Inscriptive Practices Research Articles

Inscriptional Repertoires and the Problem of Intra- versus Interlingual Translation in Traditional Korea

This article brings together a series of examples demonstrating the wide range of inscriptional practices in premodern Korea and the ways in which they force us to reconsider modern and Eurocentric notions of translation. The premodern inscriptional spectrum in Chosŏn Korea was not a simple binary of cosmopolitan orthodox Literary Sinitic versus vernacular Korean in the form of ŏnhae exegeses but was a range of inscriptional styles that included idu and kugyŏl. The ways in which texts were inscribed, reinscribed, and transliterated between these different inscriptional styles, as well as the ways in which Chosŏn literati themselves understood the notion of yŏk (譯, “translation”) challenge modern-day notions of translation, on the one hand, but also invite an understanding of them as rather more intralingual than interlingual. They also force us to ask whether LS was conceived as a “foreign” language for literate Koreans in Chosŏn. The premodern Korean cases forces us to add script and inscriptional repertoire (including notions of orthography, notational system, munch'e 文體, etc.) to the list of the main factors that influence intralingual translation.

The official record of victims as a bordering technology: knowledge and (in)visibilities in post-conflict Colombia

ABSTRACT Following the regulations dictated by the Law of Victims in 2012, representatives of the Colombian government have engaged in the task of registering and compensating victims of human rights perpetrations as a result of war violence. These registration procedures, mostly processing the applications of people on the move inside the national territory, are consolidated in the Official Record of Victims (RUV). The RUV enjoys international visibility as an exemplar project of post-conflict reparation and technological success of state bureaucracy. This success, however, relies upon overlooked material practices of inscription and assessment involved in processing the statements of millions of applicants. Whereas the RUV enacts boundaries of rights restitution as a state project, ethnographic excerpts about its inscription practices, assessment procedures, and data production rubrics complicate the broadly promoted success of post-conflict reparation. As other bordering technologies, the RUV demarcates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion by enacting visible forms of identification of which Internal Displacement is a predominant part. In this process, the forms and assessment practices prioritize applicants’ narrations that are consistent with the official version of the armed conflict while also making invisible divergent accounts that contest it.

Approximations: On Some Ways to Listen to a Building “in the Making”

What sounds and noises does a future building make? How do architectural acousticians listen to a building in the making? How do you measure something that is not yet there? What is the epistemological status of approximations? Following the listening practices of acousticians as they measure a future experience of sound through a mock-up and of noise through an incomplete simulation, this article explores the challenge of fixing sound and noise as elusive objects of knowledge. Based on an ethnography of a building project, we see how architectural acousticians rely on what they call “approximations,” both the inscriptions and inscriptive work used to give traces of reality to future lived experiences of sound and noise that they hope “would be” there. Bringing together sound studies, ethnographies of architectural practice and science and technology studies accounts of inscription practices, the article argues for attention to be placed on the ephemera of knowledge and design practices, which allows analytic focus to remain upstream between the possible and the actual. Situated within the practices of the acousticians, we can witness some of the ways that sound and noise take shape within a building project, grosso modo.

Inscriptional Practices of the Song Literati

Abstract After decades of being hidden from public view, the recent emergence of Su Shi's (1037–1101) Old Tree, Rock, and Bamboo has led to a long overdue reexamination of this famous scroll that many scholars regard as the single credible extant painting by the artist. Questions concerning authenticity have been at the forefront, and this has led to a focus on the scroll's impressive documentation, which begins with two poetic inscriptions contemporary to Su Shi, including one by the famed calligrapher Mi Fu (1052–1107). Yet, while scrutiny of the painting and its documentation has made a strong case for authenticity, it has largely avoided two seals on the painting that claim the actual authorial presence of Su and Mi. It is argued in this article that those two seals, which some have attributed to the later collector Yang Zun (ca. 1320–after 1368), should in fact belong to Su Shi and Mi Fu. Acknowledging their true provenance consequently provides an extraordinary entrée to reconstructing the dates and circumstances of both the painting and Mi's poetic inscription. Beyond this, we gain a glimpse of how the literati creatively employed inscriptional practices to enhance the communicative function of painting and calligraphy in the late eleventh century.

