Funding Research: Who is responsible?

I tend to think that the Government should fund research and education and, consequently, finance universities, conferences, workshops, research-groups, museums, etc. After all, an educated society tends to be a better one for everyone to live in. The Government should finance it, hence, also because of selfish reasons.
However, this kind of reasons does not seem to appeal to today's politicians. The general trend in Europe seems to go towards less welfare state, including education and especially research among the expenses one can reasonably cut down.
Should a new era begin, in which private citizens should feel responsible and do what the state refutes to do? Until now, enlightened citizens have been lobbying in favour of funds for education and research. Should they actually start financing it themselves?
We all agree that it is right to finance the art-historians and all the people involved in the organization of an exhibition by paying a ticket. We would not dream of going to a rock-concert without paying for it. Many of us donate to their church, or to charities. If this is normal, why not funding research, too? I am not just talking about large-scale projects. I rather think of the minor contributions of many people and how this could have a minor impact on the world, but a major one for the people involved.

Translations: tertium non datur?

In his blog, Aleix recently raised an interesting discussion about literal translations. Such translations, he provocatively argues, might be said to be useful since

1. 1. a poetic translation may also fail to be that nice but since it pretends to be poetic a reader might think that the original text is bad poetry (the argument is K.R. Norman's),
   
2. 2. a literal translation may help people understand the text, even if the translator has not been able to completely understand it.

The topic is too interesting not to pause on it once again and I will here repeat some of the points I made in a comment on that post.

In some cases, a translation cannot be too literal. Translating a compound with a compound (for instance, yāgasya iṣṭasādhanatva and "desired-[end]-meansness of the sacrifice"), to name the extreme case, would be absurd and would not help any reader. Breaking a compound into a nominal phrase ("being the means for the desired end of the sacrifice") does not always work either. In such cases, one just has to acknowledge the fact that English is more a verbal language than Sanskrit and translate "the sacrifice is the means to realise a desired end".

That being said, the kind of translation you are writing depends on your target reader. If you write for a student or for someone who uses your translation just as a commentary to the Sanskrit text, you might want to enable him to check back any single word you are translating in the original text. If, on the other hand, you are writing for a reader who does NOT know any Sanskrit (or Pāli or any other language), then you should be able to produce a text which is independently understandable. An excellent example of the first kind of translation is Jim Benson's translation of the Mīmāṃsānyāyaprakāśa; of the latter John Taber's translation of the Ślokavārttika chapter on perception.

Is there space left for a third possibility?

I wrote by far too many posts on translations in the last months. You can find them listed here.

Do we really want to edit the Ur-Text?

As all readers know, I am working since years on the edition and translation of Rāmānujācārya's Tantrarahasya and I have collected several versions of my own translation. Some fifty years ago, I would have had several workbooks full of notes. As soon as one would have become too full, I would have transcribed the last version in a new one and started re-reading it again. Suppose that I were a teacher: I would have used my translation in my classes again and again. My students would have taken notes and the ones of, say, year 1960, would have ended up with a translation quite different than the ones of year 1950. Then, one of them might have re-thought about the text and added her own notes on the margins. Another might have lent her workbook to a friend, who might have copied its content and added some glosses in brackets, when she could not make sense of it. Not to speak about the new readings produced just by misreadings, or by copying further the initial text. And this all can be easily thought to happen within a lifespan!

Of course, one might say that all philologists try to reconstruct the author's final view. This can be practically impossible (because of the lack of autograph manuscripts, etc.), but theoretically possible. However, the "final view" only exists in some cases. A kāvya poem, in classical and contemporary India has probably been elaborated enough to have a final version. But what about lectures, conferences, talks, manuscripts written by authors who were trying to make sense of a problem, struggled with that, re-read a passage again and again trying to make sense of it?
Do we really want to say that the textual edition of the Ur-Text is a general rule? Even if the Ur-Text is assumed as an abstract entity, such as the author's last version?

