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français vers anglais: THI DIÊN General field: Autre Detailed field: Org / dév. / coop internationale
Texte source - français vers une vie meilleure en famille
« C’est ma détermination à guider mes enfants vers une vie meilleure que la mienne qui m’a poussée en avant et m’a conduite là où j’en suis, aujourd’hui... » explique Thi Diên.
Cette montagnarde de 36 ans a commencé à travailler dans les champs à l’âge de 13 ans pour aider ses parents. Elle s’est mariée à 16 et a eu très vite ses deux enfants, aujourd’hui âgés de 19 et 17 ans.
Du riz, des poulets et des cochons
Thi Diên et son mari cultivent le riz et élevent des poulets et des porcs. Ils travaillent aussi pour le compte de leurs voisins et Thi Diên fabrique des objets de décoration en crochet.
Un accompagnement sérieux
Avec le premier prêt de 1,2 millions de dongs (44 €) que lui a consenti Anh Chi Em (ACE), notre programme vietnamien, Thi Diên a acheté une truie. Avec les deux suivants (de 3 et 6 millions de dongs (soit 110 et 220 €), elle a construit un enclos pour abriter les sept porcelets nés de cette truie et acheter de quoi les nourrir. Une fois engraissés, elle les a vendus pour 17 millions de dongs (620 €) !
Des formations attrayantes
Avec ACE, Thi Diên rencontre aussi régulièrement ses consoeurs et participe avec elles à des formations interactives et instructives, qui l’aident à améliorer petit à petit sa gestion et le rendement de sa culture du riz. Elle apprécie beaucoup aussi les visites du formateur agricole : ses conseils pour son élevage porcin sont précieux !
Et pourquoi pas les poissons maintenant ?
Thi Diên a bien développé son élevage de porcs et amélioré le rendement de sa culture du riz... Fière de ces premiers succès et rassurée par la présence à ses côtés de l’équipe d’ACE, elle n’a plus peur d’entreprendre : elle veut maintenant développer son élevage de poules et essayer la pisciculture !
Traduction - anglais Providing a better life for her family
“My determination to provide my children with a better life than I have had has kept me going and brought me to the position I’m now in,” explains Thi Diên. Now 36, she began working at the age of 13, helping her parents in the terraced fields on the hillsides. She got married at 16, and very soon gave birth to her two children, now aged 19 and 17.
Rice, chickens and pigs
Thi Diên and her husband grow rice and rear chickens and pigs. They also work for their neighbours and Thi Diên makes crocheted decorative items.
Tangible support
Anh Chi Em (ACE), our programme in Vietnam, granted Thi Diên a start-up loan of 1.2 million dong (€44), which she used to buy a sow. With the next two loans of 3 million and 6 million dong (€110 and €220 respectively), she built a pen and bought food for her sow’s seven piglets. Once the piglets were fattened up, she managed to sell them for 17 million dong (€620)!
Attractive training opportunities
Through ACE, Thi Diên regularly meets her peers and, together with them, participates in interactive and informative training sessions. These sessions help her to gradually improve her management and boost her rice production. Thi Diên is also very grateful to her agricultural trainer who calls on her and provides invaluable advice on rearing her pigs.
And now, what about trying fish farming?
Thi Diên is making good progress with her pig rearing and has improved her rice yield. She is proud of these early achievements and has had her confidence boosted by the constant support of the ACE team. As a result, she is no longer afraid of going into business, and now intends to rear more chickens, and have a go at fish farming!
italien vers anglais: Evoluzione Culturale Cumulativa. Dalle Tradizioni Sociologiche alle Nuove Prospettive Teoriche / Cumulative Cultural Evolution: From Sociological Traditions to New Theoretical Perspectives General field: Sciences sociales Detailed field: Sciences sociales, sociologie, éthique, etc.