Writing as a Source of Ritual Authority: The High Priest's Body as a Priestly Text in the Tabernacle-Building Story

Abstract Past works have connected the design, execution, and content of Aaron's inscribed clothing in the tabernacle-building narrative in Exod 28 and 39 to different types of ancient Near Eastern inscriptions. This largely form-critical enterprise sheds light on their power as inscriptions that draw authority from diverse text-types, including dedications, seals, and amulets. Yet the inscriptions set into Aaron's clothing do more than tell us about the types of textual practices priests may have known about or engaged in—they project a priestly ideal of writing as a source of ritual authority. When the narrative description of these inscriptions is theorized through the framework of multimodality, we can see that they communicate through their semantic content and through their design, but also through their display features on Aaron's body and their movement with him in the tabernacle. Exodus 28 and 39 embed a host of inscriptional practices into Aaron's uniform in a way that transforms it into an archetypical priestly text, one that is mobile yet tied to the priesthood. In the story of the building of the tabernacle, this literary representation of Aaron's inscribed clothing both anticipates and affirms the ritual authority of texts in priestly communities in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem's temple in the Neo-Babylonian period.

The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing

The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Mudanças de suporte na história das inscrições urbanas

De acordo com Correa (2016), as inscrições urbanas podem ser compreendidas como um conjunto de práticas semióticas cuja dinâmica social mostra a interdependência entre os níveis de pertinência (Fontanille, 2008). Assim, ao avaliar a história das inscrições urbanas, identifica-se no suporte um núcleo de transformação dirigido pelas práticas e um fator desencadeador das tensões que promovem mudanças e conservações ao longo do tempo. Por isso, tomam-se as propostas de Dondero e Reyes (2016) sobre a questão do suporte na semiótica para abordar o desenvolvimento das práticas de inscrições urbanas em relação ao uso do suporte e seu impacto na plasticidade dos textos-enunciados. Desse modo, consegue-se dar mais um passo em direção à análise de um fenômeno social cujo dinamismo e multiplicidade desafiam a apreensão teórica.

A Dramaturgy of Feeling: Exploring Indigenous concepts of knowing through multimodal aesthetics

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists are developing dramaturgies that immerse audiences within multimodal stagings, resonating with and imparting an embodied experience of Indigenous Australian ontologies. While use of onstage multimodal expression­­–combining verbal storytelling, dance, visual art, craft making and song– has been a feature of performance traditions the world over, here, it is expressly deployed at the service of reinforcing ancient storytelling traditions as distinctively Indigenous forms of performative expression, in opposition to Western conventions that centralise dialogue as carrier of dramatic exploration. As a celebration of survival and resilience of the Eora Nation (i.e. the 29 First Nation clans of the Greater Sydney Region), the radical dramaturgy of Anita Heiss & Wesley Enoch’s play I Am Eora (2012) centralises emotion as the key vector along which performers drew audiences into the cosmos of Eora community building. Rather than engaging dialogue as a source of information and orientation, Enoch’s staging relied on group choreographies, musical delivery and monologues that were accompanied by evocative visual design and inscription practices. These triggered an oscillating trajectory of emotional engagement that took audiences on a journey that produced an emotional connection to the concept of Eora communal identity. The article closely traces the activation of senses in I Am Eora’s staging, encompassing olfactory, visual and auditory stimulation and kinaesthetic resonance. It considers their integration within the play’s dramaturgical framework, connecting it to Bill Neidjie (Gagudju)’s philosophy of feeling and theories of relational identity as relayed by American-Australian scholar Deborah Rose. The article explores how perception is leveraged in I Am Eora to shift audiences’ habitual relation to First Nation subjects, developing coordinates for a reconfigured socio-political engagement beyond the theatre space.

Ethnophilology and Colonial Demonology: Towards a Global History of Early Modern Superstition

ABSTRACT Superstition was at the core of intellectual debates during the early modern period. Rooted in the Christian theological tradition, these debates expanded to the New World via missionary networks. Although the historiography has dealt with this global process of Christianisation, fewer studies reflect the reverse process, that is, the influence of missionary reports at the centre of debates about superstition in the Old World. This paper sets out to reconsider the global entanglements that backed up Martin Delrio’s famous work, Disquisitionum magicarum (1599–1600), analysing the role played by demonology and philology in colonial contexts. It seeks to demonstrate that textual and inscription practices were not only decisive for the creation of a ‘global superstition’, but above all to tame and normalise the relationship between religious practices and Nature.

