Suchergebnisse

"This paper reflects on the issues that were brought
to the Roundtable on Hermeneutics and Translocality
held at the ZMO in 2006. I review the successive
ways in which I have drawn on the hermeneutic
philosophical tradition as an anthropologist,
emphasing the ethical dimension. Translocality
heightens the hermeneutic problem but does not
radically change it; it may entail recognizing that
everything is always already pretranslated. In reflecting
on the task and means of anthropology, I
briefly juxtapose Gadamer's admirable deference
or modesty to Ricoeur's dialectic of appropriation
and distanciation and to what Cavell calls the arrogation
of voice." [author´s abstract]

The Americas offer a peculiar stage for translocal methodologies. If we agree that the products of Chinese American culture—which, in the course of the last 170 years of interaction, has evolved into a unique, American, phenomenon—can not be labeled as "Made in China," then contemporary Chinese medicine in the Americas cannot legitimately be perceived solely as an 'import.' Beyond doubt, phenomena such as the emergence of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine at the California Institute of Integral Studies testify to the fact that the once 'exotic' forms of therapy are now being granted a status parallel to those developed throughout the history of Western medicine. Increasingly, as translocal, they are becoming recognized as non-foreign elements of the glocal culture. Similarly, the exploration of the physical world, which, to an experienced dancer of Bharatanatyam, Odissi, or any other of the dominant forms of the classical Indian dance is an obvious function of his or her own experience of the 'body-in-the-world,' has, translocally, opened up an altogether new space of profound understanding of ourselves in our environment. It is not about the fashionable, politically correct, 'openness to other cultures'; it is about the opening up to a parallel meditative experience of the "bodymind," which neither excludes nor isolates the sphere of emotions from the reality of what-is-being-experienced. Or, to express it in terms more easily comprehensible to a Western reader, dance may prove to be a methodology (not just a method) serving the purpose of a more profound understanding of the complexity and unity of the universe, and a language to express this understanding. Making the most of available traditions might produce much greater benefits than remaining locked within just one, Western, Anglonormative, library of concepts. In the context of the ongoing debate on transnational American Studies, the article offers an insight into how the worldwide studies of the Americas and translocality intersect, and how such a perspective may contribute to the multifaceted process of the decolonization, understood both literally and intellectually.

Abstract
This article reviews Gin Müller's play Trans Gender Moves, arguing that it has translation, on several levels and in its broadest sense, at the core of its themes and aesthetics. Based on the performers' real-life stories, Trans Gender Moves is about what it might mean to live in transition between and across genders, but also languages, cultures, and times. With a departure from their own translational experience as an audience member, the author looks at how the play connects translation to interpretation and discusses how the stage is crafted into a "translation site," or "translocality," where the overlapping places, times, and languages of the performers' everyday lives are explored. It is crucial to the politics of Trans Gender Moves that all the actors, as well as the director, have themselves experienced living trans lives and that the play, by telling the life stories in the words of the people who lived them, brings trans voices into the realm of authority. Moreover, it is especially noteworthy that the performers and the audience are involved in a form of engagement that begins from multiplicity. The author suggests that the play might be used to further reflect on the challenge of how we are to escape monolingualism in transgender studies.

"Rising levels of global inequality and migrant flows are both critical global challenges. Set within the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia, 'Going Nowhere Fast' sets out to answer a question of global importance: how does inequality persist in our increasingly mobile world? 0Inequality is often referred to as the greatest threat to democracy, society, and economy, and yet opportunity has apparently never been more accessible. Long and short distance transport - from motorbikes to aeroplanes - are available to more people than ever before and telecommunications have transformed our lives, ushering in an era of translocality in which the behaviour of people and communities is influenced from hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. Yet amidst these complex flows of people, ideas, and capital, persistent inequality cuts a jarringly static figure. Going Nowhere Fast brings together a decade of research to examine this uneven development in Cambodia, making a case for inequality as a 'total social fact' rather than an economic phenomenon, in which stories, stigma, obligation and assets combine to lock social structures in place.0'Going Nowhere Fast: Inequality in the Age of Translocality' speaks from an in-depth perspective to an issue of global relevance: how inequality persists in our hypermobile world. Focusing on pressing issues in Cambodia that resonate beyond, it investigates how human movement within and across the nation's borders are intertwined with societal threats and challenges, including of precarious labour and agricultural livelihoods; climate and environmental change; the phenomenon of land grabbing; and the rise of popular nationalism."