Texte source - italien Introduzione
Il saggio che qui viene presentato vuole evidenziare una proposta teorica utile a ridefinire i confini di analisi della sociologia della cultura e, in particolare nell’evoluzione dei sistemi culturali in relazione a cambiamenti e riassestamenti di ordine sociale. L’idea, posta in questi termini, non è certamente nuova ma, in questo caso, l’elemento di innovazione verrebbe determinato a partire da una prospettiva che interpreta il concetto di cumulatività adattativa non solo come la definizione di una “grammatica” mutevole che riesce a rispondere in tempi “evolutivi” molto brevi, a pressioni socio-ecologiche sempre nuove, ma anche dalla determinazione di un modello frutto di una forte sinergia tra tradizioni scientifiche molto diversificate. Questo ultimo punto potrebbe costituire un importante scaffolding esplicativo.
La cultura umana è, probabilmente, uno dei sistemi adattativi più potenti e versatili. Il termine cultura, da una prospettiva sociologica rimanda ad un insieme di usi, costumi, comportamenti, linguaggi, tecnologie tipici di particolari gruppi umani (più o meno numerosi). Sia il concetto che le funzioni della “cultura” hanno esercitato un’importante influenza nelle tradizioni sociologiche; la scuola di Chicago, e Florian Znaniecki in particolare, hanno sottolineato una dimensione “psicologica” della cultura che si fa mediatrice all’interno di un’altra “mediazione” ovvero quella prodotta dal processo di socializzazione all’interno del quale operano attori sociali portatori di propri patrimoni culturali. All’uopo scrive Znaniecki (1928:17-18)
In contrast with this study of the various present civilized societies, the lines along which most of the purely scientific sociological work has been done up to the present—that is, ethnography of primitive societies and social history—have a secondary, though by no means a negligible importance. Their relation to social practice is only mediate; they can help the practitioner to solve actual: cultural problems only to the degree that they help the scientist to understand actual cultural life; they are auxiliary, and their own scientific value will increase with the progress of the main sphere of studies. In all the endeavors to under-stand and interpret the past and the savage we must use, consciously or not, our knowledge of our civilized present life, which remains always a basis of comparison, whether the past and the primitive are conceived as analogous with, or as different from, the present and the civilized. The less objective and critical our knowledge of the present, the more subjective and unmethodical is our interpretation of the past and the primitive; unable to see the relative and limited character of the culture within which we live, we unconsciously bend every unfamiliar phenomenon to the limitations of our own social personality. A really objective understanding of history and ethnography can therefore be expected only as a result of a methodical knowledge of present cultural societies.
All’interno della stessa tradizione sociologica assume una rilevante importanza il rapporto, scaturente dall’interazione individuo/ambiente, tra identità e cultura (Thomas, 1921). Nella tradizione sociologia della scuola francese (sebbene, come è noto, l’impianto metodologico sia diverso e orientato ad analizzare, in particolare le funzione delle rappresentazioni collettive e l’origine del simbolismo sociale) la dimensione culturale acquisisce un valore simbolico insieme oggettivo ed istituzionale. Tuttavia, introducendo il concetto di “rappresentazione collettiva” e di “rappresentazione individuale”, Émile Durkheim risalta un aspetto fondamentale per gli studi, sempre attuali, aventi per oggetto l’analisi dei processi culturali: la cultura, ovvero le rappresentazioni collettive, viene “situata” all’interno dei contesti sociali e contemporaneamente ne evidenzia la duplice natura psicologica e morale. Tuttavia il sociologo francese mentre, da un alto, sottolinea la dimensione collettiva della cultura frutto, di fatto, di una continua attività di cooperazione ed interazione tra agenti sociali, dall’altro è consapevole che la cultura possiede una “stabilità” intrinseca che la rende trascendente rispetto all’individuo stesso; infatti, scrive lo stesso Durkheim (1912/1995:435-436)
[…] Defined in that way, the nature of the concept bespeaks its origins. It is common to all because it is the work of the community. It does not bear the imprint of any individual intellect, since it is fashioned by a single intellect in which all the others meet, and to which they come, as it were, for nourishment. If it has greater stability than sensations or images, that is so because collective representations are more stable than individual ones; for while the individual is sensitive to even slight changes in his internal or external environment, only quite weighty events can succeed in changing the mental equdibrium of society. Whenever we are in the presence of a type1of thought or action that presses uniformly on individual intellects or wills, that pressure on the individual reveals the intervention of the collectivity. […] It is beyond doubt that speech, and hence the sys tem of concepts it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole conceives the objects of experience. The notions corresponding to the various elements of language are therefore collective representations.
