![]() ![]() As Pierre Bourdieu (1977:648) points out: "Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledege, but also an instrument of power. If we substitute for "teacher" and "pupil" in Barthes�s text the terms "public health official" and "peasant," we can begin to see how linguistic essentializing works with Quechua. At first "work of the devil," later "false belief," and still later "false consciousness," successive generations in the Andes have learned to hide their language. I no doubt receive an objective message: Red is the sign of interdiction (the proof of this lies in the conformity of my behavior), but what I actually experience is the speech of my teacher, his phraseology if, for example, this phraseology is intimidating, the meaning of red will inevitably include a certain terror: in the rapid process (as experienced) of the message, I cannot put the signifier of the terminological system to one side, and the signified of the rhetorical system to the other, dissociating red from terror.įor nearly five hundred years Spanish-speaking Peruvians have been translating anti-remedy into "brujería," witchcraft. In other words, another semantic system almost inevitably builds itself on the instructor�s speech, i.e., the system of connotation. Roland Barthes (1983:31-32) writes: My teacher�s speech is, so to speak, never neutral at the very moment when he seems simply to be telling me that red signals an interdiction, he is telling me other things as well: his mood, his character, the "role" he wishes to assume in my eyes, our relations as student and teacher these new signifieds are not entrusted to the words of the code being taught, but to other forms of discourse ("values," turns of phrase, information, everything that makes up the instructor�s rhetoric and phraseology). Spanish attempts to neutralize Quechua are nothing less than linguistic intimidation, linguistic terrorism, where one learns to fear and hate one�s own language. Translations which suppress the negative phases, repress signifieds, oppress the living language. As Regina Harrison (1989:49) suggests: "The semantic imprecision" of such terms "would argue that the language of the victor avoids the problem of accuracy." Persons who know only Spanish, or Spanish and English, are removed even farther, and are in no position to anticipate how the oscillating signifieds bounce, tumble, change places, erase each other and reappear, like unquiet ghosts. Colonizers, missionaries, government officials, and dominant elite sectors have been doing this for centuries in their unceasing efforts to erase "social memory," a term used by Thomas Abercrombie (1998:21) "to convey the embodied ways by which people constitute themselves and their social formations in communicative actions and interactions, making themselves by making rather than inheriting their pasts." Thus, bilinguals translate ampi as "remedio," cure, and ampeq as "curandero," (26) curer. Bilingual mestizos understand this overdetermined meaning of ampi, as well as that of ampeq, one who practices ampi, but they tend to view the negative meanings as "false beliefs" subject to correction. We are confronting a Quechua medical discourse of ill-being and well-being, of healing and anti-healing, of remedy and anti-remedy, and, in no manner incidentally, of medical practice and malpractice. Something quite marvelous, something powerful, something magical. Moreover, the difficulty is that "two objects cannot coexist in the same place," yet "without changing places, a same object can become �other�" (160). The translation "can thus be neither accepted nor simply rejected" and, also, there can be "no such thing as a harmless remedy" (99). thus excluding from the text any leaning toward the magic virtues of a force whose effects are hard to master, a dynamic that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject" (97). ![]() It cancels out the resources of this ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossible, an understanding of the context. as antisubstance itself." He points out that the usual translation of the word as "remedy" is accurate but that this "nonetheless erases, in going outside the Greek language, the other pole reserved in the word. (23) Ampi, as it is used in the Province of Carhuaz, is impossible to translate into Spanish or English because it has oscillating signifieds: it can mean either "remedy" or "anti-remedy," "medicine" or "poison." (24) It is like Greek pharmakon which, Jacques Derrida (1981:70) says, was used by Plato as "both remedy and poison already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. Et us conclude with the second example, a Quechua word (or root), ampi.
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