Hostile Hosts and Unruly Guests: Bible Translation as Hospitality and Counterinsurgency

Extracted text from BT_2013_BT_as_Hospitality_and_Counterinsurgency_-_Maxey.pdf:

Bible Translation Conference

Dallas, TX October 15, 2013

Bible Translation as Hospitality and Counterinsurgency:

Hostile Hosts and Unruly Guests

James Maxey, PhD Associate Dean Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship American Bible Society

During the 2011 Beekman lectures I suggested that the notion of hospitality offers conceptual opportunities for understanding Bible Translation today. An additional metaphor that I explore here is that of counterinsurgency. Although this project remains very tentative and exploratory, I am motivated by the generative promise of these metaphors for Bible Translation (BT). This presentation looks with a postcolonial lens at the translation of the Bible around the world.

Self-awareness is one postcolonial value. So let me say: this is not a distant research project for me. Im deeply immersed in the enterprise of Bible translation. My very being

my social, economic, religious, and professional orientation

revolves around institutional implication in the enterprise of BT. This is not a moment of confession seeking absolution, but a recognition that these are topics that have great influence on my daily life.

My profession is ideologically driven. I have an agenda.

This is a statement that I would expect from any self-respecting scholar.

Agendas abound

whether they be an agenda to stand in solidarity with refugees or with an aggressive stance against imperialist governments, or to build schools in rural parts with a view to awakening the human imagination with the dispossessed, we each recognize that we are out to do something.1 The argument of translation studies is that translation is ideologically laden, as indicated by Maria Tymoczko in her book Translation, Resistance, Activism:

1 Although general agenda descriptions, each of these three was stated by lecturers at NSTS 2013: refugees (Siri Nergaard); imperialist governments (Vicente Rafael); rural schools (Gayatri Spivak).

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Translation is seen as an ethical, political, and ideological activity, not simply as a mechanical linguistic transposition or a literary art.2 BT offers a complex and sustained history of translation for us to consider with regard to agendas.

Ambivalent Hospitality

An initial definition of hospitality: the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. With such a definition, the host has power to offer hospitality to the guest. However this definition does not allow for the complexity of how hospitality is lived out.

We recognize hospitality as a theme throughout the Bible. Additionally, Christianity holds hospitality in high esteem on both practical and theological levels. We recognize the words of hospitality in the Eucharist. Jesus the host welcomes all to his table. Theres probably some connection between this Eucharist meal and the scene we find at the end of the Emmaus road.

2 Maria Tymoczko, ed. Translation, Resistance, Activism. University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, 3.

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Luke 24:1335 Now on the same day, two of Jesus disciples were going to the village of Emmaus, which was about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about the things that had taken place. While they were talking, Jesus himself came near and started walking along beside them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Jesus asked them, What are you talking about as you walk along? They stood still, looking crestfallen. Then one of them named Cleopas answered him, Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem

who does not know the things that have been happening these days?

As they approached the village where they were going, Jesus acted as if he would continue on. But they urged him, saying, Stay with us; the day is almost over and it is getting dark. So he went in to stay with them. When he sat down at the table to eat, he took some bread and said a blessing; then he broke it and gave it to them. Just then, their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but Jesus vanished from their sight.

This scene continues to provoke me with words and phrases like: walking along, visiting, stranger, unrecognized, invitation, at table, blessing, give, recognize, made known. It is an appropriate story for a discussion of BT as hospitality; in it, Jesus role is reversed. He enters the story as a visitor and stranger, unrecognized, yet as one invited. The story closes with Jesus as the host, recognized when he serves food.3 This complexity of guest-host is suggestive to us today with regard to the BT enterprise. Although this can be viewed from an individual perspective, today I am primarily looking at BT as an enterprise, at an institutional level.

YouTube Video: Hobbit URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAOdIG0QBdU

Many of us are aware of this Tolkien story whether it be through the books or films. This scene provides us with an example of forced hospitality where the host becomes a hostage of the guests.

3 The preceding passage is my own translation of the Greek as found in, James Maxey, The Road to Emmaus: Changing Expectations

A Narrative-Critical Study in Currents in Theology and Mission. vol 32.2, 2005.

