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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Roy Dilley
This paper examines two key concepts in the discourse of social anthropology, a
discipline that engages in the process of cultural translation and the
interpretation of meaning. These two concepts are market and context, both of
which play an important role within social anthropological analysis, and both of
which constitute part of a trans-disciplinary dialogue shared between social
anthropology and other related disciplines.
Panel 2: The Politics of Interdisciplinary Research
Trans-disciplinary Dialogue: Examples from Social Anthropology
Department of Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews, UK
The concept of the market has been shaped profoundly by the discourse of formal
economic theory and, while social anthropologists have attempted to nuance the
usage of this concept within their own analyses, it remains an issue whose
ideological underpinnings and constitutive tropes have serious implications for
the anthropological understanding of how local populations engage with and
conceptualise global social, economic and political processes. The concept of
context has been developed within social anthropology as part of a historical
dialogue with linguistics; indeed the discipline has defined itself in relation
to the centrality of this concept in terms of what is distinctive about
anthropological analysis.
These two examples of trans-disciplinary dialogue are examined with a view to
highlighting how disciplines constitute political arenas in which analysts not
only engage in trans-disciplinary conversations, but also attempt, in the case
of social anthropology specifically, to apprehend how the semantic fields of the
terms they employ correspond or not with those of the peoples who are the
subject of its study. The paper argues that there has to be a triple account of
knowledge practices within the discipline which demands a reflexivity upon our
own discourses, upon those of related disciplines with which it is in dialogue,
and upon those of the people with whom we study.
© IATIS 2003