Ethnographic Encounters: The Processes of

Cultural Translation
Shirley Ann Jordan
School of Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus,
Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP

This paper explores some of the ways in which the contested concept of cultural trans-
lation has been interpreted in anthropology. It describes what cultural translation now
involves for practitioners who research and teach within interdisciplinaryframeworks
– particularly those frameworks constituted by the interface between anthropology
and modern language learning. A variety of ethnographic encounters are examined,
ranging from ethnography in fieldwork abroad to home and auto-ethnography. These
encounters are presented as contexts in which students of modern languages can
explore and experiment with the dynamics of cultural translation.

Ce papier examine diverses rencontres éthnographiques afin d’explorer une tâche

fondamentale mais controversée de l’anthropologue: la ‘traduction culturelle’. Il
établit ce qu’implique actuellement ce concept pour ceux qui décrivent leurs enquêtes
de terrain, et notamment pour ceux qui pratiquent l’éthnographie dans un contexte
interdisciplinaire rassemblant l’anthropologie et l’étude des langues modernes.

Introduction
This article takes as axiomatic the premise that, increasingly, we are all living
in translated worlds1 and that language learning should provide frameworks to
help us negotiate relations within them. My purpose is to reaffirm the impor-
tance of ethnographic encounters for language students and to examine some of
the things that happen in them. I do not intend to cover systematically what vari-
ous projects introducing ethnography to language learners look like, or how they
work and would refer the reader interested in this level of detail to other sources.2
Instead I will focus on issues surrounding the fuzzy and contested concept of
cultural translation and on related debates about how and where cultural trans-
lation might best be done.
Ethnography is all about encounters and throughout the ethnographic
process from fieldwork to text there are a myriad of small, inter-linked acts of
translation. In Figure 1, journey 1 represents ethnographic encounters in the
field. This is where experiential learning about self and other gets done, where
meanings are tried out, where experience slowly becomes understanding and
where encounters and fieldnotes are, in the best cases, constellated with minor
epiphanies of the type: ‘So this is what it/he/she/they mean(s)!’ Journey 2
involves a sustained attempt to translate field experiences and findings (usually)
into text for people who were not there, bridging as well and as reflexively as
possible the gaps between presence and absence, between languages, under-
standings of the world, behaviours and beliefs. Journey 3 is made up of these
encounters with an encounter undertaken by readers of ethnography – encoun-

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Language and Intercultural Communication Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002

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Ethnographic Encounters 97

ters which within the academic world lead to critical debate about what ethnog-
raphy should be and do.
To represent these three journeys properly we should collapse the sides of the
triangle in upon each other to form a palimpsest with 1 folded under 2 folded
under 3, since all journeys remain present and reflect one upon the other but, for
now, the triangle serves my purpose. In the last two decades debate within
anthropology has been intensively focused on issues of power and authority,
representation and rhetoric, and journeys 2 and 3 have been hogging the lime-
light. In this paper I wish particularly to ponder once more on translation as it
happens within the primary journey, journey 1.

Figure 1 Ethnography from fieldwork to text

Defining Cultural Translation
‘Cultural translation’ is one of the many terms in anthropology that have
become so thick with inappropriate and incriminating meanings that we have to
slough off these layers like dead skin every time we want to use them. I should
probably not proceed, therefore, without subjecting it to a little terminological
exfoliation. I will draw on two essays by anthropologists which deal explicitly
with the subject of cultural translation before offering my own – admittedly very
broad – working definition and going on to look at a small number of examples of
it in action. The first essay, Asad’s (1986) ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in
British Social Anthropology’ provides a useful overview of the various interpre-
tations of the concept since the mid-20th century. The second, the more recent
and radical of the essays which seeks to sound the death knell of the concept as a
98 Language and Intercultural Communication

