes to interpret a con
cept, assertion or doctrin e in an alien culture, is basically simple. He is, say.
faced with an assertion S in the local language . He has at his disposal the large
or infinite set of possible semences iu his own language . .
He may not be wholly happy about this situation, but he ca nnot avoid il.
There is no third language which cou ld mediate between the native language
and his own, in which equivalences cou ld be stated and which wou ld avoid the
pitfalls arising from the fact that his own language has its own way of han
dling the world, which may not be those of the native language studied , and
which consequently are 1iable to distort that which is being translated.
Naively, people sometimes think that realit), itself co uld be this kind of
mediator and "third language." ... For a variety of powerful reasons, this is
of COllrse no good. (24-25)

such an impression might be thought to be disparaging the natives he

has studied, and to d isparage other cultures is a sign of ethnocen
trism, and ethnocentrism in turn is a symptom of poor anthropology
according to the doctrines of Functionalist anthropology. Functional
is( method requires that sentences always be evaluated in terms of

Again , (his sensible statement might seem to some readers to su p

together linked, Gellner writes, to the relativistic-functlonalisl view of

port the demand that the elhnographer must try tn reconstruct the
various ways in which the "native language" handles the world , con
veys information, and constitutes experience ~ before translating an

alien discourse into the language of his elhnographic text. But Gell
ner's accoun t proceeds in a different, and very dubious, direction.
Having located an equivalem English sentence, he continues , the
anthropologist notices that it inevitably carries a value connotation

that it is , in other words , either Good or Bad. "1 do not say 'true' or
'false', for this only arises with regard to some types of assertion. With
regard to others, other dichotomies, such as 'meaningful' and 'absurd'
or 'sensible' or 'silly' might apply. I deliberately use the 'Good' and
'Bad' so as to cover all such possible polar alternatives, whichever
might best apply to the equivalent of S" (27)

guage and one in his own , the anthropologist notices that the English
sentence carries a "Bad" impression. This worries the anthropologist
because, so runs Gellner's parable, an ethnographic account giving

their own social context. So the worried anthropologist reinterprets

the original sentence , with a Illore flexible and carefu l use of the con
textual method, in order to produce a "Good" translation.

The sin of excessive charity, and the contextual method itself, are
thought that goes back to the Enlightenment:
The (unresolved) dilemma, which the thought of the Enlightenmem faced ,
was between a rcialivisdc- funClionalist view of thought, and the absolutist
claims of enlightened Reason . Viewing man as part of nalUre, as enlightened
Reason requires. it wished to see his cogniti ve and evaluative activities as pans
of nature too , and hence as varying, legitimately, from organism to o rganism
and comext to conlext. (This is the relativistic-functionalist view.) But at the
same time in recommending life according (0 Reason and Nature, it wished at
the very least to exempt this "jew itself (and , in practice, some others) from
such a relati visrn. (3 1)

Typically, Gellner's philosophical formulation presents this "unre- I

solved dilemma" as an abstract opposition between two concepts-"a

"

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t~"~

14 8

rAL AL ASAD

relativistic-functionalist view o f thou g ht." and " the absolutist claims of

enlightened Reaso n." BUl ho w do these [\..,0 "concepts" ~o rk as "co r~
relates of ... the institutions of [Western] society"? (cf. Gellner, p . 18).
It would not be difficull LO a rgue ,hat the claims of "enlightened Rea
so n" arc matenally mo r e successful in T hird World countries than
man y relativistic views, that they have exerted greater au./}wn:ty than
th e lattel' in the d evelopment of industrial econo mies and th e form a
lion of nation Slales. We sha n have occasion to discuss this further
when examining tra nslation as a process of power. The point is tha t
" the absolu tist claims o f enlighten ed Reason" arc in e ffec t a.n inslitu
rionalizedforce, a nd that as such it is by de(tnition committed to adva'ncIl ing inw and appropriating alien territory, and that its opponents
(whether explicitly relativistic or not) are by definit.ion defensive. Thus
when Genn er continues on the same page to characterize this abstract
dilemma in the attitudes of anthropologists, he fails to consider wha t
"cUltuqJ translation" might involve when it is considered as institu
tio nalized practice give n the wider relationship of unequal societies.
For it is not the abstract logic of what individual Western an thropolo
gists say in Lheir ethnographies, but the concrete logic of what their
countries (and p erhaps they the mselves) do in their relations with lh e
Third World that should form the starling point for this pa nicula r
discussion . The dilemm as of 'relativism" appear differen tly de pe nd
in g on whether we think of abstracted und erstanding o r of historicall y
~ltuat ed' pracllces.
However, Gellner says he is not in principle against anthropologi
cal relativism. "My main point about tole ran ce-engende ring con
textual interpretation," he writes, "is that it calls for caution" (32). But
why such caution is r eserv ed for "tolerance-engel'ldering" as opposed
. to intolerance-engendering contex tu al interpretations is nOt ex
plained. Afte r all , Gellner insisted earlier that all translated se nten ces
are bound to be received either as "Good" or as "Bad. " Wh y should we
be suspicious only of those that appear "Good'" If "it is the priQr de
te rmination that S, the indi ge nous affirmation, be interpreted favour
ably, which determines just how much (ontext will be taken into con
sideration" (3 3), can we perhaps escape this vicious cin.;ula rity by
adoptin g an "U.11Sp"paliteti( all.ilUde' Gellner does no t address himself
directl y to this possibility here, but one must assume [hat it ca nno t be
a solution, especially in vie w of the claim tha t "there is nothing [sic] i.D
I the nature of things or societies to d ictate visibly just how much co n
text is relevant to any given utterance , or how the context should be
described" (33.).
Yet can this last remark be mean t seriously? Nothing?! How, then ,
is communication even between individuals in the sam e society ever

