Translating Ritual Beliefs

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. . ... Pili/. Soc. Sci 9 (1979) 40 1-23

Translating Ritual Beliefs*

STEPHEN P. TURNER, Univmity of South Florida

If we translate the utterances of a primitive group in a w~y that makes them cut to be contradictory. can we have translated correctly? The usual ways of criticizing and rejecting translations include showing that a particular translation of a phrase or sentence leads to a contradiction or absurdity in the translated result. The mistake of taking and translating an utterance too literally. for example, is properly criticised in this way. But what does one do with the exotic utterances of primitives, who may say such things as ·my brother is a cockatoo·. Couldn't it be that they actually believe such things? Some things. such as a flat contradiction, could not be 'believed ' , in any useful sense of'believe'. But from where aris e the criteria that mark the limits of that which can be intelligibly imputed to the primitive? And what is to be said about that which cannot be translated into anything which is not absurd or contradictory? Can the fact that these utterances cannot be translated into anything that we would call 'rational' war_rant a ciaim that, e.g . . these primitives possess a non-logical mentality?

These questions have all been considered at great length under the rubric of the problem of 'rationality'. But the ques tions have taken a different form . In stead of usking the que stions in te rms of translation. they have usually been asked about the phenomenon itself. Instead of asking what place criteria of rationality have in the assessment of translations , it is a sked 'are there c ri teria of rationality tha: must hold for ali peoples?' Martin Hollis ma kes an extremely s ignificant contribution to the controversy by pointing out the necessary connection between the exigencies of translation and the assessment of ·rationality' .1

In order to make any claims about the coherence o&lack of coherence of the native's beliefs, Hollis points out. one must first identify the beliefs, and the process of identification itself requires assumptions about rationality. In order to translate beliefs. the anthropologist must a priori credit the native with. e.g . . adherence to the law of non-contradiction (without which the 'asser.ting' and "dissenting' that goes on in os tensive definition would be indis tinguishable). Thus the universal logical princi-

* Rl•rt•i;-,•cl 11.1.71!. A..:kn,,wl.:Jgcm.:nh are due to Bob Hall for several useful sugges

tions.

Mallul Holl is. "Rc:ason anJ ,Ritual" , in Hryan Wilson (ed.). Rotionofity . New York 1970 . pp. 221-39.

402 Stephen P. Turner

pies discussed by, e .g . , Lukes,2 cannot without circularity be applied as criteria of rationality to the beliefs once the beliefs have been identified, for they figure in the process of identification. This suggests that a solution to the problem of rationality must be sought through an analysis of the exigencies of the process of identifying beliefs: that which must be assumed by any translation cannot be regarded as an empirical matter; that which is not assumed can be regarded as an empirical matter.

The problem arises when one attempts to give a positive account of the rational basis for translations and identifications of magical or religious beliefs, the beliefs which created the original difficulty. Hollis calls it the 'identification problem'. He gives the example of certain Yoruba who carry boxes covered with cowrie shell s, which they treat with special regard. When asked about the boxes, they apparently reply that the boxes are their heads or souls, and that they are protecting them from witchcraft. Now, Hollis asks, is this an interesting fact or merely a bad tran slation? If we think of the ways by which we usually check the adequacy of translations, the difficulty becomes evident: here the checks apparently do not apply. When we translate something as 'the cat is on the mat', we can check this translation by looking at"the situations when the phrase is used. We can look and see if the cat is actually on the mat, when a nd only when the phrase is used. For descriptions or claims associated with ritual beliefs, we cannot 'look and see'.

Hollis chooses to describe this fact in terms which will turn out to raise the original conflicts over rationality all over again, but his formulation can serve to introduce the issue. He says that what distinguishes the case of the Yoruba belief about souls is that the statement about the cat has 'objectively specifiable truth conditions' while statements like the Yoruba's do not. When we translate and dis tinguish correct and incorrect translations of statements like 'the cat is on the mat' we have recourse to these conditions. When we translate and distinguish correct and incorrect translations of • religious' statements like those of the Yoruba, we lack this recours e.

But what alternative recourse do we have? How can the translations of 'ritual' statements and the identification of the corresponding beliefs be warranted? The depth of the difficulty may be seen by considering some of the suggestions designed to obviate the problem. We might, for example, translate ritual statements literally, relying on equivalents we have obtained in everyday contexts, and note that the claims are to be taken metaphorically. Hollis points out that this suggestion solves nothing. An utterance may have many metaphorical senses-what checks do we have on our choice of the metaphorical sense to give the result of the literal translation? If we follow this suggestion, we are not in much

2 Steven Lukes, 'Some Problems aoout Rationality', in Bryan Wilson (ed.), Rationality , New York 1970, pp. 194-213.

Tran slating Ritual Beliefs 403

better shape than literary critics interpreting poetry which is largely incomprehensible when taken literally (and whatever criteria figure into this act ivity, they are a far c ry indeed from th ose of ordinary tra nslatio n). But we cannot s imply settle fo r the literal translation, for there is nothing to assure us that the senses in which terms are used are not equivocal between ritual and everyday contexts . The same term migh t take one sense in the one context, another sense in the other. Perhaps the equivalences the linguist disco vers to hold in everyday contexts provide only the most limited clues to meanings in ritual contexts . ·Everyday ' logical te rms like the ' is' of identity may. in Yoruba ritual contexts, mea n the 'is ' of symbolization. ' Everyday' descripti ve terms like ·cockatoo· may , in Yoruba ritual contexts, come to s tand for a class, such as a class of natural objects. 3 But there is nothing like an independent way of checking such possibilities out, and this is what adequate trans lation would seem to demand.

This bri ngs out a problem that is even mo re vexing. Where do 'rituaJ co ntexts' e nd and 'everyday contexts ' begin? Wh at d istinguishes the m? It will not do to say , for example, that ritual conte xts are those in which statements do not have objectively specifiable truth co nditio ns. After all, how are we to decide whether a statement has ' obj ectively specifiable truth conditions ' in the firs t place? Suppose a claim w as trans lated by one tra nsiator 'the ca t is on the mat' and another transl ated it as 'the cat spirit-entity is on the mat'. We could not very weli decide which was the correc t trans lat ion by referring to the 'objective conditions'-they would be the same whether the statement had 'ritual' connotations or not. Hollis ' us e of the term 'obj ectivel y specifiable truth condi tions', then. raises the ma tter all over again in the form of the question. 'is or is not the s tatement mea nt ritu ally?' We have no means of drawing a line aro und ritual statements. Any s ta tement is potentially a ritual statement, and therefore no statement can be assumed to have 'objectively specifiable truth conditions'. Consequently, there is no cordon sanitaire which separates problems in tra ns lating ' ritual' statements from others. T his means that if translations of ritual utterances are suspect , all translations are suspect.

