INNOVATIVE RESEARCH

IN THE HUMANITIES

Harry Aveling, PhD DCA,Translation and Interpreting Studies,

Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

The Research Question“Who is this Ganesa? What is his real appearance and how can it be known? To whom has he been kindly disposed, Four-faced god? How many are his incarnations and what deeds did they perform? Who previously worshipped him and in respect of what deed was he called to mind? I have asked this, though my mind is scattered, so Great-grandfather, receptacle of compassion, tell me all this in great detail.”

Ganesa Purana, Upasana Khanda, chapter 10.

The Method

“Wishing to answer the questions put in this manner,Four-faced Brahma spoke again.‘ After considering the multiplicity of Ganesa

mantras,

I am going to describe everything gradually.’” (Bailey 1995: 191)

Research

"the curiosity-driven production of new knowledge" (Nowotny 2011: xix).

“the creation of new knowledge and/or the use of existing knowledge in a new and creative way to generate new concepts, methodologies, inventions and understandings. This could include synthesis and analysis of previous research to the extent that it is new and creative” (ERA 2015 Submission Guidelines: 12)

Innovation

The creation of completely new concepts, methods and procedures;Advances or developments in already existing “tried and tested” concepts, research methods and procedures. Wiles, Pain Crow (2010: 3)

The Old Humanities

The seven liberal arts:the verbal arts (the trivium) – grammar, rhetoric, and logic mathematical arts (the quadrivium) – arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy

“The seven liberal arts together give man both knowledge of the divine and power to express it. But, in so doing, they fulfil at the same time another purpose. They serve ad cultam humanitatis, that is, they promote the specifically human values, revealing to man his place in the universe and teaching him to appreciate the beauty of the created world.” (Klibansky, cited in Wagner 1986: 24)

The Old Humanities

The Enlightenment emphasized human reason and scientific discovery.The formal study of national literatures began during the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold: “the best that is known and thought in the world”Educating the elite to govern.

The New Humanities

Among the New Humanities are Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Translation Studies, as well as Cinema Studies, Multicultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Performance Studies, and so on. They are interdisciplinary and deal with areas of formerly ignored and indeed often neglected or even disdained knowledge. The New Humanities have “a commitment to mobilising the perspectives of previously marginalised and subordinate social groups in critique of the more established humanities disciplines” (Bennett 2013: xii).

1 Cultural Studies

“takes as its theoretical object the culture of everyday life, where the concept of culture is understood in a broadly anthropological sense, as the full range of practices and representations in which meanings and personal and group identities are formed” (Frow 1992: 25).

Popular Culture

A mass, commercial culture that is intended to appeal to the widest possible audience.A residual category, not “high culture”Deficient in terms such as the active involvement of the audience, formal complexity, moral worth, intellectual difficulty, and so on. Based on specific ideological values intended “to indoctrinate the people, to get them to accept and adhere to ideas and values which ensure the continued dominance of those in more privileged positions who thus exercise power over them” (Strinati 2004: 3).

Why Study Popular Culture?

It is widespread and it is real. It deals with areas of life that have previously been overlooked by the Old Humanities.It provides a foundation for social justice. There are no “inferior” cultures, just different patterns of life.

Critical Theory

The Frankfurt School and the culture industry. Structuralism, semiology and popular culture. Marxism, political culture and ideology. Feminism and popular culture.Postmodernism.

Semiotics

Signs and systems.Interactions of signs. Texts and textualities. Genre and intertextuality. Narrative. Medium and mediation. Ideology. Systems and strategies.

Questioning Identity

Lesley Johnson: “The questioning of who we are, and the critique of the dominant social institutions and cultural practices that shape what we are, are central to Cultural Studies” (1992: 54).

Aquarini Prayatna Prabasmoro

“Diri saya sendiri merupakan subjek dan objek penulisan yang tidak akan habis, termasuk juga suami, anak, ayah-ibu, mertua, ipar, teman, kolega, marka jalan, orang-orang di bus kota, segala sesuatu di pinggir jalan, film, novel, fashion, hingga gosip selebriti. Saya juga cinta menulis tentang perempuan. Rasanya hampir setiap tulisan saya adalah tentang perempuan. Dan perempuan itu sering kali adalah saya sendiri” (Kajian Budaya Feminis 2006: 1)

Becoming White: Representasi ras, kelas, femininitas dan globalitas dalam iklan sabun (2003)

Tamara Bleszinsky

Sophia Latjuba

2 Postcolonial Studies

The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Ashcroft Griffiths and Tiffin."More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by colonialism” (p. 1). The term "postcolonial” covers "all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day" (p. 2). Literature is one of the most important ways of understanding the conditions of, and responses to, colonialism .

