Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T21:43:55.310Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Naming Others: Translation and Subject Constitution in the Central Highlands of Angola (1926–1961)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Iracema Dulley
Iracema Dulley*
Affiliation:
ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper proposes an ethnographic theorization of the relationship between naming, translation, and subject constitution via the analysis of forms of interpellation in colonial Angola. It engages critically with systemic/structural renderings of colonial society that portray social positions as oppositional to argue for a deconstructive approach attentive to historical disjunctions between naming and social positioning. Dwelling on core signifiers in Portuguese and Umbundu, the paper describes the iterative chain of substitutions through which subjects have been constituted, that is, reduced and transformed. For instance, how are the Umbundu status signifiers ocimbundu and ocindele reduced in their respective translations as “black” and “white”? How can translation both re-enact and challenge the constitution of racialized and ethnicized categories of difference? How is this related to transformations in Angolan history? The argument put forth challenges the conventional understanding of social categories in the context of Portuguese colonialism in Angola by arguing that the performativity of naming and translation constitutes subjects via both fixation and displacement. Therefore, the possibility of transformation does not lie in the intentional action of subjects, but in their capacity to operate within the fractures of the relationship between language and society by drawing on disjunctions between signifier and signified, names and social positioning, subjective constitution and sociopolitical context.

Keywords

subject constitutioniterationethnographic theorizationresistancedisplacementnamingtranslationraceethnicitycolonialism
Type
Names, Narratives, and Hidden Transcripts
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 363 - 393
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Acknowledgments: This article was based on research funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). I thank Evanthia Patsiaoura, Zeynep Gursel, Marcelo Mello, Ariel Rolim, and Marta Jardim for their comments on earlier versions of the text.