The Concept of C ultural Translation

149

possible ? Wh y does one ever say to foreigners that th ey have mIS

understood so methi ng they heard or saw? Does social learning pro
duce no skills in th e discrimination of relevant conte xts? T he answers
to these questions should be obvious, and they are connected with the
fact tha t the anthropologist's translation is not merely a matte r of
matching sen tences in the abstr.act. but of lean.!ing 'ojiv~ another fOrrrv!.f ~
J.ife and to sp eak another kind E f langu age. Which con texts a re rele
\.JO vant in differen t discursive events is something one learns in the
~~ u~-se o f Ji ving. and even th ough it is often ve r y difficult to verbalize
lhat knowledge, it is still knowled ge about something "in the nature of
society," a bout some aspect of hving, that indicates (a lthough it does
not "dictate") just how much context is relevant to a ny given utter
ance. T he point, of course, is not that the ethnographer cannot know
what context is appropriate for giving sense to typica l stat.ements, or
that he is induced to be more charitable tha n he should be in trans lat
ing the m, but that his attempts at trans lation ma y meet with proble ms
rooted in the linguislic materials he works with and the social co ndi
tions he works in-both in the field and in his own society. More on
this later.
T he latter ha lf of Gellner's essay is devoted to exa mples from eth
nographic studies in ord er to display, fi rst, excessive cha rity in transla
tion, and then, the explana tor y advantages of taking a critical look at
the logic of alien religious discourse.
The first se t of exa mples comes from Evans-Pritcha rd 's NU~I R eli
gion ( 1956), in which odd-sounding initial translations of Nu er reli
gio us d iscourse, such as the notorious statemen t tha t "a twin is a bi rd,"
are re inte rpreted. "This kind of statement," Gellner obser ves,
"ap pears to be in conAict with the princi ple of idel1lity o r non
contradiction, or witb common sense, or with manifest observable
fact : human twins are nOI birds, ahd vice versa" (34). Accordin g to
Gellner, Evans-Pritcha rd's reinterpretation absolves Nuer thou g ht
from the charge of "pre-logical mentality" by an arbitrary use of the
conlextual melhod. T h e apparent absurdity is reinterpreted to deny
that Nuer beliefs conAict with manifest fact by relating the meaning of
the "absurd " statement to "logical" behavio r. Gellner indicales ho w
this is done by quoting (with the deliberate omission of one significant.
sentence) from Evans-Pritchard:
no contradiction is involved in the statemenl which, o n the contrary, appears
quite se nsibl e and eve n true, to one who presenLS the id ea to himself in the
Nuer lan guage and within Ih eir system of religi ous thoug ht. [He d oes not
then ta ke th eir statements about [wins any mo re litera lly than they ma ke and
und erstan d them themselves.] They a.re 1U)t saying thal a. I.win has a. beo.It, feathers,
and so forth. Nor 'i-n lheir everyday relalilms as t-wins do Nuers speak of them (IS bi-,.ds or

,r'

15 0

TA LAL ASAD

act towards them as though they were birds. (35. Sentence in brackets omitted by

Cellner; emphasis supplied by Cellner.)

At this point Gellner breaks off the quotation and inteljects in
mock despair: "But what, then, would count as pre-logical thought ?
Only, presumably, the be haviour ofa totally demented person, suffer
ing from perman ent hallucinations , who would treat something which
is pe rceptibly a human being as though it had all th e attributes of a
bird " (35). So eager is Gellner to nail utterances that must count as
expressions of "pre-logical thought" (why is he so eager?) that he does
not pause to consider carefully what Eva ns-Pritchard is trying to
do. In fact, Evans-Pritchard devotes several pages to ex plaining this
strange senten ce. It is plain that he is concerned to explain (in terms of
Nuer social life), not to ju-slify (in terms of Western commonsense, or
Western values). The aim of this kind of exegesis is cenainly not to
persuade Western reade rs to adopt Nuer religious practices. Nor does
it rule out the possibility that individual speakers make mistakes or
utter absurdities in the ir religious discourse when e mploying their
traditional ways of thinking. It is not clear, therefore, why Gellner
should point to this example from Nner Religion to substantiate his
charge of excessive charity on the part of Functionalist anthropolo
gists. Evans-Pritchard is trying to explain the coherence that gives
N uer re ligious discourse its sense, not to defe nd that sense as having a
universal status-after all , Evans-Pritchard himself was a Catholic
both before and after his monograph on Nuer religion was written.
Now whether Evans-Pritchard succeeds in expla ining the basic co
herence of Nuer religious discourse is, of course, another question.
Several British anthropologists-for example, Raymond Firth (1966)
-(though not, to my knowledge , any Nuer themselves) have disputed
aspects o f Evans-Pritchard's interpre tation . But such disagreements
are still about different ways of making sense of Nuer religious dis
course, not about too mu ch Or tOO little "charity" in translation . In fact
contrary to Gellner's allegations, Evans-Pritchard's exegesis does make
, quite explicit apparent "contradicti ons," or at least ambiguities, in
Nuer concepts-for example, betwee n the notion of "a supreme and
omnipresent be ing" and that of "lesser spiriL'," both of which are cate
gorized as kwolh. And il is precisely because Evans- Pritchard insists on
keeping the d ifferent se nses of kwolh together as parts of "one con
cept" and does not treat lhem as homonyms (as Malinowski might
have done by relating the word to different contexts of use) that
the Nuer conce pt of spirit might be said to be "contradictory." But
whether the identifica tion of ambiguities and "contradictions" in the
basic conceptual repertoire of a language provides obvious evidence
of "pre-logical thought" is, of course, a different issue-I would sug-

The Concept of Cultural Translalion

'5'

gesl that only someone with a very naive unders tanding of what was
involved in translation cou ld think that it does .

Yet Gellner's discourse typically evades the issues it seems lo be

raising, in a style that seeks to hurry the reade r along over a series of

archl y phrased disclaimers:

I do nOI wish to be misunderstood: I am twl arguing thai Evans-Prilchal'd's
account of Nuer concepts is a bad one, (Nor am I anxious to revive a doctrine
of p,-e- Iogical mentality a fa Levy-Bruhl.) On the contrar~ , I have the greatest
admiration for it. What I am anxiolls to argue is thal contextual interpreta
lion, which offers an account or what asserlions "reall y mean" in opposition to
what they seem to mean in isolation , does not by itse lf clinch matters. (3 8 )

Now who would have claimed it did ? Certainly Evans-Pritchard does

not. In any case the opposi tion between a "contexLUal intel-pretatio n"
and one that is not contextual is enlirely spurious. Nothing has mea n

in g "in isolation ." The problem is always, what kind of co nleXl?

