Paper short abstract:

Our contribution aims to compare the developments of the concept of translation in Anthropology with the route that the same concept has taken in Semiotics, hoping that the conceptual outcomes in Semiotics might help clarify and reinforce the centrality of the idea of translation in Anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

In the contemporary anthropological debate both Geertz and Clifford explicitly place translation at the heart of their anthropological proposals. More recently, Viveiros de Castro has similarly suggested cultural translation as the very task of the discipline, redefining Amerindian perspectivism as a specific form of translation based on controlled equivocation.

That notwithstanding, in a recent issue of Hau, edited by Hanks and Severi, it is asserted that the depth and universality of translation has in fact been so far underestimated, while translation might help overcome both cognitivism and ontologism's limits.

Our contribution aims to compare such developments in Anthropology with the route that the concept of translation has taken in Semiotics, hoping that the conceptual outcomes in Semiotics might help clarify and reinforce the centrality of the idea of translation in Anthropology. From Peirce to Jakobson, from Greimas to Eco, from Lotman up to include the recent upswing of a Semiotics of Cultures, the concept of translation has become internally specified to the degree that we might say that today signification can be likened to the concept of light in Physics. Where in the latter light appears at once undulatory and made of particles, in Semiotics signification appears to be simultaneously constituted by two forms of translation - classically defined as interpretation and correlation - that in order to function must make each other mutually invisible. Something which, besides, would explain the difficult recognition of signification both as the foundation of the semiotic-anthropological disciplines and as the constitutive element of cultures.