Needle ss to say . thi s is the sort of result that suggests that a philosophical wrong· tu rn has been made some place earlier in this account of translation. The suspicion of fund amental irra tionality that the identification problem seems to cast over the whole activity of transla tion hardly seems warranted by the actualities of the activity Ritual beliefs are t ranslated, with a fair amount of agreement, a nd other utterances are tra ns lated as well. Perh aps the wrong turn can be identified if we attend more closely to these actuaJities. In the following I shaJJ analyze an example of a controversy over the identification of a

3 A suggestion made, e.g., by C. Levi-Strauss, in Totemism, Boston 1963, p. 17.

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404 Steph en P. Turner

particular belief in an Australian culture. This example may seem to be an odd choice as a case of translation, since it involves not merely a ' problem of translation but a problem of sociological explanation as well. It should be seen at the outset that this sort of combination of problems is characteristic, rather than abnormal. ·

Often it is the case that statements which are being translated are translated into statements which are false or equivocal in the ethnographer's own language. The translator is thus drawn into the task of showing the circumstances under which someone could make such a claim or believe such a thing. This task takes a variety of forms. If we encounter a claim such as 'the earth is flat' while translating from a mediaeval scientific work, we explain it by describing a situation in which this is a reasonable or justified belief. We cite facts of which we are aware, and of which the authors and hearers of the claim were not, such as ' Magellan had not made his voyage, so they did not know that it was poss ible to circumnavigate the globe '. Sometimes this sort of explanation suffices. Often, however, there are no such 'facts' to be cited. Sometimes we end up describing the 'world view' ofwhich the belief is a part (and in terms of which the belief is reasonable or justified). Here we mark an end to the chain of reasons and justifications, for there are no 'reasons' for or 'justifications' of world-views.

Sometimes the mistaken belief is part of a body of practice, and its only 'justification' is the face justification of its actual practical application. Here we describe the body of practice, and show the practical necessity or warrant of the belief. We may, for example, describe the practical consequences which present themselves to the practitioner, when he fails to follow the practice. This is the kind of case Wittgens tein has in mind in responding to a comment of Frege in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. In the introduction _to the Grundgesetze, Frege says that if we encounter a person who reasons in a different way, then 'here we have a hitherto unknown form of insanity'. The point of Frege's statement is to show that logical laws are not psychological laws of thought, to b~ verified by empirical inquiry. Wittgenstein points out that Frege 'never said what this " insanity" would really be like' .4

Wittgenstein goes on to describe , in terms of their practices , a hypothetical case which involves a people who reason in a different way about quantities of wood. It is this sort of description of practices that settles the most basic translation problems, those involving problems about principles of reasoning. Less fundamental problems presuppose common principles of reasoning. Thus it is wrong to distinguish such descriptions of practices, which are 'sociological', from 'translation' . When translation problems can be solved, for example , simply by stat-

4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations , 3rd ed ., New York 1958, Part . I, · paragraph 151. ·

'· Translating R itual Beliefs 405

ing equivalences ofter_ms, the 'sociological' aspects are merely unproblematic, not absent.

The example to be considered in detail here involves the more fundamental kind of translation problem. It also involves the problem of distinguishing 'ritual' from 'non-ritual' utterances , a problem which, as we have seen, Hollis neglects with negative consequences. The con-

. troversy ove·~ the translation shows the style of actual argumentation quite clearly.

THE TULLY RIVER CONTROV ERSY

The controversy began over an ethnographic study in which W. E. Roth describes certain beliefs of the 'Tully River Blacks' in this way:

A woman begets children because (a) she has been sitting over the fire on which she has roas ted a particular species of black bream . which mus t have been given to her by the prospective father, (b) she has purposely gone a-hunting and caught a certain kind of bull-frog, (c) some men may have told her to be in an interesting condition, or (d) s he may dream o f having the child put inside her. s

Roth takes this to mean that his informants are ignorant of any causal connection between copulation and pregnancy. The report was later used by James Frazer in connection with the thesis that cettain 'tales of virgin mothers are relics of an age of childish ignorance when men had not yet recognized the intercourse of the sexes as the true cause of offspring'.

6 The controversy overthe report was revived in. the sixties by

Edmund Leach and Melford Spiro. Leach denies that this report should be interpreted as evidence for the 'assertion that these Australian aborigines were ignorant of the connection between copulation and pregnancy'. He suggests instead that the report indicates th at in this society 'the relationship between the woman's child and the clansmen of the woman's husband stems from public recogni tion of the bonds of marriage, rather than from the fact of cohabitation'. Arguing against this interpretation , Spiro points out only two of the four beliefs have reference to a male, and are left unexplained by Leach 's interpretation. He also demands additional evidence:

Is this the interpre-tation which the aborigines place on these beliefs? There is certa inly no evidence for this assumption. I am compelled to discard this interpretation· as not only implausible bu t false. I shall insis t. instead. that the aborigines a re indeed ig nora nt of physiological pate rnity, and that the four statements quo ted in Roth are in fact proferred explanat ions for conception.7

5 Quoted in Edmund Leach , Genesis us Myth and Other Essays, London 1969. p. lS7. 6 James Frazer, The Golden &lligh: A Study in Maxie and Reli~:ion (Abridged Edition).

New York 1941 , p. 347.

7 M. E. Spiro, 'Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation', in M. Banton (ed.). Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion A.S.A. Monograph 3. London 1966, pp. I I 1·12.

.. ~-- - ...... __ _ 406 Stephen P. Turner

Leach responds to this rather elaborately in his Myers Lecture of 1968. 8 His response involves three argumentative steps. One step is to clear the ground by dealing with the issue of 'intention'. Another step is to give grounds for rejecting Spiro's translation of the natives' statements. The third step is a defense of the interpretation of the statements that Spiro attacked. Each of these steps is of interest, because each step involves the giving of grounds for or against translations.

Leach deals with the issue of intention by suggesting that the statements are of a type which do not require evidence of 'intention', namely, statements of dogma or 'ritual' performances. Spiro, he says, supposes that when an ethnographic report says 'the members of tribe X believe that .. . ', it means that the 'beliefs' must correspond to a particular inner psychological attitude of the members of the tribe. The Tully River natives make statements that are p rima facie for the purpose of explaining pregnancies. To say that they have some other meaning would require, for Spiro, showing that the users' intentions were otherwise. Leach points out that many English girls go through the ritua..l of a Church of England marriage service, in which the bride receives a ring from the groom, is lectured by the priest on the importance of child bearing, and has rice poured over her head (a ceremony, Leach remarks , that is roughly analogous to those of the Tully River Blacks). The mere fact that she goes through this performance tells us little about what the girl knows or feels, her own purposes or intentions. She may have chosen to go through a church ceremony for any number of reasons with any numbe r of beliefs or intentions. She may be an atheist, who believes th at the well-being of future children depends on a church wedding. We cannot even infer much knowledge of the ritual itself.