Philosophy and Anthropology on the Body

I happened to read a great paper by Vanessa Grotti (in this volume) about the way Christianity and one's feeling of oneself as a body interact among sedentarised tribes of the Amazonia. After the first pages, the paper is really a page-turner and raises many interesting issues. Beside the political ones (such as the legitimacy of the missionaries' intervention in pre-existing societies), I have been captured by the thematic core of the article, i.e., that one's body is not a stable entity.
"Wild people" and young children seem to be (yet) able to shift into another body. For instance, a "wild man" cannot be seen in the forest, because it becomes something else, perhaps an animal; and a young children is assumed to be able to become a monkey. Becoming sedentary (which is tantamount to become Christians, in that context) implies, on the other hand, becoming "educated" and, hence, loosing the possibilities an instable body can grant. The idea is really fascinating and it made me re-think our culturally loaden concept of "body". Nowadays, we might be inclined to think that a body is just an external object, clearly distinguished from others. The fact that living beings have bodies and that inert matter can be said to have a body only in a metaphorical sense, might add the idea that a body is an external object wherein organic processes take place. But this is not the only possible understanding of body. "Mainstream" Indian authors (Mīmāṃsakas, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas, Vedāntins…) tend to speak, instead, of the body as the receptacle of fruition, i.e., the place where experience (bhoga) can take place.
What is a "body" for an Amerindian? If I understood correctly V.G.'s article, it is a vehicle for experience. The inner "soul" can move from one body to another. But this "soul" seems to be just "animation". The characteristics of one's personality depend, by contrast, on the body one is using. A "wild man" becomes "educated", if we accepts the bodily habits of "educated" people. But he will turn back into a "wild being" if he goes back into the forest and, consequently, turn into an animal. In this sense, one's "soul" seems to be capable of descending in different bodies as a medium would do it, i.e., assuming all the features of the body s/he is entering.
To put it short, "body" is an ambiguous word and its understanding is culturally loaden. Do anthropologists engage with this sort of objections or is "body" a well-established anthropological term?

Photo found in http://www.ucsf.edu.
On plants' "bodies", see here. On the conclusion that plants do not have bodies, since they cannot experience, see here. On bodies as conceived by Materialists in Indian philosophy, see here.

Sanskrit and English translations

tatra, tad, tataḥ… are among the most common Sanskrit words. A Sanskrit sentence easily runs like that:

A is B and B is C. tataḥ A is C

A literal English translation, such as:

A is B and B is C. For that reason, A is C

runs the risk to make readers ask "Which reason? One mentioned before?".
On the contrary, a standard English translation of it could be rather:

A is B and B is C. For this reason, A is C.

In other words, in English "that" is by far less common than "this" and so are "in that case", "for that reason", etc. The latter are only used to contrast, for instance, that case with this case, that reason with this reason. To put it short: "this" is the standard, non-connoted form. "That" is the connoted one.
Should we then translate tatra, tad… with "this"…, unless a contrast is highlighted through them? What strategies do readers use? (Or: Do they think that my grasp of English is too poor in this case?)

As for translations in general, see here and here.
As for the translation of specific terms, see here and under the labels "Sanskrit" and "koṣa".

Memory and experience

If we had an intellectual intuition (that is, a direct perception non mediated by any sense organ) of another person's memory's contents, would these contents appear as memory to us? No, answers the kaśmīri philosopher Utpaladeva, because the character of being past is not enough to identify a memory. On top of that, one needs the connection with an experience. We only identify as memory what is connected with our previous experience. A sheer object would not count as one. See below for a possible objection.


The Vivṛti (long gloss) of Utpaladeva on his ĪPK (see below for references):

It is not the case that in memory an object previously experienced is manifested in its sheer own form (kevala), like in an intellectual intuition (yogijñāna) having a past object as its content. For, in this way (if the object devoid of any connotation were manifested), it would not have its character of memory. It is said that in memory, the quality of being past only [occurs] through the experience, although the object is in itself changeless. Hence, the manifestation of the experience is here useful. Therefore [the author of the short gloss] says: "And a previously experienced object, together with the experience". And memory has the form of a cognition, therefore he speaks of "light of memory" (my translation).

(pūrvānubhūtasyaivārthasya kevalasya na smṛtau yogijñāna ivātītārthaviṣaye prakāśaḥ. tathā hi smṛtitvaṃ na syāt. anubhavamukhenaiva cārthasya svayaṃ sthiratve ’pi smṛtāv atītatvatvam ucyata ity anubhavaprakāśa evātropayogī. tad āha “pūrvānubhūtaś cārtho ’nubhavena saha” iti | smṛtiś ca jñānarūpaivety āha “smṛtiprakāśa” iti. The text has been edited by R. Torella, Festschrift Brunner, 2002).



Well, one could object that some psychological experiments have shown that in case one is provided with a single content, unconnected with experience and only characterised as past (for instance, an old photograph), one tends to make up a fake memory around it. Hence, the distinction may be less clear-cut… However, the same experiments show that the "trap" works by far better if one includes in the photograph the person one is analysing, thus strongly suggesting that that content is linked with her experience.
What do readers think?

On the metaphor of light as referring to cognition, see here.
I have dealt with memory and subjectivity in other posts. See here.

Spatio-temporal orientation in Sanskrit texts

I wrote in a previous post that detecting an absence means, for authors dealing with Mīmāṃsā and Śrauta Sūtras, to look for a substitute for the absent element.
Although it might be easy to say why absence is related to substitution, the opposite is not the case. Why is not it the case that one just explains substitution by saying that X becomes Y? Why do we need to refer to the absence of X, so that, instead, Y is used at its place? Could not it be that the speculations on ritual hermeneutics tend to be spatially oriented, so that spatial explanations are preferred over temporal ones?