working premiss, is Ingold’s (1994) ‘The Art of Translation in a Continuous

World’.
For Asad (1986: 156), the job of cultural translation remains inherent in anthro-
pological practice and he seeks not to negate it but to ‘make it more coherent’ . He
examines Lienhardt’s uncomfortably pre-post-colonial but fundamentally solid
assessment that the challenge faced by the anthropologist in describing ‘how
members of a remote tribe think’ is ‘largely one of translation, of making the
coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as
possible in our own’ (p. 142). He also presents Leach’s stimulating suggestion
that ‘social anthropologists are engaged in establishing a methodology for the
translation of cultural language’ (p. 142).
Asad is, of course, aware that translation is a process shot through with histor-
ically situated power dynamics and that most cultural translations continue to be
conveyed in powerful western languages and many in authoritative academic
discourses. He spends much of his essay taking Gellner to task for his notion of
translation as an elucidation – even a corrective – of the original. The nub of his
attack reads thus:
The privileged position that Gellner accords himself for decoding the real
meaning of what the Berbers say (regardless of what they think they say)
can be maintained only by someone who supposes that translating other
cultures is essentially a matter of matching written sentences in two
languages, such that the second set of sentences becomes the ‘real meaning’
of the first – an operation the anthropologist alone controls, from field note-
book 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’. (p. 155)
It is the idea of ‘affording not to’ which resonates with such intensity today, for
none of us can afford not to engage in genuine dialogue. It is not the polished,
coherent end product of a translation exercise that is important to Asad so much
as the many small dialogic processes of translation which lead up to it, for ‘the
anthropologist’s translation is not merely a matter of matching sentences in the
abstract, but of learning to live another form of life and speak another kind of
language’ (p. 149). To produce cultural translation is not a question of replacing
text with text (although this may well form part of the endeavour) but of
co-creating text, of producing a written version of a lived reality, and it is in this
sense that it can be powerfully transformative of those who take part.
Ingold, in his essay on translation, takes notions which have already been
problematised in anthropology and seeks to discredit them definitively. His
argument is designed to censure the very concept of culture and to debunk the
idea of ‘cultural translation’ which he believes to be invidious and
epistemologically wrong-headed. As he puts it:
To construe the anthropological project in general as one of translation is to
assume a world of humanity already parcelled up into discrete cultures,
each having a distinctive essence and credited with the power to ‘construct’
the experience of the people living under its sway. (1994: 229)
The idea of a world consisting of bounded, homogeneous cultural groups is, he
Ethnographic Encounters 99

claims, an alienating anthropological invention. Boundaries are unhelpful and

deceptive because they push difference to the periphery and create artificial
uniformity within a category, and boundaries were not always already there but
were erected by anthropologists who have persisted, damagingly, in stressing
discontinuity, contrast and hierarchical difference. People did not know they
were from a culture until (western) anthropologists told them so, and these same
anthropologists who have wielded the concept of culture have seen themselves
as above it. They have lorded it in a specular relationship with their ‘subjects’
whom they have seen as caught fast in traditionalpatterns of belief and practice.
To Ingold, it is this artificial idea of discontinuous bounded groups which
generated the equally artificial need to translate between them and all this trans-
lation was taking place at the expense of what he calls ‘the experiential continuity
of being-in-the-world’ (p. 230). For the world, he contends, is in reality a continu-
ous world. Thus the familiar tropes within anthropology which stress borders,
boundaries and discontinuities must be replaced with others conveying related-
ness and unboundedness so that: ‘The category we […] expands indefinitely
outwards from the centre where I stand to embrace others, along the lines of
social relationships, rather than rebounding inwards on myself, from an exterior
opposition with them‘ (p. 228). This is a very laudable aspiration and forging new
metaphors can be instrumental in changing perceptions and inflecting interac-
tions. Clifford’s (1992, 1997) acknowledgement of flux and ‘betweenness’ rather
than fixity in his redefinition of culture as ‘travel’ or Street’s (1993) ‘Culture is a
verb’ are excellent examples. Still more far-reaching for our understanding of
intercultural relations is Bhabha’s (1995) ‘Third Space’ concept to which I shall
later turn. But I do need to take issue with Ingold’s development of the ‘continu-
ous world’ concept on three scores.
First, his essay overlooks the fact that far from perceiving themselves to be
‘above culture’ today’s anthropologists are studiously keen to illustrate how
their own cultural beings inflect field practices and findings. Ingold overlooks
the empathy and the humility that positively radiate out of some contemporary
attempts at cultural translation, and does not give any concrete indication of how
adopting the trope of the ‘continuous world’ furthers current practices of
conducting and writing about ethnographic encounters. Indeed, much contem-
porary ethnographic writing already shares his insistence that ‘views of the
world’ be replaced with ‘views in the world’ and that ‘modes of construction’ be
replaced with ‘modes of engagement’ (p. 224).
Second, it is not anthropologists who must take sole responsibility for erecting
conceptual boundaries and perceiving reality within insider/outsider, them/us
patterns; indeed, to suggest this at all could be construed as a miscalculation as to
the sphere of influence of the discipline. Children in playgrounds who have
never heard of anthropology do it. Everywhere over the world where resources
are tight and people are in competition for them, people do it. And who forgot,
during this last year, to tell groups within the multicultural communities of Brad-
ford and Oldham (the scenes of violent racial unrest) that they were living in a
continuous world? Time and again studies of the changing face of Europe point
out that there are likely to be more, not fewer, boundaries erected as the new
spatial, political and economic entity evolves, and this prediction can be
extended to the global scale. The truth is that people are groupers. They do parcel
100 Language and Intercultural Communication