But that is somethin g Gelln er never discusses, except by suggest
ing that the answer must involve a vicious circu larity- or by utterin g
repeated warnings against "excessive" charity (whe n is charity not "ex
cessive"?). He appears unaware that for the lranslator the problem of
determining the relevant kind of co ntext in each case is solved by shi ll
in th e use of the langtlages concerned, not by an a prio ri "a ttitude" of
intolera nce or tolerance. And skill is something that is learned- th at
is, something .that is necessa rily circular, but not vi ciously so. We are
dea ling not with an abstract matching of two sets of sentences, but
with a socia l practice rooted in modes of life. A translator may make
mistakes, or he may knowingly misrepresent something- much as
peopl e make mistakes or lie in everyday life. But we cannOl produce a
gen eral principle for identifying such things , panicularly not through
warnings to be ca reful of "the contextual method of inte rpretation."
And so to a nother of Gellner's charming disclaimers: "To say all
this is not to argue for a scepticism or agnosticism concerning what
membe rs of alie n languages mean , soilless to c:lrgue for an abstentio n
from the contextual melhod of interpretation . (On the contrary, I
shall argue for a fuller use of il, full er in the sense of allowing fo r the
possibi lity that what people mean is sometimes absurd .)" (39). The
charm of this statement consists in Gellner's cheeky appropriation of
his opponent's method to strengthen his own distinctive positioll .
But before that is done, we are given furt her exampl es or th e
tolerance-engendering contextual me thod at work in Leach's Pobticu.l
Systems of H ighland Bunna. Thus according to Leach , Kachin state
ments about the supe rn atural world are "i n the las t analysis, nothing
more than wa ys of describing the formal relationships that exist
between real persons and real groups in ordinary Ka chin society"

r.. -

~ .

.I\SoI

15 2

TALAl. ASAD

(quoted on p. 40). At this point Gellner intervenes: " It is possible to

what has happened. Leach's exegetic procedures ha ve also

Isavesl.1he K~chins {rom being credited with wbat they appear to be say

i!1g" and th~.~ made it possible " to auribute _meaning to assertions

which might otherwise be found to lackit" (41). Gellner goes on to

insist that he is not concerned LO dispute Leach 's interpretati ons, but

merely "to show how the Tange of context, a nd the manner in which

th e context is seen , necessarily affect the intel-pretation" (4 1). This is a

significant remark, because it is indeed not Leach's reductionism to

which Gellner objects (we shall find him insisting on it him self later in

connection with Berber religious ideology) but to the fact that this ex
ample of reductionism- which Gellner misleadingly call s "contex

tualism "- seems to defend, rather than to attack, the cultural dis

I discern

course co ncerned.

Gelln e r's demonstration of how "the uncharitable may be 'contex

tualist' in the second, deeper and better sense" (42) begins by present
ing a fictitious word in a fictitious society-the word "bable," used in a
way rem"rkably like the English word "noble." Thus we are tOld that it
can be applied to people who actually display certain habitual forms
of conduct, as well as to people who occupy a particular social status
irrespective of their behavior. "But the point is: the society ill question
does not distinguish two concepts, boble (a) and boble (b). It only uses
tlte word boble LOlit court" (42). Tbe logic of bobility is then analyzed
further to show how

t,.'

C'I...., fI

'Q'

,I;.

'r

bobility is a co nceptual device by which the privileged class of the society in

question acquires some of the prestige of certain virtues respected in that so
ciety, without the in con venience of needing [0 practice it. thanks to the fact
that the same word is app lied either to practitioners or those vinues or TO oc
cupiers of favoured posirions. h is, at the same time, a manner of rein ro ,'cin g
the ap peal of those virtues, by associating them . thro ugh the use or the same
appellation, wit h preslige and pO\\rer. But a ll this needs to be said, and to say it.
is to bring out the inte rnal logica l in co hc.'e nce or rhe concep t-an incoher
ence which , ind eed, is socia ll y functional. (42)

In fact ~he concept of "bobility" is not shown to be incoherenl~even if

it be accepted lhat the ambiguity of the word allows it to be used in
political discou rse to consolidate tbe legitimacy of a ruling class (and
therefore, in principle, also to undermine that legitimacy), Gellner's
satisfied conclusion to his fictional example is surely far too hasty:
" What this sbows , however, is that the over-charjtable interpreter, de
termined to defend the concepts he is investigating from the charge
of logical incoherence, is bound to misdescribe the social situation. To
make sense ~f the concept is to mahe nonsense of the society" (42, emphasis
added). t,:learly the word "bobility" makes sense to its users in particu-

The Concept or Cu ltura l Translacion

153

lar state m e fHS (or tlley would not use it), and it makes sense ~lso, al
thou gh- of a different kind , to Gellner, who states that by deceiving its
llsel-S it somehow upholds a social S.t.ruClure. Sense 0 t.:..nonsense , lik~
tl-utb or falsehood, applies to s.tatemenls and not to abs_~ract concepts.
There seems to me no evidence here of a "nonsensical" concept, be
c,!!:se there is no analysis of sociall y situated state!!lents.

But there is also a more important failure evident in this example:

",lW <IC~
the lack of any attempt to explore its cohere~-that which makes its
social effect such a powerful possibility. or course, political discourse
employs lies, half-truths , logical trickery, and so on. Yet that is n0
what gives it its cornpu..lsive character, any more than the use of true or ~ ,'lLO.' \~ .'
~:!ear statements does, and compulsiveness b,.precisely wha t is in volved
in Gellner's example. It. is not the abstract logical status of concep-,ts
that is relevant here, but the way in which specific political discourses
seem to mobilize or direct the behavior of people within given cu lwra l
~i ~ua tions. The compulsiveness of "bobility" as a political concept is a
feature not of gullible minds but of co herent discourses a nd practices.
T hat is why it is essential for a translator of powe rful political ideolo
gies to attempt to convey something of this coherence, To make non
sense of the concept is to make no nsense of the society.
Gellner's final example comes from his own fieldwork amo ng the
ce ntral Moroccan Berbers, and is intend ed to clinch the argument
thal a n unc haritabl'e con textu aIist makes better sense of the society he
describes by emphasizing the incoherence of its concepts: "Two con
cepts are relevant," he writes , "baraka and agu.rra1n (pI. iguTramen).
Bm'aha is a word which can mean simply 'enough', but it also means
plenitude, and above all blessedness manifested amongst other things
in prosperity and the power to cause prosperity in others by super
natural means, An agurram. is a possessor of baraka" (43),
Igurramen-translated as "saints" in Gellner's later writings (e,g.,
Ig6g)-are a fairly privileged and influential minority in the tribal so
ciety of central Moroccan Berbers who act as foci of religious values
and also as n1ediators and arbitrators amongst the triba l popu lation
with whom they live. "The local belief is that they are selected by God.
Moreover, God makes his choice manifest by endowing those whom
he has seJected with certain characteristics, including magical powers,
and great generosity, prosperity, a consider-the-lilies attitude, paci
fism, and so forth" (43).
This is Gellner's "translation. " But his too-fluent use of" re ligious
vocabu lary with strong, and peThaps irrelevant, C hristian overtones
rn ust prompt doubts and questions at this point. What precisely are
the behavior and discourses translated here as "a consider-th e-lili es at
titude," " makes his cho ice manifest." and "endowin g," [or in stance?
Do the Be rbers believe that God endows their "saints" with disposi

154

TAL.i\L ASAD

tional charaCleristics su ch as "great generosity and pacifism," or do

tbe y take it rathe r tha t these characteristics are conditions of sai ntli
ness, of the closeness of igu.TTGmen to God ? Do the Berbers really be
have as tho ugh re ligious and moral virtues were "ma nifestations" of
divine choice? What do they say and how do they behave when people
fail to display the virtues they ought to have? By whom is an agurram's
behavior conceptuali zed as a "consider-the-lilies a ttitude," given that
he has both family and property, and that this fact is ta ke n by the Ber
bers to be perfectly in order? Gellner does not give the reader the
relevant evide nce for answering these important questions, whose sig
nificance for his translation will emerge in a n10menl.
Th e reality of the situation is, however, th aL the igu'f1'amen are in fact se
Iecr.cd by the surrounding ordinary tribesmen who us e their servi ces, by being
ca lled to perform tho~e services and being preferred to the rival ca ndidates
for their performance, Whal appears to be vox Dei is in reality vox populi.
Mo r eover, the maHe r' or the blessed characteristics, the stigmata [s ic] of
agunmn-hood is more complicated . It is esse mi all.ha t successful candidates to
agu1'ram stat us be ClwLiled with (hese charaCle ristics, bUl it is equ all y essenrial,
at any rale with regard to some of th em, (h al they sho uld not really possess
r.hem. For instance, a n agurram who was extremely ge nero us in a consider
the-lilies spirit would soon be impoverished and, as such , fa il by another cru ,
cia l !.eS I, that of prosperity.
There is here a crucial divergen ce hetween concept and reality, a di ver
gence whi ch moreover is quite essentia) for the working of the social system.
(43 - 44)

I,
I
I"

I
II

It is not at all clear from the account given by Gellner what is

meant by th e statement, "The local belief is that they are selected by
God"- "selected " for what exactly? For being a rbitrators? But arbitra
tion must be initiated by one or o ther member of the tribal society,
a nd that fact can hardl y be unknown to the tribesmen, For being pa
cine? But padfism is a virtue, no t a reward . For worldly success and
prosperity? But that cannot be a local definition of saintliness, or the
French colonial rulers would have been regarded as more saintly than
a n y agurram.
It is really no great explanatory ac hievement for a Europea n an
thropologist to inform his ag nostic and/o r modern European readers
tbat the Berbers believe in a particular kind of direct intervention of
the deity in their affairs, tha t they are of cOurse mistaken in this be lief,
and that this mistaken belief can h ave social consequences. In this
kind of exercise we do not learn what they helieve, but only that what
they believe is quite wrong: thus, th e Berbers believe that God "se
lects" igu,.ramen; we kn ow God does not exist (o r if some of us still "be
lieve" he does, we "know" h e does not inte rvene directly in secu lar his
tory); ergo the "selecto r" must be a nother agent whom the tribesmen

The Conce pt of C ultural Translation

'55

do n ot know as the agent-in fact, the su rrounding tribesmen them

selves. The ig'UTlamen are "selected" (for a par ticular social role? for a
moral virtue? for a religious destiny?) by the people . The "selection"
a ppears to be vox Dei and is in reality vox populi, Or is it?
In reality the social process descrihed by the anthropologist as "se- I
lection" is the locus of a vox only if it is pretended that that process
constitutes a cultural text. For a text mu st have an author-the one
who makes his voice heard throu gh it. And if that voice cannot be
God's, it must be someone else's-the peo ple's, Thus Gellner the athe
ist insists o n answering a theological questio n : who speaks through
histo ry, through society? In this particula r case, the answer depe nds
on the text containing at once the "real," unconscious meaning and its
appro priate translation, This fusion of signifier and signified is espe
cia lly evident in the way in which the Islamic concept of bamka is made
to sound remarkably like the Christia n concept of grace as portrayed
by an eighteenth-century skeptic, so that the conditions defining the
agurram's baraka are referred to with a knowing Gibbonian smile as l
"stigmata"-and by that deft sign, a portion of the Berber cultura l
text is at once constructed (made up) and designated (shown up)
within Gellner's text, as exquisite a union of word and thing as any to
be found in all his writings,
But society is not a text that communicates itself to the s~illed 1,1 ,i:
reader. It is people who speak. And the ultimate meaning of what
they say does not reside in society-society is the cultural condition in
which speakers act and are ac ted upon . The privileged positio n th at
Gellner accords himself for d ecoding the real meaning of what the
Berbers say (regardless of wha t they think they say) can be mai ntai ned
only by someone who snpposes that translating other cultures is es
sentially a matter of matching written sentences in two languages,
such that the second set o f senten ces becomes the "real meaning" o f
the first-an operation the a nthropologist alone com.rois, 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 (cf. Asad , ed, 1973: 17),
In the middle of his a rticle, when discussing anthropological rela
tivism, Gellner compla ins that "anthropologists were relaLivistic, toler
ant, contextually-comprehending vis-a.-vis the savages who are after
all some distallce away, but absolutistic, intolera nt vis-a.-vis their imme
diate neighbou rs or predecessors, the membe rs of o ur own society
who do not share their comprehending outlook and are the mselves
'ethnocentric' . .. " (3 1).
Why h ave 1 tried to insist in this paper that an yone concerned
with translating from other cultures must look for co herence in dis