These rituals are, as it happens, structured in an extremely clear and well. defined way, but not one bride in a thousand has even an inkling of the total pa!tern.9

The meaning of ritual and dogmatic utterances and performances is thus not to be sought in an examination of the intentions of the actors, at least .not in any simple sense of'inten tion '. It is to be sought in other aspects of the context in which the performance occurs.

Leach's case against Spiro's interpretation is a review of the classica..l objections to the ·ignorance' thesis. The most striking objection is based on the fact that the natives freely admit the causal connection between copulation and pregnancy in animals other than men. This fact weighs against, e.g. the implicit Frazerian comparison of the savage to an ignorant child of our own culture. If the natives' statements mean what a child's statement about the connection would mean, why do the natives

!! 'Virgi':l Binh'. in Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, op. cit., pp. 85-112 and 117-22. 9 Ibid ., p. 120.

Translating Ritual Beliefs 407

not, like the child, make the transition between explanations of animal conception and explanations of human conception? The fact that they do not sugges ts that the Tully River Blacks take questions about human conception differently than questions about animal conception. The second classical objection points to an alterna.tive set of comparisons which indicates what the nature of this difference might be . When the account given by the Tully River Blacks of how ordinary human births occur is compared to accounts of the magical conception of mythologic al heroes from all over the world, we discover very strong resemblances.

Leach sets out to show these resemblances in order to give better clues to an adequate interpretation. According to Meggit, the answer one gets from a Walbiri to questions abo ut conception depends on who is asked and what the circumstances a re. The Walbiri, a group which is ethnographically related to the Tully River group, constitute an intermediate case between the Western case, in which human conception is de scribed in the same terms as animal conception, and the case in which human conception is conventionally described solely in ritual or dogmatic terms.

In ritual contexts. men speak of the action of the f.:Urawari (spirit entities) as the significant factor: in secular contexts, they nominate both the f.?urau·ari and sexual intercourse. The women, having few ritual attitudes, generally emphasize copulation. 10

For the Walbiri, the two kinds of description co-exist. In one set of contexts, one sort of description is used; in another set of contexts, the other sort is used. Among the Tully River natives, only the 'ritual' description is used. The refusal to describe human conception in nonritual terms amounts to a dogma denying the male contribution to _conception.

This is a dogma which is by no means alien to the Western tradition. Catholics maintain the virgin birth of Jesus as a dogma. As Leach notes, the dogma no more needs to indicate the ignorance in the one case than the other. Moreover, in Catholic dogma, the denial of St. Joseph's

· physiological contribution goes hand in hand with an affirmation of his sociological paternity. St. Matthew and St. Luke affirm the virgin birth (or at least have been read to affirm it), but they still place Jesus in a direct line of descent through Joseph. Leach remarks that

In other words, the kind of interpretation which I put on Roth 's evidence and which Professor Spiro finds so novel and unacceptable has been orthodox among Christians for about I ,600 years."

lO M. J. Meggitt, Desert People, Chicago 1965, p . 90. .1 1 Leach, op.cit., p. 96.


Leach suggests that the explanations Roth describes (roasting the species of Black bream, catching a certain kind of bullfrog, being told to be in an interesting condition, dreaming of having the child put inside her) are describing signs or heralds of pregnancy, not causes . We can see the point to this suggestion if we notice how the ritual is used. The first two occurences are ways in which a woman may announce her pregnancy. The second two we can see as annunciations of the same sort as the annunciation to the Holy Mother.

These analogies form only a part of the appropriate evidence. Leach also suggests that the statements are treated as ritual statements-as mysteries rather than as technical hypotheses. The differences between technical hypotheses and mysteries are evident in the differences between who affirms them and under what circumstances. This consideration is an important part of Leach's case against the 'ignorance of physiological paternity' interpretation of another famous case, that of the Trobrianders. He recounts R. F. Fortune's report in Sorcerers of Dobu of an attempt to stage a debate between Trobrianders, who denied the role of the father, and Dobuans , who maintained it. Fortune says that 'the head of every Dobuan in the room ... immediately was turned away from me towards the wall. They affected not to hear the conversation; but afterwards when they had me alone they were furious with me. 12 The Dobuans would not, presumably, have reacted in this way to a discussion of what they took to be positions about facts of nature. As Leach puts it, 'the argument was plainly about doctrine not about knowledge'. The aspect of the Tully River doctrine that Leach takes to be central is the consequence that 'the relationship between the woman's child and the clansmen of the women's husband stems from public recognition of the bonds of marriage, rather than from the facts of cohabitation •. Leach's interpretation is that the way in which the Tully River dogma 'says • this, or 'affirms • it, is analogous to the way in which the Catholic dogma supports the claim of the divine paternity of Jesus. A virgin bears a child, according to the dogma, and who but God could father such a child? In a ritual context like this, divine paternity is a clear implication. In the Tully River case, the denial of human paternity is applied instead to all births, so its consequences are differept. It precludes the possibility of the ' facts of cohabitation'. having any implications for kinship, i.e. for the identification of 'father'. This constitutes a backhanded affirmation that the fact of 'public recognition of the bonds of marriage' is the sole determinant of the child's place in the kinship system. Notice, however, that under both the 'ignorance' interpretation and Leach's interpretation, the facts of cohabitation would be irrelevant to kinship. This, then, is not an aspect of the belief that can serve to distinguish between Leach's and Spiro's views. Similarly, there could be no such thing as ' a man'.s illegitimate children' under either interpretation. 12 R. F. Fortune, Sorcerers 9/ Dobu, New York 1963, p. 121.


Viewed in one way, the issue between Spiro and Leach is an issue of translation with ramifications of the type Hollis describes . Spiro assumes a translation which would run something like this:

When they say such and such (about the causes of pregnancy) they mean what a person innocent of understanding {like a child ) would mean if he said that the causes of pregnancy were dreams. catching frogs. etc.

Leach's translation would run something like this:

When they say such and such (about the causes of pregnancy) they mean what a devout Roman Catholic means when he says that the conception of Jesus was

• caused by God without any human male contribution, and by 'cause· they mean what the Roman Catholic would mean if he pointed to signs of this divine act (l ike the annunciation).

In Spiro' s initial attack upon Leach , we can see the embryonic form of Hollis ' worries about the 'uncheckability' of translations of ritual beliefs. But Spiro does not throw up his hands in face of these difficulties. He enters specific requests for certain kinds of evidence: evidence about the way the Tully River natives intend the claims to be understood, or in place of this, evidence of their unconscious 'symbolic' intent.

The question about the character of the dispute may be seen if we consider the fonnu!ae under which strategies for translating and explaining dogmas and beliefs are usually summarized . It is typically said that the strategy is :to describe the beliefs or institutions in their setting' or to be 'bringing out features of the context'. As Leach puts it,

All that the analyst can usually do is to observe the circumstances in w hich the untrue dogma is now affirmed and s tud y the context of this affirmation in other ways. As with the recital of grace in College Hail we learn what the recital 'means' by studying the situation, not by studying the words.