themselves into bounded groups. They do define themselves, at least in part,

through contrast – through saying what they are not.
Third, nowhere in his essay does Ingold analyse translation as a linguistic
activity. His failure to engage with this central dimension of the processes – the
dimension upon which, arguably, all else depends – allows us to highlight a
common lack in many ethnographic writings about cultural translation.
Although contemporary anthropology is only too keenly aware that it is
language-bound, its examination of linguistic issues is sporadic and fragmented.
Much critical attention is lavished upon the politics of writing and the imperative
to remain alert to the invidious power of words. There are, as Clifford (1997: 39)
reminds us: ‘no neutral, uncontaminated terms or concepts’, only ‘compromised,
historically encumbered tools’. We might expect a text such as Clifford’s Routes
(1997), which takes the companions travel and translation as dominant themes of
the late 1990s, to enter linguistic terrain and the author does stress the knotty
complexity as well as the urgency of translation for a world beset by transcultural
predicaments. On the whole, however, like Ingold he evades the linguistic. On
the two occasions in this very rich text upon which he defines what he under-
stands by translation it is clear that he is focusing on the global communicative
scope, across boundaries, of what he calls ‘translation terms’. These are ‘[words]
of apparently general application used for comparison in a strategic and contin-
gent way’ such as the ‘travel’ which he prefers to ‘displacement’, ‘nomadism’,
‘pilgrimage’ or ‘migration’ (1997: 39) and so on. Clifford’s main aim is to point
out that because some of the layers of meaning within the term ‘travel’ call to
mind issues of ‘class, gender, race, and a certain literariness’ (p. 39) it carries with
it an automatic reminder of the problems of translation.
Another approach to language within anthropology is illustrated by a key
debate in the discipline, a debate introduced by Ingold with the assertion that:
‘When it comes to language and culture, it seems that anthropologists will have
to go back to the drawing board’ (Ingold, 1996: 153). The proposed motion, ‘Lan-
guage is the essence of culture’, is preoccupied, above all, with questioning the
enduring assumption that culture comes into being only through language. This
is a chicken and egg dance around Wittgenstein’s thesis that the world is a
linguistic invention. It is about the insoluble issue of precedence, about whether
‘language calls into being the cultural worlds in which people live’ or whether
these worlds take shape and gain meaning through ‘a cognitive engagement that
precedes language, and to which language gives no more than superficial and
incomplete expression’ (p. 149). The argument is conducted on an abstract level.
It is an ontological one and respective positions are not backed up by empirical
evidence. It does not advance our understanding by examining praxis. It does
not, in other words, take us very far towards a heightened understanding of
language in, and from, the field.
There are, nevertheless, approaches which do inject into the ethnographic
endeavour a more intensive focus on issues of how informants speak their worlds
and perform their identities through language, and educators involved in the
teaching of language and culture have drawn upon these. They include linguistic
anthropology (e.g. Duranti, 1997; Holland & Quinn, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson,
1980), the related fields of interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of
communication (e.g. Duranti & Goodwin, 1992; Gumperz, 1982; Gumperz &
Ethnographic Encounters 101