Tuttavia, come opportunamente ha sottolineato Loredana Sciolla (2002:33), sarebbe sbagliato pensare che Durkheim riconosca “uno statuto ontologico autonomo” alla cultura; il sociologo francese in più punti della sua opera ribadisce l’importanza dell’individuo; a tal proposito riprendiamo un passo che ci sembra dirimente (Durkheim 1912/1995:351)
On the one hand, the individual gets the best part of himself from society all that gives him a distinctive character and place among other beings, his intellectual and moral culture. Let language, sciences, arts, and moral beliefs be taken from man, and he falls to the rank of animahty; therefore the distinctive attributes of human nature come to us from society. On the other hand, however, society exists and lives only in and through individuals. Let the idea of society be extinguished in individual minds, let the beliefs, traditions, and aspirations of the collectivity be felt and shared by individuals no longer, and the society will die.
La tradizione sociologia tedesca, sebbene sia caratterizzata da una struttura metodologica meno omogenea rispetto alle altre scuole sociologiche che sono state precedentemente presentate, ha in Georg Simmel e Max Weber i suoi interpreti principali. Sebbene il dibattito relativo all’analisi dei processi conoscitivi e alle teorizzazioni dell’”agire sociale” e, in particolare, la prospettiva idiografica e l’analisi delle dinamiche di oggettivazione della cultura, costituiscano un formidabile corpus che definisce affascinanti estuari sia teorici che empirici, in questa sede, per i nostri scopi, ci interessa trattare, con attenzione, un punto cruciale dell’impianto teorico weberiano che privilegia le relazioni tra individui come “ancore interpretative” per gli agenti coinvolti nei processi di socializzazione. Tali dinamiche orientano l’azione degli agenti con processi di influenza multidirezionale che, di fatto, costituisce un vero e proprio sistema di senso. Scrive Weber (1956/1978:215) che
The scope of determination of social relationships and cultural phenomena by virtue of domination is considerably broader than appears at first sight. […]The rule by parents and the school, however, extends far beyond the determination of such cultural patterns, which are perhaps only apparently formal to the formation of the young, and hence of human beings generally.
Per Weber gli esseri umani sono esseri culturali; l’essenza culturale, inoltre, si reifica a partire dall’interazione tra agenti intenzionali.
Sebbene questo veloce elenco, come peraltro si è detto, sia debitore nei confronti di una letteratura vastissima, ciò che emerge ed accumuna tutte le tradizioni sociologiche non è solo attribuire un ruolo centrale allo studio della cultura ma anche quello di definire il livello delle “relazioni” entro cui essa viene condivisa, appresa, cambiata.
Breve Ipotesi argomentativa: la cultura come sistema adattativo
Studiare la cultura significa analizzare gli agenti che la producono, la trasmettono, la cambiano. Molti autori ( tra gli altri: Tomasello, 2002) sostengono l’idea, ragionevole, che i nostri meccanismi cognitivi sono strumenti determinanti per l’apprendimento culturale. Come abbiamo visto, Max Weber sottolineava l’importanza delle istituzioni (scuola, famiglia), allo stesso modo, sebbene in termini diversi, Tomasello sottolinea come l’abilità di riconoscere gli altri agenti sociali come agenti intenzionali sia alla base dei processi di appropriazione di una determinata cultura nei bambini. Più precisamente, scrive (Tomasello, 1999:77-78)
The human understanding of conspecifics as intentional agents is thus a cognitive ability that emanates both from humans’ identification with conspecifics, emerging very early in infancy and unique to he species, and from the intentional organization of their own sensory-motor actions, shared with other primates and emerging at around eight to nine months of age. […] This uniquely human form of social understanding has many profound effects on the way human children interact with adults and oneanother. In the current context the most important of these effects is that it opens the child to the uniquely human forms of cultural inheritance.
