Kirk Hepburn and Dr. Charles Nuckolls, Department of Anthropology

The project under question has taken turns dramatic enough to make it nearly unrecognizable and its title almost entirely inapplicable. Problems, faced early in research but insurmountable, make it necessary that the collected data be used for purposes beside my original intent. While I originally planned to study the remittance of shakti notions among domestic workers, the project now seeks to describe the social power-based elaborations and subtractions that made translation work among this group unwieldy and useless for my purposes. While I cannot address my original hypothesis, this current iteration of my project speaks to literature detailed in the footnote, and it can provide important perspective for those facing similar difficulties (or, worse, failing to recognize them).¹ I will detail the progress of my project from its origins to its current incarnation, then describe the current state of research.

When submitting my proposal for the Institutional Review Board, Dr. Nuckolls informed me that the topic of shakti is perhaps more subtle and subconscious than is considerable in a three-month period. It seemed doubtful that one could gather the broad wealth of knowledge and data necessary to describe such a topic at all, let alone its interaction with urban migration. Further, gender would likely provide a significant barrier. At his suggestion, I shifted my focus from women to men, and instead set my sights on describing the social changes experienced in general as traditional fishermen began to work in the industrial fishing harbor, in the city. In essence, I chose a topic that seemed accessible in common conversation and without the burden of gender differences.

Soon after my arrival, it became clear that my question was larger and more complicated than could be considered in three months. Men and women described a wide variety of changes over the last few decades, as well as changes occurring now, but this wide variety would make analysis very difficult.

I decided to narrow the focus to identifying the types of changes – trajectories of social change, if the reader will allow – perceived by the village. I hoped to compare and contrast the village’s narrative of their “development” to the story told in the modern West, especially in the development industry.

While this seemed feasible, it soon became clear that our translator (hired by the program) did not fully understand his role, nor did we understand his perspective enough to achieve the sorts of translation necessary for the project. I returned discouraged, until Andrew Pieper found a translator in Singapore who could translate both the recorded informants as well as the translator. This translator, more professional than ours in India, is in the midst of providing these transcripts, but it is clear from a reading of the initial transcripts that our translator engaged in quite a lot of inaccurate reporting.

Obviously, such data cannot be used to address my third research question, but it opens a set of other, equally interesting questions. What prompts such inaccuracy? Can it be avoided? Most importantly: what is the nature of these inaccuracies?

When our new translator is finished with the new transcripts, I will seek to demonstrate the types of inaccuracies present in our data, their various properties, and their possible root in social power relationships. Though this is also a complex story, it is one that can be justified by the data in my possession.²

References

1. Stanton Wortham and Michael Locher. 1996. Voicing on the News: An Analytic Technique for Studying Media Bias. Text 16(4): 557-585. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: MacMillan. J Maggio. Can the Subaltern Be Heard?: Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Alternatives 37(4): 419-43.
2. For his help in obtaining secondary translations of our transcripts, as well as for sharing some of his recorded data, I thank Andrew Pieper, a fellow researcher working in the same village.