I"

15 6

Tbe Conce pt of Cu ltural Translation

TAL AL ASA D

cou rses, and yet devoted so many pages to showing that Gellner's text
is largely incoherent? The reason is quite sim ple: Gellner and I speak
the same language, belong to the same academic p ro fession , live in
the same society. In taking up a critica l sta nce [Oward his text I am
co_ntesting what he says, not tra.nslating it, and the radical d iffere nce be
tween these two activities is precisely what I insist on. Still, the purpose
of my argumen t is nOt to ex press an attitude of "into lerance" LOward
an "imm ed ia te ne ighbour," bUl to try and identify incoherences in his
text that call for remedy, because the anthropo logica l task of transla
tio n deserves to be mad e mo re coherenL. The purpose of this criti
cism , therefore, is to furth er a collective e ndeavor. Criticizing "savages
who are after all some d istance away," in an ethnographic mo nograph
they cannot read , does not seem to me to have the sa me kind of pur~
pose, In order for criticism to be responsible , it must a lways be ad
dressed to someone who ca n contest it.

enla rge and make more coherent. Such a critique-no less than th e
objeCl o f criticism-is a point of view, a (co ntra) version, havin g only
provisional and limited authority.
What happens when the languages concerned are so remote Lhat
il is very di fficu lt to rewrite a harmonio us in/entia? Rud olf Pannwitz.
quoted in the Be njamin essay o n wh ich I ha ve just drawn , ma kes the
following observation:

The lnequality of Languages

d..'\;

A ca reful read ing of Gellner's paper shows tha t although he

raises a number of important questions, he not only fails LO a nswe r
them , but misses some of the most cru cial as pects of the problem with
which the ethnograph e r is engaged. The most interesting of these, it
seems to me, is the problem of what one might call "unequal lan
guages"- and it is this I wan t now to discuss in some d emit.
All good translatio'n see ks to reproduce tbe structure of an alien
discourse within the translator's ow n la nguage. How that strU Cture
(or "coherence") is re produ ced will , of course, depend on the genre
concerned (" poetry," "scie ntific analysis," "narrative ," etc.), o n the re
sou rces of the tra nsla tor's language, as we ll as on the inte rests of the
translator and /o r his readership . All successful translation is pre mised
on the fact tha t it is addressed within a specific language, and there
fore also to a specific set o f practices, a spe.c ific form of life. The fu r
ther that form of life is from the original , the less mechanica l is the
reproduction . As Walter Be njamin wrote: "T he language of a tra nsla
tign can-in fa ct must-let itself go, so that it gives voice LO th e intentio
of t!:!e ~rigina l not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement
to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio"
(1969: 79). It is, incidentally, lo r the reader to evaluate that intentio,
not fo r the translato r to pree mpt the evaluation. A good trans lation
shou ld always precede a critique. And we can turn this around by say
ing that a good criLique is always a n "internal" critique-that is, on e
based on some shared unde rstanding, o n a joint life, which it aims to

' 57

~~

Our tran slations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They
want LO tum Hindi. Gree k, English in to Germa n instead of tunling Ce rman
into Hindi , G ree k, English. OUf translato rs have a far g reater reverence for
the usage of their ow n langu age than for the spirit o f th e foreign works, .. .
The basic erro r of th e lranslal.Or is thal he preserves th e Slate in which his ow n
' lan guage ha ppen s to be instead of a llowing his language to be powerfu ll y a r.
reeted by the foreign long ue, Par'ticula rl y when translating from a langu age
very remote from his ow n he must go back to the primal element.. of lan g'uage
i(sel f and penetrate to the point wh ere work, image, and tone convnge. He
mu st expand and dee pen his langu age by means of the foreign language.
( 1969:80-8, )

This call to tra nsform a language in order to translate the coher

ence o f the original, poses an interesting challen ge to the pe rson satis
fi ed with an absurd-sou nding translatio n on the assumption that the
original must have been equall y absurd: the good tra nsla tor does not
immediately assume th at unusual d ifficulty in convey ing the sense of
an alien disco urse d enotes a fault in the laue r, but in stead critica lly
examines the normal stale o r his or her own la ng uage, The relevant
question therefore is not how tolerant an aUil'Ud.e the translator o ug ht
to display toward the o riginal author (an abstract ethical dil e mma),
but how she ca n test the tolerance of he r own language for assu ming
unaccustomed forms.
But this pushing beyo nd the limits of one's h abitual usages, this
breaking down and reshaping of one's own language through the pro
cess of translation, is never an easy business, in part beca use (if I may II
._be a llowed a h ypostati latio n) it depends on the wi llin gness of the
translator's language to su bject itself to this transform in g power. I a t
tribute, sOlnewhal ficti tiously, volition to the language because I want
to emphasize thal the ma tte r is largely something the transla to r can
not d ete rmine by individua l ac tivi ty (any more than the individual
speake r ca n affect th e evolution of his 01' her la ngua ge)- that it is gov
erned by institutionally defined power re la tions between the lan
guages / modes of life concerned. To pU Lit crudely: because the lang uages of Third World societies-including, of course , the socie ties
l
that social anthropologists have traditionally studied-are "wea ke r" in ,
~'l.
relation [0 Weste rn languages (and tod ay, especia lly [0 English), the y . ,.
are more likely to subm it to forcible r.ransrarmation in the translation

'I
i"

