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Writing, complexity, translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Richard Fox
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Extract

Let me begin with an expression of gratitude to Verena Meyer, Thomas Hunter, Penny Edwards, Laurie Sears, Tom Patton and Kaja McGowan. It is a rare privilege to be read with such nuance and generosity by one's colleagues. I have learned much from their comments here, as I have from their work more generally. Given the brevity of my response it will have to be selective, focusing on a couple of the more prominent themes—namely, cultural complexity and translation. But I hope to return in future and think further along several of the other, very productive lines of questioning they have opened up in relation to the book.

Type
Short Essay
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 1-2 , June 2022 , pp. 362 - 365
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Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2022

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Thomas Hunter for organising the AAS roundtable discussion on which this forum was based, and to Verena Meyer for coordinating, editing and contextualising our conversation for publication in JSEAS. Research for More than words was supported by the Collaborative Research Centre 933, Materiale Textkulturen: Materialität und Präsenz des Geschriebenen in non-typographischen Gesellschaften (Subproject C07) at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. The CRC 933 is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). My work on these issues is more generally indebted to ongoing conversations with my mentor and friend, Mark Hobart.

References

1 I am indebted to the Fulbright Program for the Senior Scholar Award that supported this period of research, between September 2010 and July 2011.

2 See Fox, Richard, ‘Why do Balinese make offerings? On religion, teleology and complexity’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 171, 1 (2015): 29–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Collaborative Research Centre, Material Text Cultures; https://www.materiale-textkulturen.org.

4 The two essays included: Fox, Richard, ‘Substantial transmissions: A presuppositional analysis of “the Old Javanese text” as an object of knowledge, and its implications for the study of religion in Bali’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 159, 1 (2003): 65–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fox, Richard, ‘Plus ça change … recent developments in Old Javanese studies and their implications for the study of religion in contemporary Bali’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 161, 1 (2005): 63–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Here I am indebted to David Halperin's approach to the history of homosexuality, in which he asked ‘what the consequences might be of taking the Greeks at their word when they spoke about sex’ (How to do the history of homosexuality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], p. 3). As he noted, ‘The student of classical antiquity quickly learns to acknowledge, to bracket, and to screen out their erotic peculiarities, the cultural specificities in their experience of erôs that fail to correspond to any category or identity in modern bourgeois society. One simply acquires the habit of allowing for their differences, granting them the latitude to be weird, and then one turns one's attention to other topics of greater seriousness or philological urgency’ (ibid., pp. 2–3; cited in Richard Fox, More than words: Transforming script, agency and collective life in Bali [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press], p. 19). As I have tried to argue in MTW, there has been a similarly wilful ignorance at play in the study of Southeast Asian textualities, some interesting exceptions notwithstanding.

6 Volosinov, V.N., Marxism and the philosophy of language, trans. Matejka, Ladislav and Titunik, I.R. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 73–4Google Scholar.

7 Elkin, Lauren, ‘Foreword’, in Gansel, Mireille, Translation as transhumance, trans. Schwartz, Ros (New York: Feminist Press at City University of New York, 2017), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.

8 Becker, A.L., ‘Silence across languages’, in Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Acri, Andrea and Griffiths, Arlo, ‘The romanisation of Indic script used in ancient Indonesia’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 170, 2–3 (2014): 365–78Google Scholar.