Hymes, 1972; Saville-Troike, 1982). They involve the examination of speech

events (Hymes, 1966, 1972, 1974) and of communicative styles and speech
communities (Gumperz, 1968). They also include ethnosemantics, a linguisti-
cally oriented approach to ethnographic interviewing which involves the study
of key words used by informants to talk about their worlds (Agar, 1991;
Spradley, 1979). Roberts et al. (2000) contains a detailed account of how such
approaches have been drawn on within ethnography for language learners.
I shall now provide my own working definition of cultural translation within
ethnography. I use translation with the breadth its etymology suggests. I mean
everything that goes into committed acts of understanding and of clear and
determined telling. Cultural translation is a holistic process of provisional sense
making. It implies trying to render accessible and comprehensible, first to the self
and then to others, one’s experience of aspects of ways of life – either one’s own
life made strange, or lives which are different from one’s own. We are constantly
involved in translating self to other and other to self; it is, fundamentally, how we
communicate but, contrary to what Ingold suggests in his essay on translation,
no darkly suspicious project of appropriation need lie behind this. It need not
involve entrapping the other in our own webs of meaning, or being ourselves
entrapped in theirs, but consciously, deliberately, weaving something fresh
together in what is currently being referred to, after Homi Bhabha (1995) as the
‘Third Space’.
I would like to linger for a moment on the Third Space, as one of the most
richly enabling spatial metaphors inflecting contemporary practice in anthropol-
ogy – and particularly as one which is immensely fertile as far as cultural transla-
tion and language are concerned. Straddling travel and boundary tropes and
evoking new practices of mobility and displacement the notion of the Third
Space reconceptualises the field as well as suggesting what happens between
people within it. It reminds us that while cognitive and affective
self-displacement are necessities for cultural translation, physical displacement
may be less so; time–space compression, global mobility and communication
technologies mean that sites of otherness are in the path of the everyday self
which passes through them and that the field is everywhere. In other words, the
Third Space notion slows us down and highlights the culturally ambivalent
arenas on and around our doorsteps. It is, therefore, especially good in terms of
addressing questions such as the following, posed by Rapport (2000: 73) in a
recent study of narrative as fieldwork technique: ‘So: what of the practice of
anthropological fieldwork in a world in motion? When “there” is not a place?’. It
encapsulates and caters for the ‘open-ended, somehow “placeless” nature of
much contemporary fieldwork’ (Norman, 2000: 120).
Referring to ‘space’ as opposed to ‘place’ not only delineates a notional terrain,
but encompasses ideas of what might happen within it in terms of self-other rela-
tions and the production of meaning. The Third Space is what we might call an
everyday space apart, an interstitial space which ‘innovates and interrupts the
performance of the present’ (Bhabha, 1994: 7). It is a highly reflexive and
constructive breathing space – a space for reflection on intercultural issues in
need of resolution, on political issues concerning dominance and inequality. It is
also the creative, dynamic space of action and interaction, the space for negotiat-
ing worlds through words. It is an ethical space, demanding self-knowledge,
102 Language and Intercultural Communication

clear-sightedness, a readiness to listen and a preparedness to change. It is not

always already there like some parallel dimension into which we may inadver-
tently wander; the conditions for its existence are ever present but its main charac-
teristic is that it is co-created through acts of will. It springs from a desire to better
understand what happens when cultural ‘others’ meet.
Third Space practices are not new; we engage in them routinely in everyday
interaction. As Hammersley (1991: 2) suggests when he comments that
ethnographic methods are ‘not far removed from the sort of approach we all use
in everyday life to make sense of our surroundings’ we are all unconscious
ethnographers. Conscious ethnographic practice, however, brings Third Space
issues to the surface of our thought and action, making us more responsive and
reflexive about their call for empathy and tolerance of difference. In short, Third
Space practices are cognitive, affective and ethical.3
Bartlett (2001) in ‘Use the Road: The Appropriacy of Appropriation’ shows
what can happen when researchers working in the emerging Modern Languages
tradition of anthropological studies spend some time at Ingold’s (1996: 153)
‘drawing board’ . Bartlett’s essay demonstrates the politics of the Third Space
concept in action through a study of his work as an English teacher among
groups of Makushi Amerindian L2 learners in Guyana. He outlines how
commercial and political negotiations require increased contact between these
groups and English-speaking Coastlanders and points out that wider use of
English is needed to ward against ‘the immense power of translation [being]
concentrated in the hands of a few intermediaries’ (p. 24).
Bartlett’s argument is that minority groups can challenge hegemony through
appropriating the language systems of dominant groups. He gives a linguistic
gloss to Habermas’s notion of appropriation and combines this with Bhabha’s
(1994: 15) notion of politics as performativity to explore language as it is used
during ‘everyday encounters with the system’ (p. 25). There emerge from his
study directions for what he calls ‘an emancipatory ELT’, including the investi-
gation of ways in which dominated groups may develop the competence
required to ‘challenge presupposed subject positions within the “discourse loca-
tion” of their routine practice’ (p. 26). This competence he defines as ‘the compe-
tence to be thrust into cultural interstices linguistically armed and culturally
knowledgeable‘ (p. 30). His ‘Collaborative Pedagogy of the Third Space’ (p. 35), a
pedagogy devised pragmatically with community leaders to facilitate the
creative appropriation of English in real-life, everyday encounters, is a good
concrete example of what Third Space language politics might mean.
Returning briefly to Ingold to conclude this section of my argument, I would
like to highlight one aspect of his essay which seems to me to be just right and to
tell us something instructive about Third Space practices within ethnographic
encounters. I refer to his emphasis on what he calls ‘the relational baseline’
(Ingold, 1994: 223). For me, forging this ‘relational baseline’ is the best way to
begin translating meaning from the inside. It is what experiential learning is all
about and it is why the ‘participant’ in ‘participant observation’ should be
stressed. It is to do with getting one’s hands dirty together, sharing the same
food, smelling the same smells, walking the same paths, catching the same buses,
doing the same things. It is pre-verbal, sensory, sometimes visceral stuff, very
particular and very micro, that defines the relational baseline, and all attempts at
Ethnographic Encounters 103

