Fieldwork as Translation : Linnaeus' Apostle Anders Sparrman and the Hottentot Perspective

• The critical reception of Sparrman's South African travelogue (as a whole text and not a source bank for particular scholarly interests) is, markedly, dominated by inaudibility and negligence. The resistance to examine the in-between-ness of Sparrman's dialogic meetings outside of their spatial and temporal hierarchies is persevering. Style is always personal. Genre is not. It within the interface of a social event shaped by speakers in translation, in exchanges of shared values transcending the colonial asymmetry that Sparrman emerged as a reciprocal, interactive agent.This chapter discusses the entangled history of Anders Sparrman's travel account Resa till Goda Hopps-udden, södra pol-kretsen och omkring jordklotet, samt till hottentott- och caffer-landen, åren 1772-76, its decade long progression from fieldwork memoranda to the Swedish edition (1783) and the translations into German (1784) and English (1785, 1786). My focus is on the linguistic-cultural communication that evolved between Sparrman and his informants and how its critical denouncement of Boer colonial aggression and enactment of Khoisan struggle for survival were adjusted to the Linnean pedagogy for naturalist travellers and translators. I show how Sparrman endorsed the Linnean concept of 'socializing' with the people en route for the acquisition of data, how his fascination with language provided him with an incisive tool for self-reflexivity. I extend the notion of field-work to confront the postmodern negligence and rejection of Sparrman as a unique communicator and writer.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Idé- och lärdomshistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- History of Ideas (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Historia (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

18th century translation

South Africa

Khoisan

Boer

colonial anthropology

colonial ethnology

History Of Sciences and Ideas

idé- och lärdomshistoria

Cultural Anthropology

kulturantropologi

historia med utbildningsvetenskaplig inriktning

history of education

Literature

litteraturvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kap (ämneskategori)