ABSTRACT
In his short and accessible book, John Van Maanen (1988) classifies traditional and more recent styles of ethnographic writing as various kinds of narrative — as realist tales, confessional tales, impressionist tales and so on. This kind of definition of social science texts in literary terms emerges from the work of scholars like Hayden White (1973), who analyzed the narrative conventions and fictionality of historiographical texts, and it parallels developments in translation theory away from the search for accurate reproduction of identifiable, fixed meanings and towards a view of translation as interested, partial, mutable and polysemic. The same trend underlies the ‘textualist’ turn set out in the 1986 collection Writing Culture, which starts from the assumption that ‘scientific’ texts as much as any others need to be read as cultural artefacts drawing on particular sets of poetic resources and conventions, and not as the objective mirrors of reality they sometimes claim to be. For translation studies, this text-oriented approach is of great interest, bringing both practical and political issues of translation to the fore. In particular, the experiments in ethnography since the late 1960s, in the throes of what has been called the ethnographic ‘crisis of representation’, seem to offer much food for thought to scholars of translation.