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Hospitality is a topic of discussion in philosophy as well, and here I name two who have provided much material on the subject: Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida. Hospitality asks us to consider the other. For Derrida, hospitality evokes distinctions of the other as invited or a visitor. And the host can not only be viewed as one who freely welcomes but also due to laws of hospitality can in a real sense become the hostage. Obliged hospitality can make for a hostile host. Derrida suggests this ambivalence with the French expression: Pas dhospitalit (which can mean a step of hospitality or no hospitality).

In a way strangely close to our Emmaus scene, Derrida suggests the role reversals of hospitality: So it is indeed the master, the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage

and who really always has been. And the guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites the one who invites, the master of the host. The guest becomes the hosts host. The guest (hte) becomes the host (hte) of the host (hte).4

Ricoeur is the one who suggests linguistic hospitality as a way to talk about how the other is received in translation.5 (Ill leave the pursuit of Ricoeur to my colleague, Deborah Shadd, as presented in her paper her at this conference.) The concept is profoundly discussed by many

from Schleiermacher to Antoine Berman to todays Lawrence Venuti as he talks about domestication and foreignization, or as Bella Brodzki puts it, estrangement.6 Audience-oriented translation is a given for much of BT today, with such catch words as accessibility, naturalness, comprehensibility, and understandability. Only recently has this assumption been challenged within BT with such projects as Translating Alterity (as presented by my colleague Phil Towner during his plenary paper at this conference.) Well come back to this issue of hospitality as related to domestication/foreignization strategies of translation below.

What does hospitality look like in the contexts of migration, diaspora, refugees, and immigration? Salman Rushdie is often quoted as acknowledging that we are translated

4 Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford University Press, 2000, 123-125.

5 Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, translated by Eileen Brennan. London: Routledge, 2006. 6 Lawrence Venuti, The Translators Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2d. London; New York: Routledge,

Schleiermacher 1813/2004: 49. Bella Brodzki. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford University Press, 2007, 8. BT as Hospitality and Counterinsurgency

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men.7 The general point is: it is not only texts that are translated, but people too. Migration

both voluntary and otherwise

underscores the fluidity of humanity, including its communication habits. Robert Young states, Translation is a way of thinking about how languages, people, and cultures are transformed as they move between different places.8

My project today is primarily a discussion of the missiology of BT. However, it is informed by these many treatments of hospitality. I find the philosophical discussion of hospitality helpful as it renders the concept more complex than initially anticipated. This is what I like about the Emmaus road story as well. Jesus turns the table on hospitality. In the similar way, my initial suggestion of BT as hospitality sets up a cozy expectation. My own initial definition is as follows: a host who chooses to receive a guest with generosity; and the guest who behaves with gratitude and respect towards the host. But I find the historical and contemporary realities are not so congruent with my definition nor as comfortable as our initial expectations with regard to BT and hospitality. The description of the host, who is obliged and becomes the hostage while the invited guest becomes the directive host, suggests that BT today remains a very ambivalent enterprise.

Any critical analysis of hospitality for me belongs to the field of cultural studies which makes us aware of this problematic word: culture. Its a word that trips off our tongue as if we all hold a common understanding of it. Katan counters an understanding of culture as static: Culture here is viewed as a dynamic process, constantly being negotiated by those involved.9 The aspect of culture that I want to pursue with you with regard to BT as hospitality is power relations and more specifically, the asymmetry of power relations in Bible translation. This approach is often the domain of postcolonial studies. Postcolonialism is a critique against colonial mentalities as well as nationalistic movements. In the discipline of biblical studies (including BT) postcolonialism is a theological criticism of colonialism. Comparing postcolonialism to liberation hermeneutics, Oxford biblical

7 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Penguin Books, 1992. 8 Robert Young, Postcolonialism: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2003, 29. 9 David Katan, Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1999 (2004), 21.

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postcolonialist scholar, R. S. Sugirtharajah, states that postcolonial goes beyond economy to cultures. According to Sugirtharajah, postcolonial translations are involved in demystification and questioning; wider intertextual spirituality; rewriting and reconfiguring. It involves turning the Masters tools.10 As Robert Young, a postcolonial scholar, has indicated, Translation in some sense is what Postcolonial Studies is all about because its about the degree to which historically Colonialism performed acts of translation if we can speak metaphorically

What it added to that idea of cultural contact and transformation was of course the relation of power.11 Postcolonial Studies offers fecund analyses as postcolonial critique focuses on forces of oppression and coercive domination that operate in the contemporary world12 and its lens has often been turned on Christianity and at times on Bible translation.

