Translatability of knowledge in ethnografy: the case of Korean shamanic texts

In anthropology notions mostly conveyed through principles and activities of translation embrace universes of thoughts and acts: knowledge, meanings, authorship, authority, self-reflection, “thick” translation, gloss, transfer of non-verbal to verbal, oral to written, involving various processes of transmutation and transformation. This constitutes the daily practice of an ethnographer, both inside and outside of fieldwork, through interviews, data-gathering, interpreting and translating, comparing linguistic-cultural semantics and pragmatics in contextual settings, and transferring them into the ethnographer’s world. Translation is more about transferring concepts and meanings from one mental scheme to another. The goal of this paper is, in the first part, to outline a few key concepts that in my opinion function as a theoretical background for reading and analysing the second part, which is based on empirical data of Korean shamanism. The key concepts discuss translation problems in settings where language is deliberately opaque, as in the speech of Korean shamans, which is characterized by continual, relatively unmarked vocal shifts, the resulting in an ambiguous – and, for the anthropologist-translator, problematic – speech pattern.