From Literacy/Literacies to Graphic Pluralism and Inscriptive Practices

This article considers the ongoing importance of studying writing practices within and beyond anthropology. The works included here concentrate on scholarship that has appeared since the productive yet divisive debates that established literacy as a plural phenomenon that is best studied ethnographically. It focuses on research that surveys the multiplicity of graphic forms, the changing notions of literacies, and the ways that literacy is implicated in and constitutive of sites of power. In addition, the cited works engage with the linguistic and semiotic ideologies that inform such literacy practices, the various aesthetic sensibilities that shape writing, and the physicality/materiality of inscriptive practices. Considering the effects of previously theorizing writing as a single, uniform phenomenon and the shift to research that characterizes inscriptive practices as multiple makes possible an argument for moving beyond multiplicity to question what writing is and can be, looking to works on “inscriptive practices” and “graphic pluralism.”

You shall not enter the list: Inscriptional Practices and Politics of Deservingness in Indonesia

Indonesia first state-led community-driven development (CDD) began in the 1990s with influential support by the World Bank. This paradigm sees community not merely as an object but rather as an active subject of development. To ensure the shifting in the paradigmatic level, a social engineering process known as community empowerment project was built using monitoring instrument to guarantee inclusive development planning, prevent elite capture, and promote internal audit capacities. In this process, extensive use of bureaucratic instruments, e.g., paperwork, assessment forms, official stamps, program proposals/reports, and financial report facilitate the formation of community participation. How the use of documents shaped the intended inclusive development projects under CDD paradigm? This paper discusses the ironic trends of how participatory framework in CDD, in fact, intensified social exclusions. The discussion is based on my experience observing the implementation of ‘public consultation approach’ in PBDT 2015 ( Pemutakhiran Basis Data Terpadu/ Unified Database Updating). In such program, the local stakeholders, together with community trustee at kelurahan (village) level held a meeting to verify the enlisted poor households. The verification was crucial to create a unified database that can be used for future reference of the beneficiaries for several social assistance programs in Indonesia. I argue that tensions and negotiations toward deciding which names deserve to be on the list perpetuated forms of exclusion that embrace the exercise of prejudice, ethnic, and moral references in producing the hierarchy of deservingness at the community level.

“Towards eliminating viral hepatitis”: Examining the productive capacity and constitutive effects of global policy on hepatitis C elimination

In 2016 the World Health Organization published the first global health strategy to address viral hepatitis, setting a goal of eliminating viral hepatitis as a major public health threat by 2030. While the field has been motivated by this goal, to date there has been little critical attention paid to the productive capacity and constitutive effects of this policy. How is governing taking place through the mechanism of this global strategy, and how are its goals and targets shaping what is made thinkable (indeed, what is made as the real) about hepatitis C and its elimination? And with what effects? Taking the Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis, 2016–2021 as a text for analysis, we draw on poststructural thinking on problematisation and governmental technologies to examine how ‘elimination’ – as a proposal – constitutes the problem of hepatitis C. We critically consider the conceptual logics underpinning the elimination goal and targets, and the multiple material-discursive effects of this policy. We examine how governing takes place through numbers, by analysing ‘target-setting’ (and its accompanying practices of management, quantification and surveillance) as governmental technologies. We consider how the goal of elimination makes viral hepatitis visible and amenable to structuring, action and global management. Central to making viral hepatitis visible and manageable is quantification. Viral hepatitis is made as a problem requiring urgent global health management not through the representation of its effects on bodies or situated communities but rather through centralising inscription practices and comparison of estimated rates. It is important to remain alert to the multiple makings of hepatitis C and draw attention to effects which might be obscured due to a primary focus on quantification and management. To do so is to recognise the ontopolitical effects of governmental technologies, especially for communities ‘targeted’ by these strategies (including people who inject drugs).

Ethics and inscription in social robot design. A visual ethnography

AbstractIn this paper, by turning to examples of visual inscriptions adopted within HRI research, and more specifically social robotic interaction, I wish to explore through visual ethnography some of the challenges faced in designing ethical robots. Firstly, visual ethnography allows for an alternative categorisation of the inscriptions of HRI based on visual characteristics. Secondly, visual inscriptions show multiple and paradoxical meanings when appearing juxtaposed revealing challenges of diminished and asymmetric consideration of human orientated concerns in favour of technical and experimental certainty. Thirdly, by taking a human orientated perspective of experimental arrangements, the understanding of ethics becomes a way of framing and of looking at inscriptions. The paper calls for a better understanding of the role of inscription practices in HRI generally in order to find new approaches useful to bolster a more robust inclusion of ethics within the field.