More than a decade ago, with the writings of people such as Sanneh, Walls, and Jenkins, we were finally convinced that Christianity could no longer be numerically described as centered in the northern hemisphere.13 But of course, this was not the full picture. Demographically Christianity became a religion of the south; but the sites of power and economics have remained for the most part in the north with Bible translation as no exception to this. Recent research indicates 60% of all Christians live in the global South, but they hold only 17% of all Christian financial resources.14

This conference has looked at some of these questions and addressed some of the postcolonial critiques. Lamin Sanneh, as the Beekman lecturer in 2007, aggressively argued

10 This description of postcolonialism was presented at the Triennial Translation Workshop of the United

Bible Societies in Bangkok in June 2009 by R. S. Sugirtharajah. 11 Robert Young. Transcript from interview by Siri Nergaard at the NSTS 2012 Research Symposium in NYC, September 14, 2012. 12 Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2001, 11. 13 Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996. Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 14 Christianity in its Global Context, 19702020: Society, Religion, and Mission. Center for the Study of Global Christianity. June 2013. http://wwwgordonconwell.com/netcommunity/CSGCResources/ChristianityinitsGlobalContext.pdf

(accessed September 22, 2013), 85. BT as Hospitality and Counterinsurgency

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against the cultural analysis and critique of missionary Christianity of Jean and John Comaroff by suggesting that the facts simply do not support the a priori conclusions of the Comaroffs with regard to southern Africa.15 Nevertheless, the Comaroff research remains to be used by others such as Musa Dube, a Batswana Professor who has critiqued the BT enterprise through a series of books and articles

perhaps most focused in her three- lecture series at the Nida School of Translation Studies in 2012 (videos available online at NSTS).16 Ive gone into the discussion of Dubes research at length in other papers and publications.17 At the risk of simplifying her thesis, part of her research involves the missionary translation of the Setswana NT and the search for a word for demon. One of the translations settled on the word that in most contexts can be rendered as ancestral spirit. Dube accuses the missionaries as intentionally placing this bomb in the translation to denigrate the culture. However, her main assertion is that consumers of this translation

in particular women who favored this translation

had not only deactivated the colonial bomb but had used the translation for their own agenda. Rather than accepting the missionary translation that demonized their ancestors they found ways to honor them. The colonial project described by Dube describes a type of hospitality where the host communities of Botswana were obliged to receive what the missionaries offered. Despite such obligation the host communities went about the task of deflecting the missionary intentions as the community pursued its own purposes.

In a similar way, Gerald West from South Africa provides research that demonstrates host communities agency: While the Bible has been used for purposes of oppression and imperialism, both because of the ideologies of those who have used it and because of the ideologies intrinsic to it, ordinary Africans have at a deeper, often hidden, level negotiated

15 John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South

Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); idem, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 16 One of these lectures has since been published: Musa Dube, The Bible in the Bush:

The First Literate Batswana Bible Readers, in translation. Misano, Adriatico, Italy: Fondazione Universitaria San Pellegrino, 2013, issue 2, 79-103. 17 James Maxey, From Orality to Orality: A New Paradigm for Contextual Translation of the Bible. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2009, 66-69. Musa W. Dube, Consuming the Colonial Cultural Bomb: Translating Badimo into Demons in the Setswana Bible (Matt. 8:28-34; 15:22; 10:8), Journal for the Study of the New Testament 73 (1999): 33-59. BT as Hospitality and Counterinsurgency

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and transacted with the Bible, and partially appropriated the Bible by relativising, resisting, and modifying it with uncanny creativity.18

The BT activities that the Comaroffs, Dube, and West analyzed were historical missionary activities. Today we look back on these missionary activities and find ourselves amazed at their courage and linguistic capacities. But we also cringe. We cringe at their being co-opted often into the colonial project. At least we hope they were co-opted. Whether co-opted or not, Im not suggesting that colonized peoples are helpless victims. Indeed, the thesis of postcolonial scholars is not a focus only on the power of the colonizer but also on the power of the colonized in discussions of subaltern agency and subversion. Sanneh, Dube, and West agree that whatever the agenda of the missionary translators, the colonized communities used their subversive agency for their own projects. And here we see a curious demonstration of hospitality. Guests who insist on their agenda are ostensibly successful. But hosts give the impression of subservience but manipulate the result of the guests agenda to their own interests. In the parlance of hospitality, the host received what the guest offered but used it in ways differently than how the guests had intended. Or, sort to speak: the hostile hosts responded to the unruly guests.