Dunque, quindi, all’eredità biologica si affianca un’eredità culturale che, riprendendo Pierre Bourdieu, rappresenta l’habitus attraverso cui i bambini si appropriano della cultura dominante (doxa).
Un’altra linea di pensiero farebbe iniziare l’appropriazione della cultura in una fase pre-linguisitica (Meltzoff, 1988) evidenziando come già a quattordici mesi i bambini sono in grado di determinare correttamente gli scopi di un’azione da parte degli adulti, attraverso un apprendimento imitativo. Sono numerosi i dati sperimentali sulle capacità concettuali pre-linguistiche che postulano l’esistenza di fondamenti bio-cognitivi dei processi di pensiero separatamente rispetto alle rappresentazioni socio-culturali degli individui. Così, prove etnografiche portano a sostenere che alcuni processi di pensiero siano modulari (Hirschfeld, Gelman 1994) e che tipi peculiari di concettualizzazioni sono riscontrabili in tutti gli esseri umani, in tutte le culture. I caratteri analizzati sono quelli relativi alla comprensione che le persone hanno rispetto alla percezione di un oggetto solido, alla morfologia degli organismi, e alle azioni di una persona, basandoli su tre meccanismi cognitivi distinti: una biologia ingenua (folk-biology), una fisica ingenua (folk-physics), una psicologia ingenua (folk-psychology). Questi meccanismi secondo molti studiosi sono innati, ovvero farebbero parte della dotazione filogenetica che concretizza la possibilità dell’apprendimento e che, dunque, non sono identificabili come competenze culturalmente apprese (Atran, 1994; Spelke 1988).
Alcuni psicologi, antropologi e linguisti hanno messo in discussione l’idea che individui appartenenti a culture diverse possano percepire il mondo utilizzando delle categorie non misurabili. Allo stesso modo, si è ipotizzato (Needham, 1963) che l’impianto teorico di Durkheim e Mauss possa non essere sufficiente a sostenere la tesi secondo cui la variabilità dei sistemi di classificazione sia legata alla struttura sociale. Sulla stessa scia Lenneberg e Brown (1953), a partire dall’”Ipotesi Sapir-Whorf” circa la relatività linguistica, denunciano una presunta universalità della “logica naturale” a partire da una base argomentativa costruita, principalmente, su due assunti: il relativismo linguistico secondo il quale le lingue si riferiscono agli oggetti in maniera differente. Il determinismo linguistico per il quale, invece, i tipi linguistici determinando il modo in cui pensiamo. Tuttavia, a partire dall’affermazione dei paradigmi biologistici impregnati dell’influenza chomskyana, il relativismo linguistico è stato fermamente criticato ed hanno prevalso linee di ricerca propense a teorizzare dei moduli mentali specifici ed universali operanti dietro le quinte e causa delle differenze espressive linguistiche.
Conclusioni
Le teorie che abbiamo appena presentato sostengono la presenza di schemi categoriali propri della mente umana che offrono la possibilità di costruire generi naturali, cioè forme di categorizzazione che permettono la costruzione di inferenze pur non possedendo una teoria o un modello sui concetti stessi. Le ricerche più recenti sul rapporto tra cultura e cognizione si sono rivolte, principalmente, all’individuazione di regole universali. Sebbene poi, in questo caso, si siano accostati queste ricerche alle ipotesi del relativismo linguistico (ipotesi “Sapir-Whorf”) è opportuno precisare che le indagini dell’antropologia e della psicologia cognitiva si servono di un modello meno legato all’analisi linguistica (Boyer, 1993).