The formulae are accurate as far as they go. These explanations indeed involve descriptions of the 'situation' and 'context'. But obviously there is much more to be said. What makes something count as part of the context? What distinguishes relevant parts of the situation from irrelevant parts? How much context needs description for a given explanation? What makes a description of the context the appropriate description, and whatjustifications may be advanced for it? In short, though it is true enough that we describe the context, when we offer such explanations, the description must be of a certain kind, and do certain things.

These questions may be most readily answered in terms of a description of the process of offering and testing translation hypotheses. In general, translation hypotheses serve to solve puzzles of the form 'where they say X, what do we say?' and hypothesize a rule such as 'where they say X, we say Y'. This rule formulates an analogy between the use of X in the one language, and the use of Yin the other. We may


discover that the hypothesized rule leads us astray on certain occasions of the use of X: we draw wrong conclusions, or cannot make ourselves understood. This gives us a puzzle of the form 'why did the rule work (or appear to work) on this occasion and not on that one?' At this point we must look around at the setting. We look for something specific: material, like conduct, expressions used in connection with X, and so forth, with which to construct new analogies between the 'game' or set of usages of which the expression is a part, and such sets· in our own language. The goal is to find a rule, or an analogy, that won't break down, as the first hypothesized rule did.

Adapting Frege's definition of an adequate paraphrase, we may say that the adequacy of a translation consists in this: the transl ation of an utterance should have the same implications_ in the meta-language as the utterance has in the subject language. 13 The root issue between Spiro and Leach is whether the native's utterance has a particular implication: that the native is ignorant of physiological paternity. If we translate the claim as an ordinary explanation of a natural phenomenon, governed by the same rational considerations and evidentiary requirements as other explanations of natural phenomena, it does imply ignorance. If, alternatively, the claim is part of a religious ideology, a species of the dogma of the virgin birth, it does not imply ignorance.

The question of ignorance thus has a role analogous to the role of the question in physics of the origin of the universe. The facts about the origin of the universe are not directly assessible. Whatever disputes may arise about the question, they must arise among physical theories , or more precisely conjunctions of principles drawn from various physical theories warranting extrapolations. Just as each physical principle is supported by confirmed implications other than implications about the origin of the universe, each translation is supported by implications other than implications about 'ignorance'.

The way in which these implications are used for and against proposed translations is exemplified by Leach's use of the point that the Tully River natives are not ignorant of the causal connection in the case of animals. Notice how the implication that bears against Spiro's translation is drawn. Leach does not say anything like 'generally, tribes which recognize the connection in animals recognize it in humans'. Nor would the possession of such a generalization do him much good , because it is quite unclear what sort of contrafactual force the generalization c<>uld have. Nor does it involve a formal demonstration applying universal 'principles of logic'. Rather, it depends upon the point that if a person says such things as 'she became pregnant from sitting too close to the fire', in English, and does so· out of ignorance, we would also expect the

13 Gottlob Frege, 'Begriffssch rift', in Jean van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Code/: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-/93/, Cambridge; Mass. 1967, p . . l2.


person to be ignorant of animal procreation, and we would expect him to be naive in other ways. These expectations are based on our knowledge of the meaning that the utterance would have for an English speaker. If someone were to express doubt about the relevance of the fact that the natives recognized physiological paternity in animals, Leach might recount the old joke about the farm boy who is left in charge ofthe house for a few hours with the instructions that if anyone comes to the house, he is to tell them that the price of the services of t he red bull is $10 and the price for the black bull is $!5. Sure enough . an irate fellow comes to the door and asks the child, 'Where's your father?' The child says his father is gone, but that he is in Charge. 'Well', says the man, ·your Brother Herman got my daughter pregnant'. The child responds by saying, 'Sir, I know that my father charges S 10 for the red bull and $15 fo r the black bull, but he forgot to tel! me how much he charges for Herman'. The point of telling the story would be that the transition from animal procreation ·to human procreation is a step that a child would quite naturally take . The story of course only tells us what a natural step this would be for a child of our own culture. So Leach's interlocuter might express doubts that the inference would be so natural for the Tully River natives. But to challenge the application of the point to the Tully River case, the interlocuter would h;we to show some fact that would account for their failure to make the transition from animals to men-for example, that they conceived of animals and men as radically heterogeneous, and showing this would require translation justifications of the same sort as those Leach offers.

This suggests that what counts as 'relevant' or 'part of the context' is determined by the translation hypothesis, and relevance is established in the meta-language. This point can be secured through another example. It would be of interest for the anthropologjst inquiring into the dispute between Spiro and Leach to inquire into the birth control practices, if any. of the Tully River natives. Some birth control measures , such as the rhythm method, obviously require very specific knowledge of the causal connection. But the claim that birth control practices are a relevant part of the context does not depend on any ethnographic observation. It dep\!nds on the fact that a person who makes a statement such as 'frogs cause pregnancy' in English (i.e. , as Spiro translates) will be justly reproached for contradiction or insincerity if he actually practices the rhythm method. Similarly, Leach will need to show his interlocutor that a person could not be ignorant of tbe causal connection-ignorant in the specific way implied by the utterance as translated into the metalanguage-if he used a specific technique of birth control. To show that the birth control practices are relevant parts of the 'situation', it would be necessary to show that this specific translation of the utterance conflicts_ with this specific birth control practice-and this could only be shown in the language in which the translation was formulated.

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The term 'implication' may seem inappropriate for the connections described here. For example, the transition between talk about animal conception and human conception is not 'implicative' in the strict sense of a formal system of inference. But it is implicative in the more general sense from which the formal sense derives. That a person who utters · sentences in English giving the Tully River account of pregnancy is 'ignorant' is more plausibly regarded as implicative, in the sense in which 'conversational postulates' are implicative: ignorance is a precondition for a valid performance of the utterance.

Some of these connections may seem causal and therefore implicative only by virtue of some unstated assumptions, others logical, others criteriological , others a mixed concatenation of these types of implicative connections. It may seem that an adequate philosophical account of the matter would sort these species of implication out. This would be a misguided demand. Notice that one shows the existence of an implicative relationship by paraphrasing in the first place. Consider the case in which your Victorian grandmother says, 'I knew she wasn't a lady the moment she walked into the room'. You ask how she knew, and she tells you, · Because of those black patent leather shoes!' What sort of implication is marked by this ' because'? It might be paraphrased criteriologically, as 'I would never call anyone who would wear black patent leather shoes a "lady"'. Or it might be paraphrased causally, as 'a true lady's sense of decorum would prevent her from ever wearing black patent leather shoes'. Or it might be formulated in the first order predicate calculus. It is quite pointless to demand, ' but which is the right paraphrase? ' None is incorrect. This point has a direct bearing on one aspect of the controvers y, the question of whether differences between cui- . tures should be described as involving different 'criteria of rationality', different criteri a for, or beliefs about the truth of particular propositions, or different inference principles or rules .

The situation here is analogous to the question of different formulations of, e.g., the propositional calculus, where one may construct an axiomatic system in which most of the basic a rgument forms or logical truths are expr~ssed as axioms rather than rules of inference..:...Or one may construct a 'natural deduction system' in which all of the basic argument forms or logical truths are expressed as rules of inference. The two systems would be equivalent with respect to the arguments that would be valid in the system. Similarly. in translati ng the utterances of a primitive culture , we may wish to formulate them in the meta-language as propositions, so we can apply terms like contradiction to the transla ted result. But we may wish to translate them as rules of inference with corresponding criteria of acceptability or rationality. The explanatory problem remains as a result of either choice. If we choose to translate a set of native utterances into contradictory truth-claims, we are left with


the (sociological) explanatory problem of 'how do these people manage to act or think to avoid conflicts in, e .g., action, that would arise from this contradiction ?' If we choose to transiate the natives'·utterances by exhibiting the rules of inference or criteria they follow , we must restate or redescribe these criteria or rules in the meta-language. Then we must ask, ~how do they manage to avoid the conflicts that would arise from following these rules or criteria?'

Notice that the process of translation described here yields a picture of Quinean indeterminacy of translation from the bottom up. The relationship between the Quinean conception and this analysis of translation can be seen through an analogy. We may think of the translation of an utterance as analogous to the replacement of a part of a machine. The machine is successfully repaired if it can do all the things it originally could , after the part is replaced. The 'things· that a 'part' must do in the case of translation is produce implications. It is evident that differently constructed parts may be used in a machine to the same ends. Similarly, distinct translations which contradict one another may produce the same implications. The range of possible alternatives is fixed by the starting point in both cases. If one is fixing a car engine, one may replace any given original part by various parts, such that some will succeed , others fail to work, and some will do some of the things that the original part did but not others. Quine's point is tha t the total set of sentences a person accepts as true , his ' theory ofthe world', can be replac~d by or paraphrased into various other theories which are inconsistent with one another, but which all produce as implications the true sentences whose subject terms can be ostensively defined. One may not choose between these various ' theories of the world' on the basis of truth; though they are inconsistent with one another, they are equally true .

SOME PERPLEXITIES

The two conceptions that have been introduced in this discussion, the conception of translation as a Fregean paraphrase and the conception of translation and 'sociological' explanations as interdependent elements, can be elaborated to untangle some of the more notorious difficulties about ' r a tionality' a nd ·'understanding other cultures'. These perplexities include probiems about the propriety of judging a practice or statement in another cultural context as irrational, the relation between various theoretical accounts of magic and religion, the ideas of metaphor and symbolism and the relation between applications of these ideas and the intentions of the symbol or metaphor users.

Many writers have approached the 'problem of rationality' with the notion that a pronouncement of 'rational' or 'irrational' about a native practice was the purpose or result of a sociological o r anthropological investigation, and that the philosophical question was, 'What sort of

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evidence could secure such a judgment?' As I suggested above in connection with Wittgenstein's example of the woodpilers, it would be more to the point to regard the sociological problem and the translation problem as part of the same task, and the translation hypothesis conjoined ll'ith the 'sociological' explanation as the basic unit of explanation. If we translate one way, we may have no add itional problem of sociological explanation. If we translate another way, e.g., in a way which formulates or leads to a contradiction in the meta-language. we do have a problem of sociological explanation. If a sociologist makes a pronouncement of' irrational', he cannot simply leave it at that. He must somehow account for the ' irrationality'. And if possible he must do so in a way which satisfies the criteria for an adequate paraphrase. That is not evidence of irrationality , but it is part of an explanation .which produces the same implications in the meta-language as in the natives' language. When Evans-Pritch;:trd exposes a 'contradiction' in Zande thinking about witchcraft, he does not stop there, but describes the practices connected wi th attributions of witchcraft in such a way that we see why the contradiction does not have the implications for practice that it would have for speakers of the meta-language. If he could not do this, or something like this, we would reject it as a translation. He would be reporting, in Frege' s phrase , a hitherto unknown form of insanity .

The translation and the sociological explanation , then, stand and fall together. The place of a jutlgment of 'irrationality', 'contradiction', or 'ignorance' in this conjunction of translation and explanation is this. If an account of an utterance involves showing a contradiction and explaining why it isn't noticed, or showing that some obvious fact is not noticed, the translator appropriately uses such terms as 'contradiction' or 'ignorance·. The use of these terms depends on the adequacy of the whole explanation. It does not suffice to translate into utterances such as those Spiro a ttributes to the natives, which are obviously false or contradictory in the meta-language, and then pronounce the natives 'irrational'. Stupidity and ignorance are for the most part understandable among persons of our own cultural community. When the natives ' utterances are translated into stupid or ignorant utterances in the meta-language, they need to be translated in such a way that they are understandable as stupidity or ignorance. Spiro doesn't do this very well , since he does not make the ignorance which he attributes to the Tully River natives understandable in this way . His translation is an easy mark for the objection that the natives are aware of the causal connection in animals , because this objection points up the peculiarity of this 'ignorance'.

The difficulty with Spiro's translation, however, runs deeper than this. What Spiro offers is a partial paraphrase. It translates in a way which preserves some of the jmplications of the natives' utterance, but not all of them, ancl adds implications which can be drawn in the


meta-language that would not be drawn by the natives. Leach makes a similar mistake, although he does not do so in his defense of his translations of these particular utterances, but in his commentary on his defens e. He remarks at one point that the way to understand the meaning of an utterance is to look at the social situation : he gives the example of saying grace before a meal, which he says means that the meal is about to begin. There is someth ing to this explication of grace. since one implication ofthe utterance of grace is that the meal will start. But thi s is only one implication among several, and those o ther implications are nor preserved by this explication. For example, if a translator explained to a foreign vi sitor that the person saying grace had said, 'you can start eating now'. the visitor wouid never know that the participants though t the meal was blessed. Nor would he know why heads were bowed and eyes closed. .

the recogni tion that conflicts may arise between two alternative partial paraphrases can clarify a great deal. When Sp iro asks how Leach knows that statements that are apparently about facts of nature, such as copulation, are really ' about' social structure, Leach can correctly point out that the s tateme nts have certain implications fo r social stmcture. But it is a mistake to pretend that this is the only implication or ·meaning' of the utterance. It is this mistake which produces certain of the central theoretical conflicts in the literature. Consider the idea of a Frazerian theory of magic whic h asserts something like· all magic is inept scie nce' . If we recognize that to translate an utterance about magic into an assertion about a putatively true causal sequence (i.e., an assertion that would be understood as a sc ientific claim in the meta-language), it becomes evident that the Frazerian theo ry is not so much a theory as a s tyle of partial paraphrasing. And it is of course not the only possible style of partial paraphrasing. The same magical utterances might be translated into cosmological assertions, and could be accounted for as variations on the great cosmological theme of the relatio n between man' s powers and the deeper powers of the universe. The great historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, does something like this in his study Shamanism. 14 One might be able to summarize Eli ade 's paraphrases into some formula which is as tidy as the Frazerian one, and have a 'cosmological theory of magic '. But the 'theories ' themselves would be similarly uninformative. Each theory would be about a set of translations performed in such a way as to fit, respectively, the concerns of cosmology and the concerns of causal explanation. Both translations may be 'correct'-one with respect to the 'causal' implications in the meta-language, the other with respect to the cosmological implications. But both translations would be partial. As theories of magic, the two