You would be right to state that BT of the 19-20th centuries is not the BT of today.

Across the board in the BT enterprise, we recognize that the actual translators are no longer missionaries or outsiders but mother-tongue speakers. Yet I would contend that outsiders continue to be involved in a variety of roles in the process. The result is another type of hospitality. The outsider is not a colonizer or intruder. Most BT agencies explain their presence in countries as a response to an invitation. We must admit, however, that BT agencies respond to such invitations with some clear mission. We do have our reasons: for knowledge; for scholarly research; for relationships; for commerce; for persuasion; to change the status quo.

18 Gerald O. West, On the Eve of an African Biblical Studies: Trajectories and Trends, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa (1999): 99.

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And so, todays activities by BT agencies are not simply a response to an invitation; they each have a mission, an agenda. Acknowledging this ideological motivation, a series of questions can be asked: How is it determined that a translation is needed? Who will be a translator? Who will pay expenses? What will be translated? Which resources will be used? How will the translation be recorded? Who will determine when a translation is acceptable?

How will the translation be publicly presented? Each of these questions is a node of many complex questions.19 But none is more telling than why translate? The answers reveal the motivations.

And so, what does this mean in terms of hospitality

and in particular, to be invited? When does benevolence become violence? When does hospitable become hostile? When do good intentions invade? When is the invited the intruder? Why are hosts sometimes hostile? And why do guests behave unruly?

Postcolonial scholars such as Robert Young observe an exchange in translation: [I]t would be a mistake to assume that even colonial translation was always a one-way process.

If translation involves the power structure of acts of appropriation, it can also invoke power through acts of resistance.

[T]he foundation idea of postcolonialism: that the one-way process by which translation is customarily conceived can be rethought in terms of cultural interaction, and as a space of re-empowerment.20

At the recent NSTS Research Symposium in NYC, Robert Young surmised that the domestication strategy of translation

a strategy in which dynamic equivalence is generally located

fosters agency (empowerment) with postcolonial communities.21 If Young is right, this becomes a topic for significant exchange with translation studies scholars. Lawrence Venuti expressesperhaps for others in TShow a languageor more personallya language community can colonize a text. For Venuti, this involves a national (foreign) text being translated (in a domesticating way) into a world language. In this way,

19 See a comparable list in Roy Ciampa, International Journal of Frontier Missiology (28:3 Fall 2011): 140. 20 Young, Postcolonialism: a Very Short Introduction, 141-142. 21 Nida School of Translation Studies Research Symposium, Cultural Translation. September 20, 2013.

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the text is colonized by the world language. Venutis suggestion for struggling against such colonization is to use foreignization as an appropriate approach for translation.22 However, when it is the case of a minority language community translating from a dominant community, a question to explore is whether foreignization remains a postcolonial strategy. We must admit that its not simply any literature here that we are discussing but the biblical canon. And this literature has a long history of accompanying colonial agendas. So a more refined question could be: when a minority community domesticates dominant literature can it be viewed as a postcolonial strategy of identity and liberation?

Such questions invite us to look more closely at the history of domestication in the BT enterprise. Counterinsurgency: winning the hearts and minds As evocative and generative as the metaphor of BT as hospitality is, I conclude with another metaphor, one that is equally evocative but intensely disturbing: BT as counterinsurgency. These thoughts are equally speculative and are primarily the result of exchanges with historian and postcolonial thinker Vicente Rafael.

Born in the Philippines, Rafael has written extensively on the role of translation and conversion during the early Spanish rule of the Philippines. In many ways, his research parallels what West and Dube are talking about with the terms transaction and consuming the colonial bomb. His initial book published in 1988 is helpful in understanding the social and political effects of Christianitys use of translation.23

Since then, Rafael has written extensively on other empires and their colonizing efforts, most recently, the USA. He is a vocal critic of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. He notes a significant change in 2006 with the US military strategy as articulated by General David Petraeus for a strategy of counterinsurgency to win the hearts and the minds of the local populations in these countries. Central to this strategy is the use

22 Lawrence Venuti, The Translators Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2d. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. 23 Vicente Rafael. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early

