A central problem for the kind of belief ascription a translator needs to do, however, is that often the people whose language we want to translate hold beliefs that are quite different from our own. We can't assume we can uncover the beliefs of exotic people just by imagining what we would believe were we in their shoes. None of Captain Cook's men, for example, were in any position to know by introspection that the Hawaiian natives saw their ship as carrying a forest, or that Captain Cook was believed to be the god Lono. Similarly, an anthropologist could not tell how Western airplanes were perceived by Melanesian "cargo cultists" just by looking up at the planes and introspecting. In exotic cases, a vast knowledge of the native belief system is often needed to know what natives believe, even in what seems like very straightforward perceptual situations. Self-knowledge and simulation are not enough.

People interested in ascribing beliefs to exotic peoples and translating their utterances can also be thrown off the track by a lack of familiarity with the local conventions about when it is permissible to make assertions using non-literal metaphorical language. In everyday English, for example, it is quite permissible for us to talk using words that seem to imply we believe that luck is a person determining the outcome of games of chance (Keesing 1985) or that we make decisions with our stomachs (see also Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Our familiarity with this convention means that none of our compatriots takes this verbal behavior to signal an underlying belief that chance or decision-making works this way. A worry for translators, however, is that less familiarity with the linguistic conventions and the surrounding beliefs gives them more difficulty with inferring what the underlying beliefs really are when they hear such possibly metaphorical phrases. "We have no reason to assume either that other peoples' schemes of conventional metaphor are more deeply expressive of cosmological schemes than our own or that their 'cultural models' are more uniform than ours," writes anthropologist Roger Keesing. "The danger of our constructing nonexistent metaphysical schemes that seem to be implied by conventional metaphors but would be meaningless or absurd to native speakers if they could read what we write about them raises ethnographic nightmares for me." Such nightmarish inaccurate attributions do not seem to be uncommon. The linguist Heine for example restudied the Ik, a tribe now well known to the world through the ethnographic writings of Colin Turnbull. Heine writes,

We are told...that there is gor, the soul, which "flies past the moon that is good and the sun that is bad, and on to the stars where the abang have their eternal existence" (Turnbull 1974: 161). We are further informed that "A soul is round and red but it has no arms or legs. It rests somewhere in the vicinity of the stomach..." (Turnbull 1974: 161). This is hardly surprising since gor (more precisely gur) is the Ik word for heart which is occasionally used to mean "spirit," "soul." That gor is able to fly to the stars where the abang live is, however, a strange idea to the Ik. The word abang means "my

father" and in no way refers to "ancestors" or "ancestral spirits," as Turnbull (1974: 153, 167) claims. (Heine 1985).

Self-introspection, while making it easier to ascribe beliefs in one's own culture, then, is often far less helpful for uncovering beliefs in alien cultures. The exacerbation of the belief-ascription problems stemming from the unfamiliarity of other cultures can certainly be lessened the more experience one has with the exotic culture. More observation, and more participation in the exotic culture, will certainly enhance knowledge of linguistic-behavior conventions and perhaps allow one to "think more like a native" oneself. But no matter how fully nativized an ethnographer may become through participant observation, he or she is likely to always make errors due to interference from old ingrained western ideas about the significance of some external item, or the likely source of behavior. And even if the ethnographer somehow manages to become completely nativized, and thinks and talks just like the natives do, he or she has only elevated him- or herself to the same unsure ground that people are on in ascribing beliefs to people in one's own culture.

责任编辑：admin