14 Mircea E!iade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy , New York 1964, pp. xii-xv and 259f.


accounts would pass each other by. They would be about different sets of partial paraphrases ofthe same utterances. 'Theories' of this sort thus· have a quasi-circular relationship to the styles of paraphrasing that provide their 'data'. 15

Yet the very fact that these utterances may be paraphrased in these disparate ways-that they may simultaneously have implications for cosmology, social structure, and for medical or agricultural practicecreates a special problem for the translator as well as the' theorist'. The problem is ambiguity. The native utterance is often ambiguous between two or more utterances, with different sets of implications, in the metalanguage. One kind of ambiguity occurs with utterances which may be partially paraphrased as 'religious' assertions and partially paraphrased as 'scientific' assertions, but which cannot be fully paraphrased without combining both in the 'complete' translation. This kind of ambiguity shows up when the native makes what the translator (who is learning the meaning of an utterance but is equipped only with a partial paraphrase, e.g., as a causal claim) regards as a category-mistake. The categorymistake shows up when the translator attempts to formulate the native's reasoning in the meta-language and finds that he is giving, for example, justifications which are translated as 'theological' in the meta-language for conclusions which have been translated as 'scientific' in the metalanguage. Another kind of ambiguity shows up in what one is tempted to call 'metaphorical' or 'symbolic' assertions, such as an Australian aborigine's assertion that his brother is a cockatoo.

The notion of metaphor, as Hollis shows, creates more problems for the anthropological interpreter of these utterances than it solves. Interestingly enough, difficulties over the notion of metaphor and its application have quite a pedigree, going back to the theory ofthe history oflanguag~ formulated by one of the great academic charlatans of the last century, Max Mueller. Mueller hypothesized that once upon a time all words were used in senses that would have pleased the strictest logical positivist. 16 Then came an age-the metaphorical period-when words which had been used to express material facts were used metaphorically, to express the spiritual. In this period all the great notions that figure, e.g., in religious expression, were metaphorically named. This theory was an instance of a kind of reasoning fashionable in the 19th century by which was deduced the evolution of language or society from a few (usually concealed) premisses. What is of interest in Muelier's theory is that the same premisses lie concealed behind the problem of meaning that troubles Hollis and Spiro .

15 I have elsewhere characterized the stiUcturalist approach as a mode of paraphrasing. Stephen Turner, 'Complex Organizations as Savage Tribes', Journal for the Theory of Social Behal·iour, 7, 1977, 116-24.

16 Owen Balfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, New York 1964, p. 74.


· Mueller saw metaphors and similitudes being invented by poets and others in his own time. In examining recent etymology, he found many examples of such metaphors becoming part of the language. Looking farther back. he discovered that all of our words were at cne time 'the names of sensible objects'. He supposed without argument that these names originally had no other meaning than their meaning as names of sensible objects. He then concluded that the application of these names of sensible objects to what we now call insensible objects was deliberately metaphorical. The ·metaphorical period' was the period in which all this metaphorical invention went on. The idea of such a period serves an essential purpose in the theory. It excuses Mueller from having to explain how the great leap from expressing the 'sensible' to expressing the 'insensible' was made . And this leap raises serious questions.

The success and meaning of an intentional metaphor, as in poetry, depends on the similitudes whose recognition is evoked in the hearer. The .suggestion that intentional metaphor was the original SO\.lrce of usages expressing the ' insensible' begs such questions as where the idea that the metaphor 'stands for' caine from, in the first place. If the metaphor is intentional, the metaphor user must know for what it stands, and he must be seeking, in the metaphor, a means of expressing it. But how do his hearers, who do not possess the concept the metaphor expresses, know for what the metc.phor is supposed to stand? The intentional metaphor user is seeking similitudes between col"!cepts which are already in the possession of his hearers. But the inventor of metaphors in the metaphorical age, and the inventor of metaphor as such, are not seeking such similitudes, for the concepts are not in the possession of their hearers. They cannot see the 'connections ', because they cannot see the thing that the invetor is connecting to. Thus the appeal to the notion of intentional metaphor cannot account for the leap from expressing the 'sensible' to expressing the insensible-precisely Hollis' point, arrived at through Mueller.

Owen Barfield, in his classic study Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning gives the solution to this problem in the course of a critique of Mueller. Consider an example of one of Mueller's analyses:

Spiritus in Latin meant originally blowing, or wind. But when the principle oflife within man or animal had to be named, its outward sign, namely the. breath of the mouth, was naturally chosen to express itY

According to Mueller, the metaphor, based on this connection of similitude, was selected once 'the principle of life ... had to be named'. In short, a material or sensible fact was made to stand for an 'insensible' or abstract fact, and was able to serve the purpose by virtue of its connection of similitude.

17 Quoted. Ibid. Cf. also St. Augustine, De civita:e Dei, book XIII , chapt.er 24.


Against this very speculative etymological reconstruction Barfield points out that even in the relatively recent semantic history of the word, such as the use of nv£u~a (the Greek equivalent of spiritus) in the fourth Gospel (John 3: 5; 8), we can see the word used as though there were a single meaning or reference. This single meaning is rendered into English as 'spirit' in line v and 'wind' in line vii, which destroys this single meaning, and in this case the meaning of practically the whole passage. What this semantic history suggests is a different progression in the development of such terms as 'spirit '. Rather than startil)g from a 'sensible' meaning and building through metaphor to an 'insensible' meaning, the early sense of the word seemed to encompass both the 'material' or 'sensible' and 'abstract' or 'insensible' meanings that the word takes in current English usage. Barfield calls this encompassing sense an ·undivided' meaning. ·

