6.484 Rev: Between Worlds (Karttunen)

[The Linguist List]

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-6-484. Sat 01 Apr 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 236
 
Subject: 6.484 Rev: Between Worlds (Karttunen)
 
Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. <aristar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Review Editor: T. Daniel Seely: Eastern Michigan U.<eng_seely at emunix.emich.edu>
 
                            REVIEW EDITOR'S NOTE:
 
What follows is another discussion note contributed to our Book Discussion
Forum.  We expect these discussions to be informal and interactive; and
the author of the book discussed is cordially invited to join in.
 
If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books
announced on LINGUIST as "available for discussion."  (This means that
the publisher has sent us a review copy.)  Then contact Daniel Seely at
     eng_seely at emunix.emich.edu
 
-----------------------------Review--------------------------------------
 
Frances Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors
(New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1994).
 
Reviewed by Lawrence Rosenwald, Dept of English, Wellesley College
 
Maybe the best thing about this book is the sheer conceptual energy of
its topic: the nature of intercultural communication and negotiation,
as revealed in the lives of particular intercultural communicators.
That topic is itself a first- class intellectual discovery, important
to several fields but adequately treated by none; I at any rate know
of no other work that treats this subject with anything like the
breadth, the omnivorous curiosity, and the thoughtful self-
consciousness that distinguish this book.
 
Because so much interest inheres in the topic itself, the reviewer's
often perfunctory task of summary is here especially important, and
reveals the astonishing, apt juxtapositions and comparisons that the
book is full of. The heart of the book is three groups of biographical
essays.  The first group of these, called "Three Guides," deals with
Dona Marina, "La Malinche," the Mayan woman who was Hernando Cortes'
interpreter in the conquest of Mexico; Sacajawea, the Shoshone guide
and interpreter to the Lewis and Clark expedition; and Sarah
Winnemucca, the Paiute interpreter and advocate of Indian rights.  The
second group, "Three Civil Servants," deals with Gaspar Antonio Chi,
the Mayan "interpreter general" for Yucatan; Guaman Poma de Ayala, the
Quechua civil servant and historian; and Charles Eastman, the Sioux
physician and advocate of tribal culture.  The third group, "Three
Native Informants," deals with Larin Paraske, the Finnish
ballad-singer; Dona Luz Jimenez, the Nahuatl woman, model to numerous
painters and later linguistic informant to Benjamin Whorf; and Maria
Sabina, the Mazatec "wise woman" and shamanic adept in the use of
hallucinogenic mushroom.  Each of these sections is followed by brief
reflections on the themes the individuals essays jointly raise.  The
remainder of the book is like some jumbled, wonderful lumber-room.
There is first a section called "More Lives, Familiar Stories,"
composed of shorter biographical essays on still other examples of the
categories defined earlier; these range from the 17th century to the
present, and from Siberia and Australia to the Amazon rain forest.
Then follows the longest sustained reflection in the book, a
meditation called "What Was Won and What It Cost." Finally, as a kind
of epilogue, FK adds some brief remarks on the children of the figures
treated earlier in the book. This is not exactly a conclusion, and
does not end in a peroration; it is more a manifestation of FK's
unquenchable curiosity, which both complicates and enhances her book.
Surely the book would be neater and more efficient if FK had omitted
the first and third of these sections, and gone directly from the last
of her longer studies to her reflections; but such a book would also
have been less generous, and less suggestive of the breathtakingly
vast extent of the territory.
 
Within that territory, FK is clearly more interested in some kinds of
interpreters than in others.  She is, for example, more interested in
women than in men (ten of her sixteen subjects are women).  She is
more interested in encounters between western and non-western cultures
than in encounters within western or non-western cultures.  And when
she is talking about the encounter between a western and a non-western
culture, she is invariably more interested in the non-western
interpreter of that encounter than in the western one.  At the heart
of FK's interest, then, are the lives of non-western women who become
interpreters of their culture to western explorers and investigators.
 
It follows from these preferences that certain issues are especially
prominent in the case she makes for her subjects - for it is in fact a
case that she is making, and clearly FK is not only the investigator
of her subjects but also their advocate.  Her being their advocate
leads her to defend them against a troubling charge: that a non-
westerner's act of interpreting his or her culture to a western
investigator or explorer is always and inevitably an act of betrayal.
(LINGUIST readers will recall in this connection recent discussions of
the term "informant," and on the relation between linguistics and
imperialism.)  FK is courageously right to start her book with La
Malinche, who helped Cortes to devastate the civilizations of Mexico
and whose name has become a term by which to refer to those who
abandon their own culture for gaudy and corrupting foreign things; no
figure could evoke this charge more powerfully.
 