Sebbene non conclusive le idee proposte fanno parte di un progetto di ricerca molto ampio che affronterà, con sistematicità, alcuni nodi cruciali relativamente all’evoluzione culturale in rapporto all’interazione tra agenti intenzionali. Come si è visto, i bambini già dopo poco mesi, sono, a tutti gli effetti, agenti culturali totalmente immersi in sistemi di senso tipici delle loro culture (habitus) di cui si appropriano attraverso forme, più o meno istituzionalizzate, di cooperazione e partecipazione. Ciò rappresenta un punto cruciale poiché l’essere immersi in una rete di significati attraverso cui si fa propria l’altrui prospettiva permette di appropriarsi non solo di nozioni ma anche di modalità interpretative intrinsecamente legati alla natura bio-tecno-simbolica dell’uomo stesso.
Traduction - anglais Introduction
This essay puts forward a theoretical framework useful for the redefinition of the boundaries of analysis of the sociology of culture. More specifically, it defines the evolution of cultural systems in relation to changes and readjustments of the social order. This idea, in these terms, is certainly nothing new, but, in this case, the element of innovation is determined from a perspective that interprets the concept of adaptive cumulativity, not only as the definition of a changing “grammar” managing to respond on a very short timescale in evolutionary terms, alongside constantly new socio-ecological pressures, but also as the determination of a model. This model is the result of a strong synergy between highly diverse scientific traditions. This last point could provide an important explanatory scaffolding.
Human culture is probably one of the most powerful and versatile adaptive systems. The word “culture”, refers in sociological terms to a set of habits, customs, behaviours, languages and technologies typical to particular groups of people (large or small). The concept of culture has exercised an important influence in sociological tradition; the Chicago School, and Florian Znaniecki in particular, have highlighted a “psychological” dimension of culture that acts as a mediator within another “mediation”, or that which is produced by the process of socialisation, in which social actors operate as bearers of their own cultural heritage. On this topic, Znaniecki states (1928:17-18):
In contrast with this study of the various present civilized societies, the lines along which most of the purely scientific sociological work has been done up to the present—that is, ethnography of primitive societies and social history—have a secondary, though by no means a negligible importance. Their relation to social practice is only mediate; they can help the practitioner to solve actual: cultural problems only to the degree that they help the scientist to understand actual cultural life; they are auxiliary, and their own scientific value will increase with the progress of the main sphere of studies. In all the endeavours to understand and interpret the past and the savage we must use, consciously or not, our knowledge of our civilized present life, which remains always a basis of comparison, whether the past and the primitive are conceived as analogous with, or as different from, the present and the civilized. The less objective and critical our knowledge of the present, the more subjective and unmethodical is our interpretation of the past and the primitive; unable to see the relative and limited character of the culture within which we live, we unconsciously bend every unfamiliar phenomenon to the limitations of our own social personality. A really objective understanding of history and ethnography can therefore be expected only as a result of a methodical knowledge of present cultural societies.
Within the same sociological tradition, the report arising from the interaction between individual and environment (Thomas, 1921) assumes great importance. In the tradition of the French School of sociology (although, as is well known, the methodological approach is different, aimed as it is at analysis, in particular at the function of collective representation and the origins of social symbolism), the cultural dimension acquires a symbolic value, both objective and institutional. However, by introducing the concepts of “collective representation” and “individual representation”, Émile Durkheim posits a still-current fundamental aspect for studies, involving the analysis of cultural processes. Culture, or collective representation, is “located” within social contexts, and at the same time highlights the dichotomy of psychology and morals. However, while Durkheim on one hand emphasises the collective dimension of the resultant culture, indeed of a continuing co-operation and interaction between social agents; on the other hand, he is aware that culture is intrinsically “stable”, causing it to transcend the individual. Durkheim writes (1912/1995:435-436):
[…] Defined in that way, the nature of the concept bespeaks its origins. It is common to all because it is the work of the community. It does not bear the imprint of any individual intellect, since it is fashioned by a single intellect in which all the others meet, and to which they come, as it were, for nourishment. If it has greater stability than sensations or images, that is so because collective representations are more stable than individual ones; for while the individual is sensitive to even slight changes in his internal or external environment, only quite weighty events can succeed in changing the mental equdibrium of society. Whenever we are in the presence of a type1of thought or action that presses uniformly on individual intellects or wills, that pressure on the individual reveals the intervention of the collectivity. […] It is beyond doubt that speech, and hence the sys tem of concepts it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole conceives the objects of experience. The notions corresponding to the various elements of language are therefore collective representations.