The touch of iconoclasm

This article reflects on some depicted intentional acts of iconoclasm undertaken by Isis in Northern Iraq and viewed as online videos. It attempts to consider what makes these moving images compelling to audiences who share an orientation to the protection and preservation of ancient artefacts. In doing so, it prompts a reflection on their circulation as part of stories that get told about cultural heritage, and particularly the simple civilizational oppositions that get set up between ‘Western’ and ‘Islamic’ culture. Centring on the significance of the sensation of touch to practices of cultural inscription, it suggests that the Northern Iraq videos animate forms of synaesthesic material engagement that are denied by the modernist technologies of museum culture.

Trajectories of knowledge and desire: Multilingual women scholars researching and writing in academia

This paper explores the significance of gender in research and academic writing for publication. It reports on a gender-focused, interview-based study with 10 multilingual women scholars, set within a longitudinal research project in which they have participated for between 11 and 14 years. The scholars work in two disciplinary fields, education and psychology, and come from four national contexts: Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal.The paper argues that gender remains an ‘occluded’ (after Swales, 1996) category in research on academic writing for publication but is implicated in practices around academic knowledge making in important ways. Key themes emerging from the data are discussed: the passions driving intellectual work; academic inscription practices; networks of collaboration; being a carer; academic service work; the body in academia. The value of exploring women scholars' perspectives and practices through the lens of trajectory is underscored, offering as it does glimpses of how they enact agency at specific moments of their academic lives, in an increasingly rigidly governed and evaluated social space.

Post-conventional energy futures: Rendering Europe's shale gas resources governable

Following the shale gas boom in the United States, unconventional natural gas extracted from organic-rich shale rock formations has generated increasing attention in the European Union (EU). This considerable interest has been spurred by a range of optimistic volumetric appraisals of shale gas resource potential trapped beneath the European continent. The paper critically examines rationalities and practices through which states of resource availability and recoverability are made visible, measurable, intelligible, and thus rendered governable, namely open to new fields of possibilities to act upon. By implementing the concept of socio-technical imaginaries as governmentality approach, the analysis is guided by two objectives: first, to identify visions of shale gas potential contained in a range of resource estimates; second, to scrutinize rationalities of government, that is how shale gas resources are made knowable and purposeful, as well as technologies of government that operationalize these rationalities via practices of calculation, visualization, and inscription. The paper illustrates that, these highly speculative and uncertain assessments can forge powerful volumetric imaginaries of shale gas potential that yield specific governing effects concerned with securitization of unconventional hydrocarbons availability. Consequently, these imaginaries prescribe and legitimize techno-political hopes for certain post-conventional energy futures underpinning the fossil fuel abundance narrative.

Authoring the ancient sites of Cyprus in the late nineteenth century: the British Museum excavation notebooks, 1893–1896

This paper considers the performance of archaeology in the field. To do so it examines the notebooks recording the British Museum excavations in Cyprus during the period 1893–1896. Archaeologists have described the practices of writing and drawing as a performance that accords archaeology its disciplinary identity. However, there have not been systematic studies of the centrality of fieldwork in the disciplinary culture of nineteenth-century archaeology as there have been for other field sciences. Histories and geographies of science have shown that field knowledge was produced through a variety of spatial practices – including inscriptive practices – whose meaning, processes and intentions were embodied in the material artefacts of science, such as instruments and notebooks. Drawing on that work, this paper locates the British Museum notebooks as material objects of science in the disciplinary landscape of late nineteenth-century Cypriot archaeology and in British classical archaeology more broadly. In doing so, this paper furthers our understanding of how classical archaeology became established as a field-based scientific discipline in the later nineteenth century. This paper argues that the British Museum notebooks functioned as paper tools in the field: they constructed a new interpretative model of the ancient Cypriot artefacts that placed the island within the prehistoric Greek world. This archaeological model was established through the more accurate, schematic, abstracted and numerical syntax of the notebooks. Importantly, the British Museum archaeologists through the use of the notebooks as paper tools created a new entity, the excavated Cypriot artefact, that was firmly associated with the conditions of its discovery and evaluation processes.