communication, understanding, meaning-making and translation will benefit if

they are built on this. Clifford (1983: 119) makes this point in an essay on
ethnographic authority which stresses that: ‘participant observation obliges its
practitioners to experience, at a bodily as well as intellectual level, the vicissi-
tudes of translation’. Coffey (1999: 131) likewise refers to the importance of
sensory experience when she comments that ‘Fieldwork involves placing our
physical, embodied selves among the lives, selves and bodies of others’. Indeed,
Coffey suggests fieldwork should be rethought so that fuller account is taken of
‘[its] physicality […] and the embodiedness of the fieldworker […] “I was there”
evokes physical as well as mental meaning and presence’ (p. 131). Cultural trans-
lation, I would therefore contend, is translation with the whole person. The
following is a succinct list of what its practitioners may aspire to.
Cultural translation within ethnographic encounters:
• is heuristic, extended and multi-level;
• does not involve translating a given text, but creating that text and progres-
sively translating as one goes along;
• uncovers the processes of meaning-making within the ‘Third Space’;
• dramatises conflicts, tensions and resolutions;
• shows translation getting done;
• does not present a translation without a self-reflexive infrastructure;
• may have inspirational flashes but is not uniformly smooth and polished;
• is porous, fragmentary, ragged and open-ended;
• is aware of the history, politics and power dynamics within which it is
taking place.

Cultural Translation in the Field

I wish now to illustrate the type of cultural translation within contemporary
ethnography which we can most usefully present as a working model to under-
graduate students of foreign languages on periods of residence abroad. I am
going to draw concrete examples from just one recent text, Bradburd’s (1998)
Being There: The Necessity of Fieldwork. It is an account of getting to know and
trying to describe the Komachi nomads of southern Iran through living with
them and participating in their migrations. I have chosen it because part of its
purpose is systematically to demonstrate that extended fieldwork is the terrain
in which cultural translation can best be done. Bradburd explains the motivation
behind his book in the following way:
Being There […] is intended to stress the importance of a long-term, cumula-
tive encounter. One aspect of my annoyance at postmodernist criticism of
fieldwork and ethnography is that it has, rightly or wrongly, served to vali-
date non-anthropological ‘multicultural’ study based on flying visits, brief
encounters, and highly selective readings. I do not see this as an effective
way of advancing knowledge or understanding’. (p. 173)
Bradburd is thus pitting a traditional Malinowskian model of deep and
focused understanding acquired over time against what he sees as less authentic,
alternative Third Space investigations generated by different constraints, new
patterns of mobility and new communication devices and strategies. One may
104 Language and Intercultural Communication