References

Allen, Lori. 2017. Determining Emotions and the Burden of Proof in Investigative Commissions to Palestine. Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, 2: 385–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Althusser, Louis. 2001. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation). In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Alves, Albino. 1951. Dicionário Etimológico Bundo-Português. Lisbon: Silvas.Google Scholar
Alves, Albino. 1954. Directorio dos catequistas. Huambo: Tipografia da Missão do Cuando.Google Scholar
Andersen, Chris. 2014. “ Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal. 1986. The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology. In Clifford, J. and Marcus, G., eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Austin, John. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barbeitos, Arlindo. 2008. Angola/Portugal: des identités coloniales équivoques. Historicité des representations de soi et d’autrui. Paris: L’Harmattan.Google Scholar
Behrend, Heike. 2011. Resurrecting Cannibals: The Catholic Church, Witch-Hunts, and the Production of Pagans in Western Uganda. Woodbridge: James Currey.Google Scholar
Bell, William. 1922. Umbundu Tales, Angola, Southwest Africa. Journal of American Folklore 35: 116–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bender, Gerald. 1978. Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Frans, Bontinck. 1995. Les mindeles, hommes d’ettoffes. Annales Aequatoria 16: 135–52.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985. The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups. Theory and Society 14, 6: 723–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. London: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cahen, Michel. 2012. Indigenato Before Race? Some Proposals on Portuguese Forced Labour Law in Mozambique and the African Empire (1926–62). Proceedings of the British Academy 179: 149–71.Google Scholar
Cahen, Michel and Messiant, Christine. 1989. Vilas e cidades: Bourgs et villes de l’Afrique lusophone. Paris: Laboratoire Tiers Monde.Google Scholar
Cândido, Mariana. 2013. Benguela and Its Hinterland: An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cardoso, Carlos. 1966. Olumbali do distrito de Moçâmedes (achegas para o seu estudo). Luanda: Separata do Boletim do Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola.Google Scholar
Castelo, Claudia. 2007. Passagens para África: O povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com Naturais da Metrópole (1920–1974). Porto: Afrontamento.Google Scholar
Castelo, Claudia. 2019. Gilberto Freyre’s Concept of Miscegenation and Its Circulation in the Portuguese Empire (1930s–1960s). In Anderson, W., Roque, R. and Santos, R., eds., Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism. Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Childs, Gladwyn. 1949. Umbundu Kinship and Character. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clarence-Smith, Gervase. 1979. Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola 1840–1926. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. 1999. Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist 26: 279–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1980. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Force of Law. In Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M., and Gray, D., eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Dulley, Iracema. 2010. Deus é feiticeiro: prática e disputa em Angola colonial. São Paulo: Annablume.Google Scholar
Dulley, Iracema. 2017. Missões católicas e protestantes no Planalto Central angolano: continuidades e descontinuidades. In Moura, C., Abrantes, H., and Silva, E., eds., Missões, religião e cultura: estudos de história entre os séculos XVIII e XX. Campinas: Edunicamp.Google Scholar
Dulley, Iracema. 2018. Angola. In Lamport, M., ed., Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Dulley, Iracema. 2019. On the Emic Gesture: Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dulley, Iracema. 2021. ‘Chronicles of Bailundo’: A Fragmented Account in Umbundu of Life before and after Colonial Rule. Africa 91, 5: 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dulley, Iracema. 2022. Feitiço/Umbanda . In Menon, D., ed., Concepts from the Global South. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dulley, Iracema and Sampaio, Luísa. 2020. Accusation and Legitimacy in the Civil War in Angola. Vibrant 17: 1–20. At https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412020v17a355 (last accessed 18 Nov. 2021).Google Scholar
Edwards, Adrian. 1962. The Ovimbundu under Two Sovereignties: A Study of Social Control and Social Change among a People of Angola. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Estatuto dos Indígenas Portugueses das Províncias de Guiné, Angola e Moçambique . 1957. Lisbon.Google Scholar
Estermann, Carlos. 1956. Etnografia do sudoeste de Angola. Volume 1: Os povos não bantos e o grupo étnico dos ambos. Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar.Google Scholar
Estermann, Carlos. 1983. Etnografia de Angola (Sudoeste e Centro). Coletânea de artigos dispersos. Vol. 2. Lisbon: IICT.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Faudree, Paja. 2015. Made in Translation: Revisiting the Chontal Maya Account of the Conquest. Ethnohistory 62, 3: 597–621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Istvan. 1983. Introduction to the History of Umbundu. L. Magyar’s Records (1859) and the Later Sources. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 8, 4: 777–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2015. Politics of Translation. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 225–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan. 2018. Registers in Circulation: The Social Organization of Interdiscursivity. Signs and Society 6, 1: 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-Colonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Gilmour, Rachel. 2006. Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 1986. Making up People. In Baigioli, M., ed., The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 2004. Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansen, Thomas. 2001. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Henare, Amiria, Holbraad, Martin, and Wastell, Sari. 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heywood, Linda. 2000. Contested Power in Angola: 1840s to the Present. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.Google Scholar
Holbraad, Martin and Pedersen, Morten. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Google Scholar
Likaka, Osumaka. 2009. Naming Colonialism: History and Collective Memory in the Congo, 1870–1960. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Livingstone, David. 1858. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. New York: Harper and Brothers.Google Scholar
Lusotopie. 1997. Lusotropicalisme: Idéologies coloniales et identités nationales dans les mondes lusophones. Paris: Éditions Karthala.Google Scholar
Magyar, László. 1859. Reisen in Süd-Afrika (1849–1857). Pest: Lauffer and Stopl.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Melnysyn, Shana. 2017. Vagabond States: Boundaries and Belonging in Portuguese Angola, c. 1880–1910. PhD diss., Anthropology and History, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Messiant, Christine. 2006. 1961: L’Angola colonial, histoire et société. Basel: Schlettwein Publishing.Google Scholar
Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Mignolo, Walter and Schiwy, Freya. 2003. Double Translation: Transculturation and the Colonial Difference. In Maranhao, T. and Streck, B., eds., Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, Rosalind. 2000. In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Morris, Rosalind. 2007a. Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 355–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, Rosalind. 2007b. Imperial Pastoral: The Politics and Aesthetics of Translation in British Malaya. Representations 99: 159–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, Rosalind. 2010. In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nader, Laura. 2011. Ethnography as Theory. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1, 1: 211–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neto, Maria. 2012. In Town and Out of Town: A Social History of Huambo (Angola). 1902–1961. PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies.Google Scholar
Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ortner, Sherry. 1995. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, 1: 173–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearce, Justin. 2015. Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975–2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Péclard, Didier. 2015. Les incertitudes de la nation en Angola: Aux racines sociales de l’Unita. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Rafael, Vicente. 1993. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Siegel, James. 1997. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Siegel, James. 2006. Naming the Witch. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L., eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. 1997. Translator’s Preface. In Derrida, J. and Spivak, G., Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann. 1989. Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 1: 134–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, Ann. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Valente, José. 1973. Paisagem africana (uma tribo angolana no seu fabulário). Luanda: Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola.Google Scholar
Valente, José. 1974. Namussunguila, a Ceres umbundu. Luanda: IICA.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, Roy. 1986. Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar