CSEAS Friday Lecture Series. On filthy nouns and dirty verbs: Translating sex in Tagalog missionary linguistics

Some of the oldest specimens of indigenous literacies in the Philippines are found in the linguistic texts written by Catholic missionaries who wanted to talk about Christianity in any of the archipelago’s many tongues. These texts, the object of the discipline we now refer to as missionary linguistics, constitute the earliest systematic attempt to reduce these languages into a set of replicable rules. While current research directions generally analyze missionary linguistics as a resource for studying early written forms of non-European languages or for reconstructing the initial stages of linguistics as a scientific pursuit, I argue that it can similarly be examined as a corpus of translation. This is particularly true for colonial articulations about sex. In this presentation, I will describe how missionary texts on Tagalog, the basis of the modern-day national language called Filipino, commemorated sexual practices in the early modern Philippines through the use of a specific translational repertoire. I will show instances where the juxtaposition of the translational parameters of equivalence, incommensurability and untranslatability with the moral teachings on human sexuality resulted in peculiar translation strategies for describing indigenous sexualities and inscribing them into a Christianized discourse on civility.

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