The strikingly simple notion of an 'undivided meaning' carries us a long way out of the perplexities of Spiro:s concerns, Hollis' problem of translation, and Mueller's history of language. The notion accounts for exactly the same early semantic and etymological evidence as Mueller's theory does, without invoking the paradoxical and unsupported notion of a metaphorical age. The fact for which the notion of the metaphorical age is designed to account is the fact that in much earlier times words were used in ways which, were these uses to be invented today, would be metaphorical uses , based on .similitudes. If these uses were the original uses, as Barfield suggests, there would be no need for the notion of a metaphorical age. Nor is there a need for such curious notions as a :need' to name, e.g., the principle of life, such as Mueller invokes in explaining the metaphoric intent of the supposed inventors of the metaphor 'spirit' . Indeed, if the original uses of these words were undivided, there is no need to attribute any metaphoric intent at all to the original users. By saying that the original meaning is the 'undivided meaning' we start linguistic history at a point after Mueller's metaphorical age, thus abolishing the role it is designed to play in the explanation of these early uses. Barfield's view distinguishes the metaphorical inventions of more recent linguistic history from th~ early speakers . For example, the poet has a metaphoric intent, a 'need' to express various 'insensible' meanings and invents accordingly. The early speakers did not, for they could not have. They did not possess the kinds of purely 'material' or 'mechanical' notions of, e.g., breath, that the modern speaker possesses. So they could not use these notions to 'stand for'

anything. Barfield's line of argument may be restated in the terms introduced

above. A translation of John 3: 7 which renders nvw~a as breath, i.e. as a purely material fact, is a partial paraphrase. It does not yield all t!,e implications of the original utterance, including those which are needed

Transl~ring Ritual Beliefs 419

to make sense of the passage as a whole. By the same token, Hollis' and Spiro's difliculties with the noti on of metaphor are reenactments of Mueller's.

Hollis· difficuliy •• r:,..:-. !rt'm his choice of Mueller's starting point. He takes the ·sensible· meaning of utterances to be the place at which the translator must start. He is then compelled to ask how, if the translator learns the everyday meanings of the words by ostension and by making certai n assumptions about the rationality of the natives, can the 'ritual' meanings of the words be learned? Once this step has been taken, as Hollis sees, we are defeated. For the notion of metaphor carries us nowhere unless we have some means of telling for what the metaphor is supposed to stand.

Spiro's difficulties also begin with the problem of metaphoric intent. His criticisms of Leach depend on Leach's failure to give evidence of the natives · metaphoric intent. Leach's ariswer is to say that intention is irrelevant. But this answer is not quite satisfactory. He points out that not one bride in a thousand understands the symbolism of the Church of England marriage ritual. But clearly someone understands this symbolism, and can explain it with authority. In the Tully River case it is by no means clear that there is any Tully River native who would explain the pregnancy beliefs as Leach does . So the cases are disanalogous in the relevant respect.

A better answer woul.d avoid the notions of symbolism and metaphor, with their implication of intent, unless there exist grounds for. attributing intent. Failure to do so simply ignores the difference between a speaker self-consc iously expressing hi mself symbolically or metaphorically and a speaker expressi ng himself and being tran slated as though he is using a symbol or metaphor. Ordinarily the notions of symbol and metaphor are used by the translators and not the native speakers, and the translator has no evidence of intent, no evidence that the speaker regards the utterances as metaphorical. When the Australian aborigine says his brother is a cockatoo , he is evidently not speaking symbolically or metaphoricaiiy, for no one in his group is self-consciously using it as a symbol or metaphor. 18 Instead, he is speaking in a way which translates ambiguously. One implication of saying that his brother is a cockatoo is to say that anyone who is brother to the cockatoo, is also brother to him. This is the social structural implication of the utterance, and an adequate translation would preserve it. But he is also speaking in a way which has cosmological implications, a fact which such theorists of totemism as Robertson Smith at least recognized and tried to bring under account,

18 This is not to say that the aborigine could not fonn a symbol or metaphor. It is merely to say that the ciaim that he has, req uires the same kind of evidence as a claim that a membe r of our own culture, such as a poet, has fonned a symbol. The nature of the evidence required depends , naturally enough, on the nature of the process of symbol or metaphor fonnation imputed .


however inadequate their attempts were. And the cockatoo has a place in the classification system of the tribe . If we translate the statement to preserve the social structural implications, as , for example, 'I am a member of cockawo sib-group', we lose the cosmological implications. They must be tacked back on by such devices as addenda like 'and the cockatoo is the symbol of the sun', which involve misleading suggestions of intent. The difficulty is that the utterance can't be translated into a single utterance in the meta-language in which all these implications are preserved. The best that can be done is to state the partial paraphrases of the utterance together, and say 'when what is translated in the meta-language as X, they also mean what is translated in the metalanguage as Y'. There will thus be ambiguity in the translation-one cannot say these things simultaneously i"n the meta-language without confusion-so the translator must show how the ambiguity is controlled, how such confusions as would arise in the meta-language are avoided in the natives' use of the utterance. This might involve showing, for example, that an utterance which is treated like a fact about the world on one hand, is treated like a dogma on the other. The pregnancy conceptions of the Tully River natives, for example, are treated like facts about the world with respect to their implications for kinship determinations. But they are not assessed and revised as though they were matters of mundane fact. Instead, the natives treat them like dogma. It may be noted that to call the doctrine 'dogma' does not reintroduce the distinction between ritual and ordinary utterances. Here ' dogma' means no more than that the utterance is taken by the native as an authoritative opinion, i.e. no further justifications are offered by the natives if it is questioned . This is merely a fact about use which may be settled by seeing whether the natives do or do not treat it as a matter of authoritative opinion. The difference with o·ur own use of the utterance is that we do not, at least in some contexts, treat such facts about the world as a fit subject for authoritative opinion.

CONCLUSION

I have suggested that some common modes of anthropological analysis proceed from a mistake about the nature of translation and of translation-warranting arguments, and I have provided a new analysis of the process of translation and translation criticism. The implications of this analysis may be clarified by a final example. Consider a speech by Agamemnon in Book 19 of the Iliad.

I am not responsible. But Zeus is, and Fate, and the Eranys that walks in Darkness: These put into my wits a savage Ate (<itT)) i~ the assembly. When I despoiled Achilles of his prize. So what would I do? Deity will always have its way.

Translating Rit:wl Beliefs 421

Ate is a term wh ich is used either to refer to a state of mind or to the symptoms of this state. The state of mind is panial and temporary insanity , rashness, infatuation, or bewilderment. Yet it would be a mistake in translation to translate the tern: in Agamemnon's speech as 'rashness'. For 'ras hness· conveys nothing about such crucial matters as the cosmological character of the agencies to which ate may be ascribed, or about the implications for the moral or legal guilt of the party who is truly described as being in this state of mind. 19 The key to the analysis of translation presented here is that to separate the meaning of ate as, e.g .. a 'visible' fact such as might be captured by a 'behavioural' description a Ia Skinner, from these cosmological and moral impl !cations (implications that were understood by the Greeks and were the basis of th ei r inference practices in ac tual discourse) is logical butchery. Yet it is butchery that the translator must perform. For in one way or another he must disassemble the implications of a term !ike ate in order to translate it, for the term does not have a single equivalent English usage that preserves its impiications. So the translator must reassemble the term in English by placing the partial paraphrases of the term back into a form which does preserve its implications.