II

'58

TALAL ASAD

p.ocess than the other way around. The reason for this is, first, that in
lh~ir political-econ01Tlic relations with Third World countries, West
ern nations have tbe greater ability to manipulate the latter. And, sec
ond, Western languages produce and deploy desired knowledge mOre
r~ dily than Third World languages do. (The knowledge that Third
World languages deploy more easily is not sought by Western societies
i~uite the same way, or for the same reason.)
Take modern Arabic as an example. Since the early nineteenth
century there has been a grow in g volume of material translated from
European languages-especially French and English-into Arabic.
This includes scientific tex ts as well as "social science," "history," "phi
losoph y," and "Ii[erature." And from the nineteenth cen tury, Arabic
as a language has begun as a result to undergo a transformalion (lex
ica l, grammalical, semanlic) that is far more radical than anything
to be identified in European languages-a transformation that has
pushed it to approximate to the latter more closely than in the past.
1Such Lransformaions signal in equalities in the power (i.e. , in the ca:
parities) of the respective languages in relation to the dominant forms
of discourse that have been and are still being translated. There are
varieties of knowledge to be learnt, but also a host of models to be
imitated and reprod uced. In some cases knowledge of these models is
a precondition for the production of more knowledge; in other cases
it is an end in itse lf, a mimetic gesture of power, an expression of d e
sire for transformation. A recognition of this well-known fact re minds
us that industrial capitalism transforms nOt only modes of production
but also kinds of knowledge and styles of life in the Third World. And
with them, forms of language. The result of half-transformed styles
of life will make for ambiguities, which an unskillful Western trans
la tor may simpl ify in the direction of his own "strong" language.
What does this argument imply for the anthropological concept
of cuituraltranslation? Th at perhaps there is a greater stiffness in eth
nographic linguistic conventions, a greater intrin sic resistance than
ca n be overcome by individual experiments in modes of ethnographic
representation.
In his perceptive essay "Modes of T hought," which Gelln er criti
cizes for making over-charitable assumptions about the coherence of
" primitive thought," Lienhardt has this to say:

II

II

When we li ve with savages and speak their languages , learning to represent

their experience t.o ourselves in their \'lay. we come as near to thinking like
them as \.. e can without ceasing to be ourselves. Eventually. we try to represent
their conceptions systematicall y in the logical constructs we have been brought
up to use; and we hope, at best, thus TO reconcile what ca n be expressed in
their languages, with what can be expressed in ours. We mediate between
their habits of thought. which we have acquired with them, and those of our

The Concept of Cultu ral Translation

'59

own societ y; in doing so, it is not finally some mysterious "primitive philos.,9ph)'"' that we are exploring, but the further potentialities of our thought and

language. ( ' 954: 96-97)

In the fjeld , as Lienhardt rightly suggests, the process of tran slation
takes place at the very moment the ethnographer engages with a spe
cific mode of life-just as a child does in learning to grow up witbin a
specific culture, He learns to find his way in a new environment, and a
new language. And like a child he needs to verbalize explicitly what

the proper way of doing things is, because that is how learning pro

ceeds. (Cf. A. R. Luria on "synpraxic speech" in Luria and Yudovich

197 1 : 50.) When the child /anthropologist becomes adept at adu lt

ways , what he has learnt becomes implicit-as assumptions inform ing

a shared mode of life, with all its resonances and areas of unclarity.
But learning- to live a new mode of life is llot the same as lea rning
about anothe r mode of life. When anthropologists return to their
cauneries , they must write up "their people," and they must do so in
the con ventiolls of representation already circumscribed (already
:'writlen around," "bounded") by their discipline, institutional life,
and wider society. "Cu ltural translalion" must accommodate itself to a
different language not only in the sense of English as opposed to
Dinka, or English as opposed to Kabbashi Arabic, but a lso in the sense
of a British, middle class, academic game as opposed to the modes of
li fe of the "tribal" Sudan. The stiffness of a powerful established
structure of life. with its own discursive games, its OWIl "strong" lan
guages, is what among other things finally determines the effective
ness of the translation: The translation is addressed to a very specific '") Ie
aud,ence, which 's wallmg to read a.bou.t another mod e of life and to
/.
manipulate the text it reads according to established ru les, not to
learn to live a new mode of life.
If Benjamin was right in proposing that translalion may require
not a mechanical reproduction of the original but a harmonization
with its i-nlenlio, it follows that there is no reason why this should be
d one only in the same mode. Indeed, it cou ld be argued that "trans
lating" an alien form of life, another cuitu re, is not always done best
through the representational discourse of ethnog raphy, that under
certain conditions a dramatic performance, the execution of a dance,
or the playing of a piece of music might be more apt. These would all
be productions of the original and nOt mere interpretation s: trans
formed instances of the original , not authoritative textual representa
tions of it (cf. Hollander '959). But would they be thought of by most
social anthropologists as valid exercises in the "translation of culture"?
I think not, because they all raise an e ntirely different dimension of
the relationship between the anr.hropologiGIl "work" and its audience,

160

TALAL ASAD

The Co ncept of Cu ltu ral Trans la tion

the question of different 'Uses (practices), as opposed merely to d iffer

ent unitings and 'readings (meanings) of that work. And as social an
I thropologists we are trained to translate other cu ltural languages as
te xts, no t LO ~n lroduce or enlarge cultural capacities, learnt from
othe r ways of living, into o ur own. It seems to me ve ry likely Ihat th e
notion of culture as text has reinforced this view of OUf task, because it
faci lita tes the assumpt.ion tha t translation is essentia.lly a maller o f ver
bal r e presen tatio n.

Reading Other Cultures

II

II

,,'

..

\..

This inequality in the power of languages, together with th e

fa ct th at the anthro pologist. typicall y writes about an illite rate (or at
any rate non-English-spea king) population for a largely academic,
English -speaking aud ience, encourages a tendency I would now like
to d iscu ss: the tendency La read th e implicit in alien cultures.
According to many social a nthro pologists , the object of ethno
grap hic [1'anslation is not the historically situated speech (t hat is the
,ask of the folklorist or the linguist), but "culture," and to translate
culture the anthro polog ist must. first read a nd then reinscribe the im
plicit meanings that lie beneath /within /beyond si tu a ted speech. Mary
Douglas puts this nicely:
The a nthmpologist wh o draw s Out the wh o le scheme of the cosmos whi ch is
implied in [the obse r ved] practices does the primitive culture g reat vi olence if
he seems to present the cos mo logy as a systematic philosophy suhscribed [ 0
co nsciously by individuals .... So th e primitive world view which I have de
fined above is l'arel y iLSelf an obj ect of co ntemplation and speculation in th e
primiti ve culture. It has evolved as the appa na ge of other social insritutions .
To thi s extent it is produced indirectly. and to this extern the primitive culture
must be taken to be un aware o f itself, un conscious of its own conciitions.
( !966 :9 1 )

