Instead of getting in the line of cute and cuter contributions (perhaps in
my native Hungarian?), one thought.
What is essential about the issue raised in the ISA President's remarks, I
think, are the substantive implications for scholarship, as ideas,
arguments and empirical "evidence" move across socio-historical borders. He
alludes to this (by referring to the different socio-cultural histories
of the societies whose organic communicative media the natural languages
are) but does not elaborate. This is a crucial problem for contemporary
sociology which emerged as a result of a move from Germany and France to
north America, and even more especially for sociologists in the
comparative/global mode. One example.
The English term _public sphere_ is an extremely uneasy, and in and of
itself highly misleading, translation from German. The German original,
_Oeffentlichkeit_ is two steps of abstraction away from the spatial
image: its stem, _oeffen_ (=open, as in a door) does indeed refer to a
spatial notion but that is then abstracted from in the next step,
_oeffentlich_ ('open' in the sense of being "in the public realm," i.e.,
not secret) and further by _Oeffentlichkeit_ which creates an even more
abstract noun from the already abstract adjective 'oeffentlich.' The
difficulty is that it is impossible to express this double abstraction in
English. While Habermas does talk about cafes, etc. as physical locations
for the emergence of bourgeois (n.b., another extrememly problematic
translation, of 'buergerliche') 'Oeffentlichkeit,' the spatial
arrangement is something clearly different from the notion that is
investigated in the book on the _Strukturwandel der Oeffentlichkeit_.
The English rendition of _Oeffentlichkeit_ as 'public sphere' has created a
strain of misunderstandings among hyper-parochial readers, as in some of the
new urban sociology, where the term 'public space' is used quite freely
as a synonym of the public sphere, without both the political-institutional
and class connotations of the original notion (so that the undocumented
Mexican street vendors in L.A.--people who sell bags of oranges at
intersections to the drivers/passengers of cars stopping--are portrayed
as "carving out a new, alternative space in the public realm" thereby
"de-centering hegemonic notions of the public sphere"). Somewhere between
the two languages, and in the yawning cracks of north American graduate
school requirements for foreign language proficiency, extremely significant
conceptual distinctions are lost.
I see only one solution: proper contextualization of borrowed theories.
Reading feverishly "across languages" in the proper sociocultural
context, i.e., reading theory as embedded in social and intellectual
histories. And, of course, most important of all, reading in the
original. If that takes us to a more modest plateau, all the better. If
that puts a severe strain on our numerical results in the 400 meter
publishing hurdle, even better.
For an excercise in humility (or a check for "external validity",
if that's your preferred metaphor), try squeezing your intellectual life
into a foreign language. That would, BTW, also be a very interesting tool
for ISA, preventing the appearence of a nasty politics of identity among the
world's sociologists (the danger of which I seem to sense from the
Presidential notes): banning the use of people's mother tongues in public
appearences. That would certainly not do away with English: it would just
put those of us with that fortunate mother tongue in a somewhat more
self-reflective posture. That way we could perhaps re-claim some of the
original territory of sociology: a sense of strangeness lost in the
rhetorics of national-linguistic turf.
I know there is no possibility of introducing reforms like this. But,
not being in the President's shoes, I figure I can afford such silly,
rhetorical suggestions for mental exercise.
Jozsef Borocz
in reality at Rutgers, virtually still at UCI
(jborocz@rci.rutgers.edu)
P.s.: At the risk of sounding nationalist which I am emphatically not, I
want to add that it is extremely interesting how Hungarian--a
non-Indo-European language--reproduces the original sense of the German
term, in contrast to English which is, the last time I checked, at least,
it was, Indo-European. What matters is cultural connection and shared
experience, more than purely linguistic structure.