Spanish Rule. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993 [1988]. See also: idem, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

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of language and in particular translation. As the title of one of Rafaels articles indicates, the tactic seems to be the weaponization of language.24

How are hospitality and counterinsurgency related? Prior to counterinsurgency there must be insurgency from within. This insurgency activity is a reaction against unwanted guests or strangers from a segment of the host population. Insurgency refuses an obligation to host the stranger. Hospitality that obligates the host to receive a stranger can result in insurgency activities. Counterinsurgency becomes the stranger/guests reaction to this insurgency. Counterinsurgency is not a brute use of force, but rather of finesse. As General Petraeus indicated, the American militarys counterinsurgency efforts were to win the hearts and minds of the host community. In fact, the counterinsurgents seek to co-opt a portion of the host community to collaborate against the insurgents.

Here are two brief excerpts from the plan to win the hearts and minds of the people according to the journal, Military Review, September 2008. 25 The first is part of the military strategy for counterinsurgency:

Living	

among the people is essential to securing them and defeating the insurgents.

Relationships are a critical component of counterinsurgency operations. Together with

our Iraqi counterparts, strive to establish productive links with local leaders, tribal sheikhs, governmental officials, religious leaders, and interagency partners.

With regard to the weaponization of language, here are some of the guidelines in the selection and training of interpreters as is presented in the US militarys Counterinsurgency Field Manual. 26

In order to win the hearts and minds of the host community against the insurgents, one has to be able to communicate in an accessible language, most often through interpreters.

24 Vicente Rafael, Targeting Translation: Counterinsurgency and the Weaponization of Language, Social Text

113

(Vol. 30, No. 4

Winter 2012): 55-80. 25 General David H. Petraeus, U.S. Army. Multi-National Force-Iraq Commanders Counterinsurgency Guidance in Military Review, September-October, 2008, 2; 4. 26 The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. University of Chicago Press, 2007, 66-68. BT as Hospitality and Counterinsurgency

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 An interpreter must be acceptable: to the target audience. . . . Their gender, age, race and ethnicity must be compatible with the target audience, their mannerisms and social reputation, as one who is least likely to cause suspicion or miscommunication be discrete

Hence, the visibility of the interpreter is meant to produce his or her invisibility Interpreters should be reliable, loyal, and compatible with military personnel (team player) [They] should be quick and alert, able to respond to changing conditions and situations. be careful not to inject their personality, ideas or questions; mirroring the speakers tone and personality; translating the exact meaning without adding or deleting information

Rafael enters into contemporary discussions of Bible agencies interest in heart language translation. In the end the counterinsurgency strategy with regard to translation does not achieve its original aim due to the very nature of language and translation

a nature much more complex than the views reflected in the programs and products of the US military

as well as the BT enterprise. Rafael leaves us with this question: Can translation be faithful to empire, or does it betray empire in the double sense of that word: revealing its workings but also frustrating its ends?27

Whereas the initial sentiment with the metaphor of hospitality is benign and benevolent, counterinsurgency seems out of place with regard to Bible translation. Nevertheless, if translation in general and Bible translation in particular is ideologically laden, this militaristic term offers alternative ways of viewing the BT enterprise that should give pause. Given the current demographics of Christianity in the world today, it is possible to

27 Rafael, Language, Translation and Empire in Comparative Perspective, 25.

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think of the global north as dominant and empire-like in its decision-making and funding activities. Furthermore, the scenario of N. American BT agencies imbued with political and financial power entering into global south contexts where host communities are obliged to accommodate their guests suggests a complex network of power relations.

Conclusion

BT as hospitality and counterinsurgency are generative metaphors that offer us a chance to reflect on institutional roles, motives, responsibilities, and opportunities. A theme that runs throughout discussions of hospitality is that of the other. And from this, we ask ourselves how we relate to the other. Postcolonial studies pushes us to consider power relations. Although the doers of BT today are predominantly from the global south, much of the institutional power remains in the north. The ambivalence of hospitality where hosts can be held hostage and where guests can dominate the host leads to a portrayal of BT as counterinsurgency. From this angle, the invited guest sees his task is to win the hearts and minds of the hosts in ways that can be understood as self-serving. Perhaps neither of these metaphors is helpful for BT in the first decades of the 21st century. I wonder if a more transparent image is that of BT as negotiation. Lets see how this develops at BT 2015.

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