And what FK has to say about this matter seems to me very
thoughtful. She does not seek to avoid the question; thus in comparing
Dona Marina and Gaspar Antonio Chi, she writes that they were "both on
intimate terms with terrorists" (114).  But her chief interest is not
in the abstract ethical or political question but in the particular
life, and from the standpoint of the particular life things often look
different. By focusing on the individual life, FK can ask not, Did
this interpreter help destroy her culture?  but rather, What choices
did this interpreter have?  She sees her interpreters as people whose
gifts and ambitions made them marginal within their cultures.  In
investigating the lives of Dona Marina and Sacajawea and Sarah
Winnemucca as women within their cultures, FK asks, at the end of the
first large section, "did the intruders perhaps offer these women the
opportunity to escape traditional roles to which they were unsuited?"
[77] And FK is always aware of the role of money and the facts of
poverty.  Thus in commenting on Dona Luz's choice to work as an
artist's model - a choice one might easily characterize as a betrayal
- she writes, "Anyone as intelligent as Luz would capitalize on
whatever assets she had to avoid the poverty and exploitation she saw
on every side. . . . her best hope lay in maintenance of her
Indianness.  As the embodiment of all that non-Indians perceived as
eternal, primordial, ancient, and mysterious, she had a chance to earn
a living by simply being.  People at the art schools paid her by the
hour just to look at her, and later linguists and anthropologists
would pay her by the hour to listen to her"[199].And when FK touches
on the question of whatwestern investigators might have done better,
she characteristically suggests not that they should have stayed away
from the whole had been recognized as national treasures during
their lifetimes, dependable pensions were not forthcoming" [246].
 
Against the background of these large virtues I should point out what
seem to me some weaknesses.  1) Too often FK resorts to
impressionistic history.  She is of course often dealing with scantily
documented lives, and she very much wants to enter into her subjects'
consciousnesses.  But for me, at any rate, there too many "may have"'s
and "must have"'s; when I read, for example, FK's claim that "Dona
Marina . . . was not paralyzed by the terror her situation surely must
have inspired" [11], I am simply not convinced.  2) As noted, there is
much to admire in FK's focus on the individual life, and the way in
which that focus complements the general ethical and political
questions we are used to asking about intercultural negotiation.  I
admire less the rarer moments when FK turns to those more familiar
questions; here the argument seems thin.  Her account of the
particular pressures on the life of the Huaorani interpreter Dayuma is
excellent; the concluding sentence of that account, though, seems to
me inadequate as a historical judgment: "through Dayuma's work with
the missionary linguists, the language of the Huaorani will be
preserved whether or not the Huaorani continue as a distinct people"
(285).  And FK's more general exhortation, "our planet and its
inhabitants desperately require human commitment to global
responsibility," evokes in "global responsibility" a concept that the
book simply has not developed, and which cannot bear the weight being
put upon it.  3) When I asked to review this book, I knew only that it
was a book "about interpreters"; I thought it might be something like
a more professional version of Ved Mehta's sketch of the UN
simultaneous translator George Sherry, and as a translator I was eager
to read it because richly textured descriptions of interlinguistic
communication are very rare.  FK's book is, I'm glad to report, much
better than the book I expected it to be.  It is a really rich account
of intercultural communication.  But it is also a strikingly sparse
account of the interlinguistic interpretation on which intercultural
communication is founded. For example: at one point, noting that some
of the conversations in which Dona Marina acted as interpreter went
back and forth through four languages (Totonac, Nahuatl, Maya,
Spanish), FK writes, "the wonder of it is that any vestige of
communication survived the transmission back and forth through four
languages" (7).  The question, of course, is whether any did.  We
cannot know, of course, and maybe that is why FK does not reflect on
the matter any further. But we can at least imagine
somespeculations;these would have to be based first on other accounts
of multi-language interpretation, and second on a sufficient knowledge
of the languages in question to think about sorts of information would
and would not have passed easily among them. Again, FK notes that
"Guaman Poma's Spanish . . . is distinctly the Spanish of an
individual whose first language was Quechua" (122); but having noted
this she drops the matter, and makes no study of whether or how Guaman
Poma's complex intercultural identity is manifested in the in-between
language he writes in.  What I miss in FK's book is the sort of
meditation we find, say, in autobiographical texts as Elias Canetti's
The Tongue Set Free, or Eva Hoffmann's Lost in Translation, or Alice
Kaplan's French Lessons. Perhaps, of course that sort of meditation
can only be made from inside the process, and is not recoverable from
outside it.  But it is part of FK's topic, and I could wish that she
had focused on it more closely.
 
But it would be unfair to conclude with a reservation.  This is an
important and evocative book, and a genuinely pioneering one.
 
Lawrence Rosenwald
Department of English
Wellesley College
 
Editors note:
The following comments on the review are by Frances Karttunen:
 
a) Dona Marina was not a "Mayan woman" but a Nahua woman who fell into
the hands of some Maya for a while and thereby became bilingual in her
native language and in that of her initial owners/masters.
 
b) Initially I was planning a book about woman who worked as
informants for male linguists and anthropologists.  I was going to
call it "Traditional Woman, Academic Man" and to treat the ethics and
the potential mutual misunderstandings of such relationships.  But as
I worked, it became clear to me that the crux of the matter was not
gender but marginalization.  Women are easily marginalized, but so are
men.  So I expanded the biographies to include the men in the book.
(For purposes of length I left out two more men and one additional
woman.) One potential publisher told me that the book would be more
marketable if it was exclusively about women, but I found another
willing to publish it as I wrote it.
 
I have had two readers comment that the description of the career of
Larin Paraske has a special resonance, and that strikes me as very
perceptive.  Perhaps among all the encounters described, that between
Finns and Ingrians/Karelians seems the most minimalist.  The languages
are largely mutually intelligible.  Yet the implications are as
monumental, in my opinion, as those in the encounter of Wasson and
Maria Sabina.My husband remarked that he could not imagine a male
writer concluding with an epilogue about what happened to the
children.  I could not imagine concluding in any other way.
 
Frances
 
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