Features of all postcolonial writing: The "silencing and marginalizing of the post-colonial voice by the imperial centre"; “The abrogation of this imperial centre within the text"; “The active appropriation of the language and culture of that centre”

Indonesian Postcolonial Literary Criticism

Clearing A Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature, edited by Keith Foulcher and Tony Day (2002).

Melani Budianta, “In the margin of the capital” deals with Tjerita Boedjang Bingoeng (1935)and Si Doel anak sekolahan (1940s), both by Aman Datoek Madjoindo,

Methodology

Budianta argues that: Postcolonial studies provides a set of theoretical questions, or a framework, that can be applied to different kinds of colonial experience in order to discover “otherwise unseen intertextual relations or dynamics of textual power relations, be they ‘global/local interaction’, ‘internal colonialism’, ‘regional neo-imperialism’, or yet unnamed conditions” (p. 238).

The essay deals with money (capital), tradition and modernity, education, language, race, gender, class and ethnicity, the wider local-global economic and cultural relationships (p. 268).

3 Translation Studies

Translation is “a craft consisting in the attempt to replace a written message and/or a statement in one language by the same message and/or statement in another language” (Newmark 1981: 7). Translation Studies is a formal branch of academic study that explores all dimensions of the translation process.

The Name and Nature of Translation Studies

“As a field of pure research … translation studies thus has two main objectives: (1) to describe the phenomena of translating and translation(s) as they manifest themselves in the world of our experience, and (2) to establish general principles by means of which these phenomena can be explained and predicted” (James Holmes 1972).

Descriptive Translation Studies

1 Product-oriented DTS: “that area of research which describes existing translations” (184).2 Function-oriented DTS: the description of the function of translations in the recipient socio-cultural situation, “it is a study of contexts rather than texts” (185).3 Process-oriented DTS: “[T]he problem of what exactly takes place in the ‘little black box’ of the translator’s ‘mind’ as he creates a new, more or less matching text in another language …” (185).

Translation Theory

A general translation theory aims “to develop a full, inclusive theory accommodating so many elements that it can serve to explain and predict all phenomena falling within the terrain of translating and translation, to the exclusion of all phenomena falling outside it.” (186).

Partial Translation Theories

1 Medium restricted translation theories: according to the medium used – human (oral, written), machine … 2 Area restricted translation theories: focusing on specific languages, cultures …3 Rank restricted translation theories: the word, word group, sentence, the whole text …4 Text-type restricted translation theories: “specific types or genres of lingual message”: poetry, scientific articles ... 5 Time-restricted theories: contemporary texts, texts from an older period.6 Problem-restricted theories: one or more specific problems within the entire area of general translation theory: e.g., the limits of variance and invariance in translation, the nature of equivalence, the translation of metaphors or of proper names

Translation History of Indonesia

“Selama satu milenium itu terjemahan terbagi atas tiga babak, yang sesuai dengan pembabakan sejarah Nusantara pada umumnya, yaitu periode pengaruh India, pengaruh Islam dan pengaruh Eropa. Di antara ketiga babak itu terdapat persamaan yang mencolok, yaitu setiap kali, penerjemahan dari suatu bahasa tertentu mengiringi peminjaman suatu sistim tulis, suatu bahasa dan suatu agama.” Chambert-Loir Sadur: Sejarah Terjemahan di Indonesia dan Malaysia (2009:11)

4 Practice-based Research

1 The settings and aims of the universities are separate from those institutes dealing with the creative arts.

2 The humanities and the creative arts may exist in the one institution but are still separate different from each other.

3 Both exist together but strictly the rules of research in the humanities apply to the creative and performing arts. Often the communities of scholars and creative artists are speaking past each other, from the basis of different “values, conventions, meaningful actions and significant activities”.

The current compromise is writing an “exegesis”.

Instead of Posthumanism?

Tri Hita Karana and the demands of international scholarship?

Indonesian/Balinese innovative research in the humanities.