take issue with his ‘either/or’ position; indeed, seeking to invalidate the latter
range of encounters and dismissing any possibility of their producing cultural
learning or enhanced understanding seems rather radical. In a world where
short or flying visits are more common than year-long sojourns, a world increas-
ingly characterised by cultural brassage, brief encounters need to be understood,
theorised and built upon rather than discounted. Bradburd’s model does,
however, remain as a resistant, baseline model. It keeps us grounded in one ideal
– if not always practicable – framework of practice and it remains the most appro-
priate ‘fit’ for students of language and culture who are learning, during periods
of residence abroad, what processes of cultural translation involve. As one of
these students comments in an echo of Bradburd: ‘the conclusions that you come
up with (in) ethnography, you can’t come up with them if you’ve just seen it once.
So you need to spend a hell of a long time actually looking at it’ (Roberts et al.,
2000: 225).
Bradburd’s project is not a systematic, overarching attempt to describe
Komachi culture in its entirety, but is rather episodic and anecdotal, focusing on
the difficulties or insights presented by specific encounters, which are related in
chronological order. Each aspect of Komachi belief or behaviour he translates for
us stresses the heuristic, cumulative process of arriving at understanding over
time, the misunderstandings which participants have to unravel, the loose ends
of things still not fully understood and the sheer complexity of translation
between parties involved.
For example, there are challenges in coming to understand the layers of infor-
mation conveyed by cover terms. One morning visiting a neighbouring tent
Bradburd is alarmed to be told that a young Komachi woman has ‘gone mad’ but
he needs to learn a great deal in order to understand and then convey what that
madness, referred to as ‘eshk‘, meant (pp. 133–5). Over time, he comes to an
understanding that it is a kind of yearning, crazy romantic desire – very real but
also rendered public in a most theatrical way and strategically used by young
men and women to exert a degree of control over who their marriage partners
are. ‘Eshk‘ is contrasted with the companionable, comfortable affection which is
‘dust‘ and the situated meanings of both terms become clear only as they are
tracked through a variety of contexts.
Language students who have undertaken fieldwork have commented on how
different this layered translation over time is from the rapidly conducted textual
translation of the classroom. Christiane, a student returning from ‘living the
ethnographic life’ (Rose, 1990) during a period of fieldwork abroad, commented:
‘I would tend to use the dictionary’s interpretation or meaning of certain words
and OK that’s very interesting but what is even more interesting is how people
see that word, rather than what the dictionary says’ (Roberts et al., 2000: 227).
Students are encouraged to work creatively and sensitively with the verbatim
data they record and to consider approaches which may lead to enhanced under-
standing. Ethnosemantic work on drawing out rich words and on eliciting the
key categories informants use in order to make sense of their cultural worlds
provides examples of how this can be achieved. Thus Sandra, a student attempt-
ing to understand the meanings embedded in and created by the Sevillanas
dance, spent a lot of time attempting to come to grips with the term ‘gracia‘ which
was often applied to certain dancers. This was heavy with layers of significance
Ethnographic Encounters 105

and teasing out its nuances as it was used in various contexts became a large part
of her project (Roberts et al., 2000: 232).
There are some conceptual challenges which are more problematic, such as
Bradburd’s attempt to grasp the complexity of Komachi decision-making
processes. The way they decided to move camp was based on principles at the
opposite end of the planning spectrum from that at which Bradburd routinely
operated. He had assumed moving would be an ‘active’ choice, predicated on
‘positive criteria’ whereas in fact the Komachi strategy was simply to sit tight
until options were so reduced that ‘the only possible time or way emerged’ (pp.
42–3). This foxes and frustrates Bradburd and it is some time before he can
explain satisfactorily to himself the elusive process and the allusive way his hosts
referred to it. Giving accounts of the self and one’s home world present similar
challenges of cultural translation, as Bradburd discovers when he tries to
respond to a question about whether wheat is grown in America. The exchange
reveals another impasse of translation for the Komachi ‘had never seen vast,
continuous stands of any vegetation’ (p. 47) and simply could not understand.
Similarly, Bradburd never quite got his hosts to comprehend what he and his
wife did for a living. When the couple overheard how the Komachi described
them to others they heard things like: ‘They live in a tent; they travel around; they
ask questions like, “Who lives in this tent?” or “Who was your grandfather?”;
they are on a tafrih [roughly, a pleasure trip to the country]’ (p. 154).
Processes of cultural translation in the field also have tangible and immediate
consequences since they often involve overcoming potentially damaging
mismatches of frame in order to maintain harmonious relations. Patterns of
behaviour stemming from very different understandings of the meaning and
value of solitude resulted in a number of face-threatening incidents between the
Bradburds and their hosts. Whereas the former prized their ‘own space’, the
virtue of togetherness was so integral to Komachi understandings of society that
they persisted in referring to the couple as ‘deltang‘ (homesick) (p. 130) and sent
over company the minute one or the other was left alone. Even to sit apart and
refuse tea while others were drinking was enormously offensive, as Bradburd
discovered to his cost. It was interpreted as a sign of anger and a threat to the
social fabric (p. 94). There were many other cumulative acts of cultural transla-
tion which, small though they may appear, made a very real contribution to the
satisfactory co-existence of people from different worlds. For instance, it was
only once Bradburd had learned the meaning of ‘meat’ to the Komachi that he
could form strategies to relieve them of the obligation to feed it to him and to
relieve himself of the obligation to eat so much of it (pp. 86–9). For Bradburd,
then, fieldwork is precious precisely because ‘it [brings] into sharp focus the
difficulties inherent in making apparently easy translations, showing why it is
sometimes difficult to securely reach common understandings even on what
seem simple, descriptive points’ (p. 45).

