Language, representation and translation in Amazonian ethnographic writing. Peter Gow’s Of Mixed Blood/De sangre mezclada

In this article I discuss the interactions between ethnography and translation through a case study of Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia (1991) by Peter Gow. This ethnographic text has a meaningful impact on Amazonian anthropological theory and displays high linguistic reflexivity. De sangre mezclada. Parentesco e historia en la Amazonía peruana, a Spanish translation by anthropologists Sebastián Arze and Juan Manuel Rivera Acosta, was published in 2020, aiming to return the knowledge produced by the Scottish anthropologist to the local context. A two-step contrastive analysis is applied. First, the source text was examined to identify the roles of translation in ethnographic production, focusing on both analytical and representational functions. Next, selected segments from the source text were compared with their equivalents in the target text to assess the translation’s impact on these functions. The findings highlight three key translation challenges: the transfer of native categories, specifically racial categories; representing the ethnographer’s translation methods; and employing contemporary terminology when describing local people and institutions.