One difference between the an thropologist and the linguist in the

matter of translaLion is perba ps this : that whereas the lattel' is imme
diatel y faced with a specifit.: piece of discourse produced within th e
society studied, a discourse that is th.en textualized, the fo rme r must
co nstruct the discourse as a cultural text in terms of meanings imphcit
in a range of practices. T h e constru ction of cultural disco urse and its
translation thus seem to be facets of a single act. This point is brought
out in Douglas's com ments on her Own translations of the meanings o f
the pangolin cult among the Lele:
There are no Lele boo ks of th eology or philosophy to state the meanin g of th e
cult. The me tapbysir:a l implic;.nio ns have not been expressed to me in so man y

161

words by Lcle, nor did I even eavesdrop a cOll versal ion betwee n (Iiviners
covering this ground.
What kind of eVldence for the meaning of this cult, o r of a ny cult, ca n be
sensibly d emanded ? h ca n have many different levels a nd kind s of mea nin g.
BUl the one o n which I gro und my a rg um ent is [he mean in g whic h e me rges
out of a paltern in which the pa rts can in conteslabl y he shown to be regu la rly
related. No o ne membe l- o f tile socie{y is necessar il y aware of the wh o le pat
tern, any more than spea kers a re able to be explicit abo ut the lin g uistic pat
terns they employ. ( 1966: 173- 74)

19,

I've suggested elsewh e re (Asad 1983a) tha t the attribution of im:

p licit mea nings to an a lien prac(jee rega.rdless oj whether th.ey a.re acknowl
edged by its age"~1 is a cha racteristic form of theo logical exe rcise, with II
an ancie nt history. H ere 1 wa nt to note tha t refe rence to the linguistic.
patterns produ ced by speakers does not make a good a nalogy because
linguistic patterns are not meanings to be transla ted, the y are rules to
I;>e systematicall y described and ana lysed. A nat.ive speake r is aware of
how such patterns sho uld be produced even when he ca nn ot verba lize
that knowledge explicitly in the form of rules. T he a pparent lack of
ability to verba li ze sllch social knowledge does not necessaril y consti
tu te evidence of unconscious meanings (cf. Dummett 198 ,) . The con
cept of "unconscious meaning" belo ngs to a theor y of the repressive
unco nscious, such as Freud's, in which a pe rson may be sa id to "know"
so mething unconscio usly.
The business of ide ntifying unconscious meanings in the task o f
"cultural translatio n" is therefo re pe rhaps better com pared to the ac
t~~ity of the psyc hoa n.l ys t tha n to that of the lin guist. Indeed British
anthropologists have sometimes presented their work in precisely
these terms. T hus David Pocock, a pupil of Evans Pritchard's, writes:
In shon , the wo rk of lh e soc ial anthropo logi~t may be rega rd ed as a hig hl y
co mplex act of trans la t.i o n in which author and translato r coll aborare. A more
precise analogy is that. of th e relat io n between the psychoanalyst a nd his sub
ject. The analyst enters th e private wo rld of hi s subjec t in order to lea rn the
grammar of his pri vate la ng ua ge. 1f th e analysis goes nO furth e r it is nO diffe r
em in kind fr o m the und e rsta ndin g which may exist betwee n a ny two peo ple
who kn ow each ot her well.[ !] It beco mes scientific to the exte nt thalthe pri va te
language of intimate und e rsta ndin g is lranslated into a puhlic la nguage, how
ever specialized from the lay ma n's poi nt of view, which in thi s case is t he la n
guage o~ psychologists. But th e particular act of tran slalion does no t disto rt
the priva te expe rie nce of the subj ect and ideall y it is, at least pOle ntia ll y, ac
ceptable to him as a scie ntific represe ntation of it. Similarly, the model o f
Nuer political life which e merges in Pro fessor Evans-PriLchard 's wo rk is a sci
entific model mea ningful to his fellow-sociologists as sociologists, a nd it is
effective beca use it is /JOlenl.iaily acceptable to the Nuer in same ideal situaligll in
which they could be supposed 10 ~e in terested in themselves as nun Living in society. T he
collaboration of na r.ural scientists may from this point of view be see n as de vel

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.62

TALAL ASAD

oping language enablin g ce rlain people ro com municate \,,..ith increasin g s ub~
[lety abo ut a distinct area of natural phenome na whic.h is defined by the name
of the particular science. Their science is, in [he literal meaning of the term ,
their commonsense, their common meaning. To move hom this com mon
se nse to the "com mo n sense" of the wider public involves again an act of
translation. The situ atio n of social anthropo logy, or sociology in ge nel-al , is
not at this le vel so very different. The difference lies in the fact tha t so
ciologica l phe nomena are objectively swelied o nl y to [he extent that th eir su b
jective meani ng is taken in to accou nt and [hat the people studied a re poten
tially capable of sharing lhe socio logical consciousness that [be sociologist has

o f them. ('96 . : 88-89; emphasis added )