Home and Away

Monographs like Bradburd’s Being There are, as I have suggested, testimony to
the continued importance of the classic Malinowskian ethnographic ‘situation’
but as I have also suggested there are many other kinds of ethnographic encoun-
106 Language and Intercultural Communication

ter going on at the start of the 21st century. Embarking upon fieldwork has never
been such a rich proposition for the contours of ethnographic encounters are
constantly evolving, providing an inviting set of experimental frameworks for us
to investigate with our students.
There are numerous studies of small groups, defined perhaps by a common
activity such as Edelman’s (1994) shunters in a Swedish railway yard or
Palisson’s (1994) Icelandic skippers whose words and worlds are translated for
us in Beyond Boundaries, the collection where Ingold’s essay on translation is to be
found. Encounters with aspects of home cultures, historically neglected in
anthropology, are increasingly popular and available. Augé’s (1986) recently
republished examination of métro travel in his native Paris involves the kind of
deliberate, sustained act of ‘making strange’ I encourage my students to perform.
Recently an ethnography of an Australian bar in the same city was published
(Conord et al., 1999) which has a number of insights about the nocturnal practices
of groups of young people and which provides a useful extension to the pub
observation task I have often got students to do as a first ‘taster’ of participant
observation. Declerck’s troubling Les Naufragés (2001), a product of his fieldwork
amongst the tramps of Paris, studies from the inside the question of extreme
social exclusion and necessitated some particularly demanding – even danger-
ous – ethnographic encounters of the kind I spend ages persuading my students
not to undertake. There are also some bottom-up rather than top-down
ethnographic encounters taking place (in other words the ethnographer gaining
access to a milieu of privilege and power). Le Wita’s (1994) study of the usually
very private family networks of France’s haute bourgeoisie is just one example.
Finally, ethnographic encounters with the self constitute an interesting strand of
contemporary experimental practice which borders, in some instances, on
catharsis and therapy (Ellis & Bochner, 1996).
Cultural translation, then, may now focus on the issues which stem from
translating self and home to other and elsewhere. Both home ethnography and
auto-ethnography can produce Third Space processes and opportunities for
cultural translation which students can explore when they are not conducting
fieldwork in (literally) foreign places. As Reed-Danahay (1997: 123–4) suggests,
‘The growth of interest in home or native anthropology represents a questioning
of the dominant thinking in anthropology that you must leave home to do good
ethnography’. Language students can usefully see the home as field and conduct
a ‘home ethnographic project’ as a way of learning about the dynamics of
ethnographic research before their period of residence abroad (Roberts et al.,
2000: 185–209).
The latest batch of student home ethnographic projects I have received give a
flavour of the variety of home fieldwork. Patsy investigates how a family group
of six grown-up sons and a father keep on reconstructing themselves as a family
through family narrative and jokes. Joanne explores how locals in a local pub in
West Sussex act out and talk about their shared identity as ‘locals’. Elisa attempts
to translate something of what it feels like to be a member of a group of fox hunt-
ers in Cornwall and explores aspects of the group’s discourse. Lois makes
strange an unexpected place by investigating the ‘bonding’ activities which take
place between young women in ladies’ toilets. These she describes as gendered
rituals, seen by her young female informants as an essential part of ‘a girl’s night
Ethnographic Encounters 107

out’. Short and tentative they may be but each of these projects is a valuable
record of the student’s early attempts to get an insider feel for other lives and to
grapple with the issues involved in translating cultures.
As educators, we can also draw on and experiment with the whole spectrum
of auto-ethnography. It reinforces the importance of starting with the self,
making strange of one’s own practices and learning to articulate them afresh
from another, more reflexive, stance. Undertaking ethnographic fieldwork
makes language students self-conscious in a positive sense, open to self-scrutiny
and as exploratory about themselves as they are curious about others and
borrowing from auto-ethnography gives frameworks within which this curios-
ity can be exercised.
Auto-ethnography explores the self in different ways and through different
textual formats. It includes writing whose main purpose is to scrutinise the rela-
tions between self and informants in the field, foregrounding issues of the
anthropologist’s political responsibility (Okely & Callaway, 1992). It embraces
personal narratives in which people who were formerly the subjects of ethnogra-
phy explore ‘the textualisation of [their] own group, and the emancipation from
the ethnographer’s gaze this entails’ (Van Maanen, 1995: 8–9). It incorporates
writings which straddle autobiography and whose purpose is to foreground the
political dimensions of self-representation (Lejeune, 1989; Reed-Danahay, 1997).
It also involves, perhaps more controversially, intensely personal testimonies
from practitioners whose purpose is to articulate intimate discoveries about
issues surrounding the families, loves, bodies, illnesses and traumas of them-
selves or of those close to them (Ellis & Bochner, 1996). Powerful though these
latter texts may be, such confessional cross-generic experiments push the elastic-
ity of ethnographic writing to its limits and lay themselves open to charges of
solipsism and egocentricity. Coffey (1999: 155–6) presents the argument that they
are ‘self-indulgent writings published under the guise of social research and
ethnography’ and questions ‘whether utilising ethnographic strategies to write
autobiography really ‘counts’ as ethnography at all’. Perhaps this is also what
Goodall (2000: 91) refers to when he suggests that some ethnographic writing
veers towards the ‘self-ish’.
In the context of this debate, it is interesting that as newcomers to
ethnographic research and writing, language students may, at some stage,
become somewhat over involved in self-discovery and self-examination, in
charting the changes brought about in the self by particular fieldwork experi-
ences. The same cautionary notes as those made by Coffey and Goodall redress
the balance but the importance of home and auto-ethnography for language
students lies in their explicit acknowledgement that self-narration is inescapably
one of the things we do when we write and translate culture, that this can still
retain scholarly qualities and that there will always be, in cultural translation, a
tension between field diary (the self) and field notes (the other).

