Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

his ideas.” Schweder’s closing comment is one we’llhave to come back to, for it recalls Poggi’s comment inraising the crucial issue for Geertz’s translators: is it bestfor the translator, like the reviewer, to ignore Geertz’sstyle in the interest of “getting on” with his ideas?As a way of focusing my discussion of Geertz’s styleand its translation into Italian, I will focus on chapterfour of Available Light, entitled “The Uses of Diversity.”First presented in 1995 as a lecture at the University ofMichigan, the essay is a critique of two contemporaryspokesmen for ethnocentrism, Geertz’s fellow anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss and the American philosopherRichard Rorty. While acknowledging the differences inrhetorical style and intellectual stance of his two antagonists,Geertz argues that both are animated by a reactionto cultural relativism and by a shared view of culturaldiversity that sees its main importance as offering alternativesto ourselves rather than for ourselves. Levi-Strauss and Rorty, in Geertz’s view, seem to believe, ashe does, that feeling, thought, and judgment are groundedin a particular form of life (culture), but they carrythat notion to the extreme and mistaken conclusion thatcultures and the values that spring from them are somehowfixed and incommunicable. Such a notion, Geertzclaims, is based on a fundamental misinterpretation ofthe master, Wittgenstein: “The grounding of feeling,thought, and judgment in a form of life … is taken tomean that the limits of my world are the limits of mylanguage, which is not exactly what the man said. Whathe said, of course, was that the limits of my language arethe limits of my world,” which means that the more weare able to expand our language, to increase the “rangeof signs we can manage somehow to interpret,” the betterwe will understand not only others’ ways of life but ourown, and, in turn, the more able we will be to change ourway of life should we choose to do so.Perhaps the best way to get a flavor of Geertz’s styleand of the challenges it contains for translators is toexamine what I take to be a typical paragraph from the“Diversity” article. The paragraph follows Geertz’s initialpresentation and analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s thesis andserves as a segue into his discussion of Rorty and theclaim that both of them are representative of an intellectualclimate grown hostile to cultural diversity. Our concernhere, of course, is not with the merits of Geertz’sclaims but with the language he uses to make and arguefor them.Whatever one thinks of all this, or however surprisedone is to hear it coming from an anthropologist, itcertainly strikes a contemporary chord. The attractionsof “deafness to the appeal of other values” and of arelax-and-enjoy it approach to one’s imprisonment inone’s own cultural tradition are increasingly celebrated inrecent social thought. Unable to embrace either relativismor absolutism — the first because it disablesjudgement, the second because it removes it from history— our philosophers, historians, and social scientiststurn toward the sort of we-are-we and they-are-theyimpermeabilité Levi-Strauss recommends. Whether oneregards this as arrogance made easy, prejudice justified,or as the splendid, here-stand-I honesty ofFlannery O’Connor’s “when in Rome do as you donein Millidgeville,” it clearly puts the question of Futureof Ethnocentrism — and of cultural diversity — inrather a new light. Is drawing back, distancing elsewhere,the View from Afar, really the way to escape thedesperate tolerance of UNESCO cosmopolitanism? Is thealternative to moral entropy moral narcissism?Comunque si giudichino tali affermazioni, o perquanto sia sorprendente sentirle proferire da unantropologo, tutto questo tocca certamente un nervoscoperto della comtemporanietá. Nel recente pensierosociale le attrattive della “scordità alrichiamo di altri valori”e di un approccio rilassato e compiacente all’imprigionamentonella propria tradzione culturale sonosempe più celebrate. Incapace di abbracciare o il relativismoo l’assolutismo — il primo perchè non permetteil giudizio, il secodo perch’ lo rimuove dalla storia — inostril filosofi, storici e scienziati sociali si rivolgonoverso il tipo di impermeabilité dell’identità che Levi-Strauss caldamente raccomanda. Sia che lo si considericome segno di facile arroganza, di un pregiudiziogiustificato, di irremovabilità Luterana, la splendidafranchezzaespressa nel motto ‘quando sei a Roma fa’come se fossi a Milledgeville” di Flannery O’Connor,ciò pone chiaramente la questione del futuro dell’etnocentrismo(e della diversità culturale) in una lucealquanto nuova. Ritirarsi, distanziarsi dall’altrove,scegliere “lo sguardo da lontano”, è realmente il modoper sfuggire alla disperata tolleranza del cosmopolitismodell’UNESCO? Il narcisismo morale è davvero l’alternativaall’entropia morale?A preliminary reading of the original paragraphreveals a style that is quite different than one wouldexpect to find in an academic journal. It contains a mixtureof informal and formal tonal registers, frequent useof idiomatic or even idiosyncratic expressions, literaryallusion, and borrowing from the lexicon of high, low,and middle-brow American English. If we go throughone by one the pairs of highlighted phrases in the origi-Translation Review 21