'\'ti 'l

....
~

I have quoted this remarkable passage in full because it states very lu

cidlya position that is, I think, broadly acceptable to many anthropol
ogist.s who would otherwise consider themse lves to be engaged in very
different kinds of enterprise. I have quoted it also because the nature
of the collaboration be.tween "auth o r and transla tor" is neatly broug ht
out in the subsequent reference to the psychoanalyst as scientist: if the
a nthropological translator, like the a nalyst, has final authority in d e
term ining the subject's m eanings-it is then the forme r who becomes
tlte Teal au.thoT of the latter. In this view, "cultural translation" is a
matter of d etermining implicit meanings-not the meanings the na
I tive speaker ac tually acknowledges in his speecb, not even the m ean
ings the native liste ne r necessarily acce pts, but those he is " potentially
capa ble of sharing" with scientific autho rity "in some ideal situation":
it is when he can say, for example, with Gellner, that vox Dei is in real
ity vox poPu.li, that he utters the true m eaning o f his traditio nal dis
course, an ~sse ntial meaning o f his culture. The fact that in that " ideal
situation" he would no longer be a Muslim Berber tribesman, but
something coming to resemble Professo r Gellner, does not appear to
worry such cultural tra nslators.
1
This power to create meanings for a subject through the notion of
Ith e "implicit" or th e "u nco nscious," to autho1ize lhem, h as of co urse
been discussed for the ;malyst-analysand relationship (e.g., recently in
Malcolm '982). It has not, t.o my knowledge, been co nsidered with re
gard to what the cultural translato r does. There are, of co urse, impo r
tant differen ces in the case of th e anthropologist. I t m ay be pointed
o ut that the laLter does not impose his translation on the m e mbers of
th e society whose cultural discourse he unravels, that his ethn ography
is therefor e not authoritative in the way the ana lyst's case study is. The
analysand comes to the analyst, or is referred to the latter by those
with authority ove r him, as a patien t in need of he lp. The anthropolo
gist, by co ntras t, comes to the society he wants to r ead, he sees himself
as a learner, not as a g uide, and he withdraws from the society when
he has adequate information to inscribe its culture . H e does not con-

The Concept of Cultural Tra nslation

.63

sider th e society, and ne ither do its members consider themselves to

be, sick: the society is ne ver s~bject to the anthropologist's authority.
But this ar gu me nt is not quite as con clusive as it may seem at first
sig ht. It remaius the case that the ethnographer's tra nslation/ repre
sentation of a particular culture is inevitably a textual construct, that
as representation it cannot normally be contested by th e people to
whom it is a ttributed , and that as a "scientific tex t" it evemually be
comes a privileged element in the potential store o f historical m emory
for the uonliterate society concerned. In mod ern and modernizi ng
societies, inscribed reco rds have a greater power to shape, to reform,
selves and institutions than folk memo ries do. They eve n co nstruct
folk memories. The anthropologist's m onogra ph may return , ret.rans
lated , int.o a "weaker" Third World language. I n the long run, there
fore, it is not the persona l aut ho rity of th e ethnographet, but the so
cial authorit.y of hjs , thnography" th~t matters. And that authority i.
inscribed in the insntutioQalized forces o f indutri al capitalist socie tY..
(see page 158 above), which are constantly tending to pus h the mean
ings of various Third Wo rld societies in a single direction. This is not
to say that there are no r esista nces to this tendency. But "resistance" in
itself indica tes the presence of a dominant force.
I must stress I am not argui ng that ethnography plays an y gTeat
ro le in the reformation of other cultures. In this respect the effects of
ethnog raphy canno t be compared with some other forms of repre
senting societies- for example, tele vision films produced in th e West
that are sold to Third Wo rld countries. (That anthropologists recog
nize th e power of televisio n is re Rected, incideutally, in the increasing
number o f a nt.hropological films being made for the medium in Brit
ain.) Still less can th e effects of ethn ogra phy compare with the politi
cal, economic, and military constraints of the world syste m. My point
is only that the process of "cultural translation" is inevitably enmeshed
in conditions of power-professiona l, national, international. And
among th ese conditions is the a uthority of ethnographers to u ncover
the implicit meanings of subordinate societies. Given that that is so,
t.he interesting question for enquiry is not whether, a nd if so to what
extent, anthropo logists should be relativists or rationalists, critical or
charitable, toward othe r cultures, but how power enters into the pro
cess of "cultural translation," seen both as a discursive and as a non
discursive practice.

Conclusion
For some years I have been exercised by this pu zzle. How is it
that the a pproach exemplified by Gellne r 's paper re mains attractive to

16 4

11

Ii

TALALASAD

so many academics in spite of its being demonstrably faulty? Is it per

haps because they are intimidated by a style? We know, of course, that
a nthropologists, like other academics, learn not merely to use a schol
arly language, but to fea r it, to admire it, to be captivated by it. Ve t this
does not quite answer the question because. it does not LeHus why suc h
;!..Scholarly style should capture so many intellige nt people. 1 now put
forward this tenta tive solutio n. What we have h ere is a style easy to
leach, to learn, and to reproduce (in examination answers, assessmen t
essays, a nd dissertations). I t is a style that facilitates the textualization
of other cultures, that encourages the construction of diagrammatic
ans wers to complex cultural questions, and that is well suited 10 a r
ranging foreig n cultural concepts in clearly marked hea ps of "se nse"
or "nonsense." Apart from being' easy to teach and to imitate, thi s style
promises visible resu lts that ca n readily be graded. Su ch a style must
surely be at a premium in an established university discipline that as
pires to standards of scie ntific objectivity. Is the po ~ larity of this style,
then, not a reflection of the kind of pedagogic institutio n we inhabit?
Although it is now many years since Gellner's paper was first pub
lished, it represents a doctrinal position that is still popular today.
1 have in mind the sociologism according to which religious ideo logies
are sa id to gel lhe ir real meaning from the poli tical or economic struc
ture, a nd the self-confirming methodology acco rdin g to which this re
ducLive semantic principle is eviden r to the (authoritative) anthropolo
gist and not to the people being written abo ut. This position therefore
assumes that it is not o nl y possihle bUl necessary for the a nthropolo
gist to act as tra nsla tor and critic at o ne aIld the same tim e. 1 regard
this position as untenable, and think that it is relations and practices
of power that give it a measure of viability. (For a critical discussion of
this position as it relates to Islamic history, see Asad Ig80.)
The positive point I have tried to make in the course of my inter
rogation of Gellner's text has to do with what I have called the in eq ua l
ity of languages. I have proposed that the a nthropological enterprise
of cultura l tra nslation may be vi tiated by the fact that t.here are asym
metrical tendencies and pressures in th e languages of domina ted and
dominan t societies. And I have suggested that an th ropologists need to
explore these processes in o rde r to determine how far they go in de
fining the possibilities and the limits of effective tra nsla tion.

In additjon to the members of the Santa Fe seminar who discussed an early draft
of this article- and especially Paul Rabinow, wh o commented o n it at length- I wish to
thank Tanya Baker. J oh n Dixon, Rodney Needham, and Keith Nield for their helpful
criticism .