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns by Lisa Voigt

Reviewed by: Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns by Lisa Voigt Ricardo Padrón Lisa Voigt. Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. U of Texas P, 2016. 225 Pp. IN THIS CAREFULLY RESEARCHED AND THOUGHTFULLY CRAFTED BOOK, Lisa Voigt makes a compelling case against José Antonio Maravall’s argument that civic festivals were among the key practices used by church and crown to direct the culture of the Hispanic world during the Baroque period. According to Maravall (and others), such festivals rehearsed the triumph of civilization over barbarism, Christianity over paganism, and Spain over its various ethnic and racial others, thereby serving to impress the masses with the majesty of the Crown or the truth of the Faith. Voigt overturns this argument by carefully examining a series of printed descriptions of religious and secular festivals held in the colonial Latin American mining towns of High Peru and Minas Gerais. According to her, celebrations of Corpus Christi, official entrances of secular and ecclesiastical officials, and other such festivals did not speak with a single voice, but with many. The people responsible for them as sponsors and participants of various kinds did not just hear the commanding voice of God or king and submit to it, but also found ways to express their own agendas and identities as criollos, Amerindians, and Africans. The book is divided into two parts of two chapters each, with a separate introduction and conclusion. Part 1 deals with criollo patriotism in festival descriptions, with chapter 1 focused on the festivals included in Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí (1737), and chapter 2 on Simão Ferreira Machado’s Triunfo Eucharistico (1734) and the anonymous Aureo Throno Episcopal (1749). In each chapter, we see how these texts celebrate the identities of the criollo elites of mining boomtowns, often against metropolitan aspersions. Arzáns, for example, uses his accounts of Potosí festivals over the course of a century to defend creoles against metropolitan arguments that the inhabitants of the Americas were less sophisticated, intellectually and culturally, than their European counterparts. The Portuguese texts, meanwhile, portray the mining towns of Minas Gerais as centers of piety and devotion, thereby answering to the claim of metropolitan [End Page 235] discourse that their locations in the far reaches of the empire meant that they lacked the piety of Portugal. Part 2 is probably the more interesting of the two, insofar as it involves greater interpretative challenges. In chapter 3, Voigt returns to Potosí and Arzáns, but adds Diego Mexía de Ferangil’s El Dios Pan (early seventeenth century) to the mix; in chapter 4, she returns to Minas Gerais, Machado, and the Aureo Throno. In returning to these texts, Voigt’s goal is to examine how Amerindians in Peru and Africans in Minas Gerais appropriated civic festivals for their own ends. Baroque civic festivals putatively included Amerindian or African participants in order to enact the submission of subject populations to king and church, but Voigt demonstrates that subaltern groups were able to inhabit these roles in ways that converted them into celebrations of Amerindian or African identity. She does so by reading against the grain of the criollo narrative, fastening onto places where subaltern agendas peek out through the overt rhetorical program, using comparisons with relevant archival material and ample references to the secondary literature to tease them out. This reviewer was most interested in the discussion of mulattoes in Carijó costumes, which made them look like Tupinamba Indians and African kings at the same time, allowing their performance to mean different things for different publics. Like Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic, Voigt’s first book, Spectacular Wealth benefits from the author’s rare ability to move capably and easily between the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds. Brazil and Bolivia receive equal attention. As a result, we learn how the same practices of performance and inscription characterize the Iberian Baroque on both sides of the line of demarcation. We also observe fascinating parallels between Amerindian and African festival participation, something that would hardly be possible if the argument did not...

Setting live coding performance in wider historical contexts

ABSTRACTThis paper sets live coding in the wider context of performing arts, construed as the poetic modelling and projection of liveness. Concepts of liveness are multiple, evolving, and scale-dependent: entities considered live from different cultural perspectives range from individual organisms and social groupings to entire ecosystems, and consequently reflect diverse temporal and spatial orders. Concepts of liveness moreover evolve with our tools, which generate and reveal new senses and places of vitality. This instability complexifies the crafting of live events as artistic material: overriding habitual frames and scales of reference is a challenge when handling infinitely scalable computational phenomena. With its generative affordances, improvised interactive programming, and notational possibilities, live coding introduces unique qualities into the performance arena. At the same time, performance history abounds in adaptive systems which anticipate certain live coding criteria. Historic performance and contemporary coding practices raise shared questions that can enhance our understanding of live art, notably to do with feedback, fixed versus on-the-fly programmable conceptual and physical frameworks, and inscriptive practices and notation methods for live action. I attempt to address such questions by setting live coding in a wider performance history perspective.