However, as opportunely noted by Loredana Sciolla (2002:33), it would be incorrect to believe that Durkheim recognises culture as having an “autonomous ontological status”. At several points in his work, Durkheim reiterates the importance of the individual. In a seemingly diriment passage (Durkheim, 1912/1995:351):
On the one hand, the individual gets the best part of himself from society all that gives him a distinctive character and place among other beings, his intellectual and moral culture. Let language, sciences, arts, and moral beliefs be taken from man, and he falls to the rank of animahty; therefore the distinctive attributes of human nature come to us from society. On the other hand, however, society exists and lives only in and through individuals. Let the idea of society be extinguished in individual minds, let the beliefs, traditions, and aspirations of the collectivity be felt and shared by individuals no longer, and the society will die.
The German sociological tradition, although characterised by a less homogenous methodological structure than other schools of sociology as mentioned above, is represented by Georg Simmel and Max Weber as its principal protagonists. Although the discussion of the analysis of cognitive processes and the theories of “social action”, in particular the idiographic perspective and analysis of the dynamics of the objectification of culture, constitute a formidable corpus, which defines fascinating lines, both theoretical and empirical. For the purposes of this essay, the interest lies in attention to a crucial point of the Weberian theoretical framework, which emphasises the relationships between individuals as “interpretative anchors” for the agents involved in the processes of socialisation. These dynamics guide the actions of agents with multi-directional influential processes, which, in fact, constitute a true system of meaning. Weber (1956/1978:215) states that:
The scope of determination of social relationships and cultural phenomena by virtue of domination is considerably broader than appears at first sight. […]The rule by parents and the school, however, extends far beyond the determination of such cultural patterns, which are perhaps only apparently formal to the formation of the young, and hence of human beings generally.
For Weber, humans are cultural beings, and the essence of culture is reified from the interaction between intentional agents.
As has indeed been stated, although this brief list is indebted to a vast emerging literature that brings together all the sociological traditions, it does not only give a central role to the study of culture, but also defines the level of “relations” through which culture is shared, understood and changed.
Brief hypothesis: Culture as an adaptive system
The study of culture signifies the analysis of the agents that produce, transmit and change it. Many authors, including Tomasello (2002), support the reasonable idea that our cognitive mechanisms are determining tools for cultural learning. As we have seen, Max Weber emphasises the importance of institutions (e.g. school, family) in the same way, if in divergent terms. Tomasello notes that the ability to recognise other social agents as intentional agents is based on processes of appropriation of a specific culture in children. More precisely, he writes (Tomasello, 1999:77-78):
The human understanding of conspecifics as intentional agents is thus a cognitive ability that emanates both from humans’ identification with conspecifics, emerging very early in infancy and unique to he species, and from the intentional organization of their own sensory-motor actions, shared with other primates and emerging at around eight to nine months of age. […] This uniquely human form of social understanding has many profound effects on the way human children interact with adults and oneanother. In the current context the most important of these effects is that it opens the child to the uniquely human forms of cultural inheritance.
Therefore, biological heredity stands alongside cultural heritage, which, for Pierre Bourdieu, represents the habitus by which children take possession of the dominant culture (doxa).