The lines along wh ich the butcher must cut are determined by his own language. If P.gamemnon were to be brought to the present and were to translate for Hector and Ach illes an utterance in modem English in which ·rashness' was used, he would be compelled to paraphrase the term by saying something like 'rashness is like ate but rashness does not imply that the gods have anything to do with it'. If he were to translate an utterance in which 'Jove· was used, he would need to say what it implied in addition to the implications of 'eros' in Greek. 'Eros' would, in the terms used here, be only a partial paraphrase of 'love' in most utterances. This shows that the process of translatio n described here does not depend on any assumptions abou t the exis tence of inherent or universal distinctions between 'vis ible' or empirical and ' expressive' speech. No division is imposed by the problem oftranslation as such. The divisions that are imposed are imposed by the problems of exhibiting the implications of an utterance in a language where the implications are ordinarily separated, as we separate the 'wind' and 'spirit' that make up 7tVWJla.

I. C. Jarvie has correctly argued that · arbitrariness' is the pre-eminent methodological and philosophical problem of attributions of symbolic meaning in anthropology. 20 The problem may be readily grasped in terms of the apalysis of translation advanced here. It was suggested above that the s&me utterance might be partially paraphrased in various

i9 According to Gregory Vlastos, it is 'now widely accepted among classicists ... that in the case of ate a double causation-by the god and by the human agent-is being supposed, henct: dual responsibility•. Plato's Universe, Seattle 1975, p. 16.

20 I. C. ~arvie. 'On the Limits of Symbolic Interpretation in Anthropology', Current Anthropology, 17 , 1976, 687-91.


ways. One paraphrase might preserve its causal implications, another its cosmological implications, etc. It was pointed out that certain divergent · theories · of the meaning of these utterances are dependent on particular styles of paraphrasing, and therefore are, properly speaking, not theories about the same ' facts'. There is no general principle which allows one to select a partial paraphrase according to any particular style as the true paraphrase. Thus such 'theories' must be based on what can only be arbitrary selections of partial paraphrases-arbitrary because one cannot decide between the styles of paraphrasing cum theories on the basis of the utterances themselves.

The idea of symbolic anth ropology a rises from a true impulse, the insight tha t a ' literal' rendering of many of the utterances of primitive peoples does not captu re the whole meaning of these utterances. But the notions of symbolism and metaphor are ill-suited to the task of completing the whole meaning. For these notions proceed from an assumption that cannot be justified. Their application assumes that the division between empirical or 'visible' and 'expressive' meaning inheres in speech itself or is somehow universal, and that the peoples who speak metaphorically or symbolically are using words which refer empirically in a mysterious way, by making these words stand for non-empirical or

· supra-empirical things. What cannot be warranted is the assumption that these peoples ever used or use the words in what Westerners consider a purely ·empirical' sense.

It may be noted that there is a logical asymmetry between these assumptions and the notions of partial paraphrase and 'undivided meaning' that have been used here. The notions of partial paraphrase and ·undivided meaning· do not rest on any assumption that there is·an inherent or universal distinction between 'empirical' and 'expressive' me aning. nor do they . withou t argument . at tribute the 'empirical' meaning to primitive peoples, nor do they rest ori any implicit suggestions about the existence of symbolic or metaphoricai intent in using these ·empirical' terms to ' s tand for' non-empirical things.

The process of translation explicated here is non-arbitrary, and it provides fo r translations that deal with certain difficul ties in understanding primitive peoples that symbolic anthropology is designed to solve. But the type of argument explicated here does not make sense of all of the claims made by symbolic anthropology. Leach's claim that the Tully River denial of a male contribution is 'about' kinship does make sense in these terms. As it turns out, the fact that the utterance has implications for kinship practices is not in dispute between Leach and Spiro. What i! in dispute is the nature of the natives' grounds for the utterance, < question which hinges on other matters. Yet Leach's own argumen does not stop with the arguments explicated here. He offers a 'struc ruralist' analysis of certain o.ther beliefs and practices from other cui

Translating Riwa/ Beliefs 423

:ural contexts which he perceives as having a structural si milarity to the Tully River beliefs, and he explains his method of analyzing these by making methodological assertions quite unlike those made here. 21

The analysis of the process of translation presented here bears on the problem in two ways. Since certain claims made by 'symbolic anthropologists·. such as the claim that the Tully River utterance has a social structural meaning. can be explicated apart from any use of the notions of symbolization or metaphor. it suggests that these modes of 'symbolic' analysis may be gratuitous. 22 The analysis also bears on a question which has not been a central concern of this discussion, i.e. the question of whether the 'structuralist' mode of argument, the Freudian , or any of the others can be given an adequate explication. If there is an adequate explication of these modes of argument, the explication cannot rest on the implicit conception of translation that has guided these discussions from Mueller through Hollis. It is certainl y questionable whether any of these approaches to symbolic analysis can be made to stand apart from this implicit conception of translation. The. burden of proof here rests on the side of the approaches themselves.

:!1 Leach . op cit.. pp. 103-09.

22 :--;othing is more strik ing in J. LaFontaine's recent Myers lecture. 'The Power of Rights' . . Han r-:-; .s_J 1978. 12, ·DI-37. than the fact that although it rather casually passes over criticisms of symbolic anthropoiogy which deai with issues o f logic (p . 434, n. :! ; the main point in L1e d1\ision of specific rituals is made not on grounds i;'Jtrinsic to such ap~roaches as thoo;e oi Leach and Victor Turner on the 'metaphoric' approach. but on grounds extrinsic to these approaches, grounds whose logical force may in fact be

better grasped ir: terms of the analysis presen ted here (consider. e.g .• :he di scussion pp. 43~ ·34) . So in•·i sible to Professor LaFontaine is the disjunction between the logicin-use of the argument and the putative 'logic' of symbol ic analysis that it is never recognized that the argument ignores and backhandedly reject s in its own logic the very St)·Je of analysis to which its author claims adherence (e .g., on p. 434, n. 7).

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401 Stephen P. Turner 42.5 Philippe Van Parijs

445 K<trl-Dieter Opp

-+57 D;l\ id L. Hull ..f6fi Andrew Lugg

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499 William H. Dray

509 Alexander Rosc.:nberg

53 I Ste\·en Lee

536 Staff

PHILO~OPHY

OF TH E SOCIAL SCIENCES

Vol ume 9 , Number 4 Decembe r 1979

CONTENTS

Translating Ritual Beliefs Functional Explanation and the Linguistic Analogy Group Size, Emergence, and Composit ion Laws : Are there Macroscopic Theories sui generis?

Re1·ie11· Symposium on Laudan

Laud an's Progress and Its Problems L auJan a nd the Problem-Solving Aprroac h to Scientific Progress and Rationality Scientific Progress: The Laudan Manife~to

Lalllbn ·s Problematic Progress and the Social Sc iences

A r ticle Rel'i !'H'S

N e w Departures in the Theory of Historiography Can Economic Theory Explain Everything?

Re,·iell'

Acri.m Theory edited by Myles Brand and Douglas Walton

Announcements

-!._. York University. Toronto. and Contrib~Jtors . 1979 _j

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Published by

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Translating Ritual Beliefs