Drawing on case studies mostly from Asia and Africa, this book reconsiders the increasing interconnectedness between world regions from a perspective of 'translocality'. It suggests a more comprehensive reading of processes often simplified as 'global', very recent, unidirectional, and 'Western'-dominated.

AbstractThe diversification of US suburbs in terms of race, ethnicity and immigration has created invaluable opportunities for scholars to study technologies of translocality‐in‐the‐making. Translocal landscapes are described as spaces of 'here' studded with 'parts of elsewhere' (Allen and Cochrane, )—but which pieces of the landscape count as meaningfully 'of elsewhere', how do those parts get there, and what range of meanings can they signify? This article is based on qualitative, in‐depth interviews and explores these questions in the context of an Arab Muslim ethnic enclave and retail district in an inner‐ring suburb of Detroit. The findings indicate that 'parts of elsewhere' are more internally pluralized, multifunctional, multidirectional and aesthetically diverse than commonly recognized. The implications of these findings challenge scholars to develop more robust frameworks to explain how translocal geographies are produced, why they matter, and how they can be recognized.

The Baloch are one of the best documented ethnic communities in the modern Islamic world. But the information comes from non-Baloch, who saw them as a tribal population, with their own history and culture, separate from the people around them. This conventional approach masks the continuities in their history, from their raiding of urban populations over a thousand years ago to their current national opposition movements in Iran and Pakistan and their recent association with international terrorism. But if studied in a larger context, both historical and geographical, the available information illustrates the continuities, through qualitative changes, from the earliest available sources down to the present. Enlarging the context in this way has an additional advantage: it enhances our understanding of other world-historical processes that are currently playing out under globalization. An important variable in this history is locality, the cultural evaluation of location, and translocality, the way locality changes as the social context becomes more complex—variables that have received little attention from either historians or ethnographers. Locality is determined mainly by investment and the social interests resulting from investment. Where there was sufficient soil and water to support investment in irrigation engineering and agricultural development, small communities settled and grew into cities. As the cities grew, they developed trade networks, which further increased their investment potential. The Baloch, like other 'tribal' peoples in the arid zone of the northern hemisphere, formed from people who did not find a place in this urban social dynamic. They are people without investment, who remained historically independent of the cities, but were always there to replenish the cities demographically in times of economic growth, and to take in their economic refugees in times of decline. This history of demographic interdependence, between the cities which could increase their productivity by means of investment and the tribal people who could not, generated a culturally distinctive sense of locality throughout the arid zone, which was different from the temperate and subtropical zones to the north and south. More recently, as translocality has accelerated with the increasing social complexity of globalization, the people without investment have been forced into political and economic dependence on the cities, but the new city-based nation-state governments responsible for them have so far largely continued to leave them without investment. In the new political framework of the information age the tribes rebel. Similar developments are evident among tribal populations in other parts of the modern Islamic world, and make interesting comparison with similar populations elsewhere.

This article reports on the current state of collective migrant organizing for two Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Strained relations between migrant organizations and village authorities combine with small active memberships to limit the level and type of fund-raising in support of village development and governance. These findings highlight the difficulties that communities face to maintain effective translocal institutions over time, particularly as first-generation migrants "retire" and a lack of new arrivals hinders organizational renewal.

This volume discusses globalising processes from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. It focuses on the a ~global southa (TM), notably the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Densely researched case studies examine a variety of approaches for their potential to understand connecting processes on different scales. The studies seek to overcome the main traps of the a ~globalisationa (TM) paradigm, such as its occidental bias, its notion of linear expansion, its simplifying dichotomy between a ~locala (TM) and a ~globala (TM), and an often-found lack of historical depth.