Another train of thought has the appropriation of culture beginning in a pre-linguistic phase (Meltzoff, 1988), highlighting that babies are already able to correctly determine the scope of adults’ actions at fourteen months, by learning through imitation. Many experimental studies have been produced on pre-linguistic conceptual skills, and postulate the existence of bio-cognitive foundations of thought processes as separate from the socio-cultural representations of individuals. In this way, ethnographic evidence supports the proposition that certain thought processes are modular (Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994), and that specific types of conceptualisations may be found in all humans and all cultures. The characteristics analysed are those related to the understanding people have of the perception of a solid object, to the morphology of organisms and to human ations, based on three distinct cognitive mechanisms: folk-biology, folk-physics and folk-psychology. According to many scholars, these mechanisms are innate, that is they form part of the phylogenetic endowment that realises the ability to learn, and which, therefore, cannot be identified as culturally learned skills (Atran, 1994; Spelke, 1988).
A number of psychologists, anthropologists and linguists have discussed the idea that individuals belonging to diverse cultures may perceive the world through unmeasurable categorisation. In this way, Needham hypothesised (1963) that the theoretical framework of Durkheim and Mauss could be insufficient to support the argument that the variability of classification systems is linked to social structure. In the same vein, starting from the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” of linguistic relativity, Lenneberg & Brown (1953) denounce the universality of “natural logic”, based on an argument constructed on two assumptions: the linguistic relativism whereby languages relate to objects in different ways. A linguistic determinism by which, however, linguistic types determine the way we think. However, from the affirmation of the biological paradigms influenced by Chomsky, linguistic relativism has been roundly criticised, with a prevailing tendency towards lines of research inclined to theorise specific, universal mental models that operate behind the scenes and cause different linguistic expressions.
Conclusions
The theories presented above support the existence of categorical schemes particular to the human mind, which offer the opportunity to build natural genres, i.e. forms of categorisation that allow the construction of inferences, despite not possessing a conceptual theory or model. The most recent research on the relationship between culture and cognition primarily address this identification of universal rules. However, this research has been combined here with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativism. It is important to note that the investigations of anthropology and cognitive psychology use a model less dependent on linguistic analysis (Boyer, 1993).
Although inconclusive, this framework forms part of a much broader research project, which will systematically address certain crucial points related to cultural evolution and its relationship with interaction between intentional agents. As demonstrated, after a few months, infants are to all intents and purposes themselves cultural agents immersed in systems of meaning typical to their cultures (habitus), which they siphon through more or less institutionalised forms of co-operation and participation. This is a crucial point because immersion in a network of meaning in which the perspective of others is most important allows them to take possession not only of knowledge but also of methods of interpretation intrinsically linked to the bio-techno-symbolic nature of Man himself.
chinois vers anglais: Academic translation: Jack Riley General field: Sciences sociales
Traduction - anglais Jack Riley , the ‘coin-eating tiger’ conman
Ping Jinya
A ‘coin’ (角子; jiăo zi) here is a silver or nickel token coin (辅币; fŭ bì) used in old times, with a value of 0.1 or 0.2 yuan. The ‘coin-eating tiger’ was a slot machine amusement imported from the USA to Shanghai. It was not a very large machine, similar in dimensions to a medium-sized stereo radio. It looked like a box, with a coin slot at the top and a dispenser tray at the bottom. Gamblers would insert a token into the slot and pull a lever on the right-hand side of the machine. A wheel inside the machine would quickly turn, then stop. If you were ‘lucky’, a torrent of tokens could fall into the tray below. In actual fact, the machine had a calculation function, so that if you put in 10-20 tokens, you might occasionally get a few back. There was only a one in a million chance of winning big. For the most part, it would take ten tokens and return one or two, so gamblers nicknamed the machine the ‘coin-eating tiger’. These machines were all the rage in Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s.
