Call For Papers: AAA panel on translation and transduction

[Courtney Handman]

This is a call for papers for a proposed session at AAA meetings in New
Orleans on "Material Transductions: Transformations across Ethnographic
Scales." If you are interested in participating in this sessions, please
submit an abstract to Courtney Handman (chandman at reed.edu) by Wednesday,
February 24. The session abstract is below.



Material Transductions: Transformations across Ethnographic Scales
AAA 2010 Panel Abstract
Organizers: Heath Cabot and Courtney Handman

“Translation” has frequently been invoked in cultural theory and
anthropology to bridge different domains of analysis and experience,
describing not just movements and transformations in linguistic genres, but
across multiple registers of knowledge and communicative practice (Callon
1985; Clifford 1997; Latour 20051996; Merry 2006; Star and Greisemer 1999;
Zhan 2009). More recently, Helmreich (2007) has enlisted Silverstein’s
(2004) model of “transduction” to describe the movements and transformations
that make sensory input apprehensible as scientific or ethnographic
knowledge. While these models have important distinctions, they are all
deeply engaged with questions of transformation analyzed in terms of
questions of scale. Translations and transductions describe not just
transformations across repertoires, but also from the material levels of the
sign and individual moments of sensory experience, to broader, and often
more abstract, scales of knowledge (e.g. person, family, society, network,
culture, nation). These analytics themselves involve forms of “scale-making”
(Marston 2000; Tsing 2009, 2005, 2000), outlining the parameters and
categories through which subject-actors are said to engage with themselves,
others, and the worlds around them. While translational models of
transformation can be useful in the kinds of bridging work they enact, they
can also involve a sleight of hand, a jump from the material moment or sign
to more abstract scales of representation.

Recent linguistic anthropological accounts of the intertextual relations
between translated texts have highlighted the ways in which gaps between
texts are obviated or enhanced in particular social contexts (Briggs and
Bauman 1991, Silverstein and Urban 1996). This grounded theorization of
textuality opens up possibilities for analysis of the materiality of
semiotic forms transduced across different scales of experience. While
theorists of translation the construction of subject-actors and the objects
with which they construct worlds to translate across as recreated in each
situated context (Latour 2006), what limitations of material see semiotic
form and cultural knowledge constrain these creative and transformative
processes?

Papers in this panel will ideally address these issues from a number of
ethnographic perspectives of social or cultural change. How are
transductions achieved across scales, moving between kinds of sensory or
bodily experiences to forms of knowledge, compentencies, projects of
learning, or formations of religious or ethical stances? How are these
transductions also transformative? What kinds of material forms are
implicated in these transductions? How are such scale-making transductions
enabled or thwarted? What constitutes a jump in scale (for either actors or
analyists)? This panel thus bridges across a number of sub-disciplinary
foci, including science and technology studies, linguistic anthropology, and
cultural anthropology.