Conclusion
Thinking about and attempting to do cultural translation within ethnographic
encounters provides students with a special kind of intercultural competence
which is not limited to interaction within one given culture but provides a
108 Language and Intercultural Communication

generic framework for all situations involving encounters with difference. This
framework, which a number of educators are now attempting so strenuously to
feed into language and culture programmes, is especially important given (at
least) four tendencies of contemporary life. The first is that people are travelling
more often and further. The second is that they are contacting each other more:
new modes of electronic and long-distance communication are becoming one of
the major vehicles for cross-cultural encounters and pedagogic research must
develop ways in which these media may be productive of learning. The third is
that ‘home’ cultures are not comfortably bounded as the word ‘home’ implies but
are, in most cases, rapidly transforming multicultural and multilingual fields.
The fourth is that young people are currently exposed to a wide range of modes
of cross-cultural consumption, many of which militate against our efforts. The
ethos of such cultural consumption is epitomised by the pseudo-ethnographic
encounter as cheap entertainment which we see on certain television reality
shows.4 These dramatisations feed on discomfiture and embarrassment and are
geared to illustrate people defeated by the difficulties of difference. They place
little emphasis on the subtle mediation and patient accommodation required if
such encounters are to be productive and rewarding.
Could there, I wonder, be a link between this brand of superficial encounter
and the now almost routine process of round-the-world student travel known in
the UK as ‘the gap year’? In gap years large numbers of young people snatch
whiffs of alterity as they pass through a vast, practically undifferentiated field of
otherness, often barely remembering the names of places they have seen. They
talk more about the best ways of moving between places than they do about being
there. They pass fluidly through the well-developed, cushioned infrastructures
which have been set up to cater for the new market they represent. They ghettoise
on the ether, conversing not with indigenous people but with people like them-
selves who are already known to them and situated outside the country they are
purporting to discover. Young people may thus acquire the illusion that they are
well acquainted with and competent in dealing with difference but as Braburd
put it, ‘being there’ is not enough.
In the midst of such tensions educators need to think creatively about new
possibilities, new models to engender meaningful processes of cultural transla-
tion at home and away. We are moving, however, in the right direction. The prac-
tices of cultural translation in which I see my students involved are demanding,
rewarding and transferable in a range of ways that my own university experi-
ence of translating passages of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves into French or
Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée into English, was not. With Bradburd, I believe that
ethnographic awareness can and often demonstrably does affect how we
conduct ourselves in our encounters with others, whether these be ordinary,
everyday others still very much like ourselves, or exoticised or demonised others
with a capital ‘O’. Ethnographic encounters within the field and the multiple acts
of translating and negotiating meaning they entail can help to bridge cultural
divisions and provide the best framework I have encountered so far for prepar-
ing young people to negotiate translated worlds.

Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Dr Shirley Ann Jordan, School of
Ethnographic Encounters 109

Languages, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington,

Oxford, OX3 0BP, UK (shirley@solbrookes.ac.uk).

Notes
1. A version of this article was presented as a keynote paper at the IALIC Conference
2001 (Living in Translated Worlds: Languages and Intercultural Communication)
Leeds Metropolitan University, 1–2 December.
2. See Roberts et al., (2000) for one extended example and for further details of others.
3. For recent discussions of the ethical issues inherent in intercultural communication
see Language and Intercultural Communication (1, 2001).
4. For example the Channel 4 series Going Native (2001) which followed a South London
family as they spent ten weeks attempting to integrate in a rural community in
Swaziland.

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