Indexical histories and circulating cultural forms

Bible translators are into circulating cultural forms, but often don't think about the ways those forms are always linked indexically to location, technologies and the like. Charles Briggs explains it this way. "Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999) suggested that in the case of diagnostic categories and statistics, producing mobility involves two contradictory processes. First, particular practices, epistemologies, and technologies must be employed in order to enable objects, cultural forms, and other entities to inhabit particular sites. At each location through which they circulate, texts, objects, narratives, and the like get connected indexically to features of these assemblages at the same time that they performatively reshape them, albeit generally in minute ways. Bowker and Star suggest that in order to move on to other sites, however, dimensions of the complex indexical histories generated at each site must be erased. Some actors, interests, languages, conflicts, technologies, and the like must disappear; of the stuff that circulates, some features become fissures and others part of the background, some get referentially coded while others are lodged in non-referential features. Reception, of course, further complicates this process, as some people who get interpellated down the line know enough of the indexical histories to infer elements that have been erased while others are unable to decode even foregrounded elements."

Briggs, Charles L. "Contested Mobilities: On the Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation." Journal of Folklore Research 50, no. 1 (2013): 285–99, (287).