An old Shanghainese proverb went: “You can visit a prostitute alone, but to gamble there must be two of you”. Only with the ‘coin-eating tiger’ could one person play alone. As there was nobody to check on how well they were doing, punters saw the machine as a man-eating tiger, albeit one for solitary fun that would keep taking their money. If they played for an hour, they might only lose tens to hundreds of yuan. Despite the machines’ popularity, it was difficult to find one in a thousand who did well from them.
The machines were originally vending machines for an American fruit gums company, so there were still oranges and lemons painted on them. After the machines were imported into China, they became part of the unscrupulous business of gambling; a way to endlessly bleed the Shanghainese dry.
Little by little, the machines came to be seen on every street corner of Shanghai. They could be found in public areas, cafés, playing fields and libraries; even if there were only one or two machines, each place became a ‘mini-casino’. Wherever there were people milling about, there was bound to be a gambler or two in their midst.
According to my research findings, in their heyday, each machine could make on average more than 400 yuan in a day (and a night), if it were in a busy location. Even in quieter places, a machine could make more than 200 yuan. The money would be split proportionally between the owner of the machine and the owner of its location, for example the boss of a bar or café. If someone owned several hundred machines, they could make thousands per day. Not a bad amount for doing nothing!
Who took these ‘coin-eating tiger’ slot machines from the USA to Shanghai?
Jack Riley, an American resident in Shanghai at the time, had been an unemployed hoodlum in his home country. He had been behind bars for bouncing cheques, and, after his release, drifted over to Shanghai. He started out as a lackey in a bar and a handyman at the Majestic Hotel, made a little money, then returned to the States. He managed to smuggle a ‘coin-eating tiger’ back to Shanghai, and on a small scale, the money started to come rolling in. Bit by bit, more and more machines were imported to Shanghai. By then, the machines were already being used for gambling, so the Customs authorities forbade them. Even so, Jack Riley worked out a way to outsmart the Customs men, by dismantling the machines into their component parts and paying people to carry them in their luggage. Once he received the parts, he managed to put them back together, and made many more ‘coin-eating tigers’. After more than ten years of fumbling around, Jack Riley found he understood the intricacies of the machines, so he started to build different ones. He realised he did not need to rely solely on his ‘coin-eating tigers’ to make money, and became the manager of D.D’s , three of the most stylish bars in Shanghai. Riley had his slot machines installed all around the D.D’s bars, making them the ‘coin-eating tiger headquarters’. Who knows how much Shanghainese people’s money he must have swindled!
Large-scale gambling was also illegal in old Shanghai, let alone 24-hour gambling in public. Even so, the Concession authorities saw a way to get rich quick and never enforced the ban, giving gamblers free rein to do as they pleased.
However, on 28 March 1941, that American Jack Riley was arrested, clapped in irons and taken to jail. How could this have happened?
The atmosphere on the streets of Shanghai at the time was one of impending doom. Although the invading Fascist Japanese army had not yet broken through into the Concessions, they were already surrounding the city. By then, the British Concession and International Settlement authorities were only out for a fast buck, and targeted Jack Riley. The authorities knew Riley had been bleeding Chinese gamblers dry for 20 years, and had made tens of thousands of dollars out of them. The authorities investigated him, and discovered his criminal record in the USA. In August 1940, Riley was dragged through the American criminal justice system for 17 crimes he had committed 20 years earlier, and would have had to face over 20 years of lawsuits. However, opening up cases from so long ago was too complicated for the American authorities, so Riley was offered a deal. He could either face trial or pay 25,000 US dollars in fines and be allowed to go free. At the going rate of 18.70 French francs to 1 US dollar, the authorities calculated that the fines amounted to 467,500 francs. He paid up, all money he had extorted from the Shanghainese people.
After Jack Riley was set free, on one hand he again relied day and night on his ubiquitous ‘coin-eating tigers’ to gobble up as much money as possible; on the other hand, the bribery continued, and even after he had spent the more than 100,000 dollars that he had stockpiled over 20 years, the authorities kept on pursuing him. Jack Riley became extremely anxious, and in his last communications with the outside world, he refused to appear in court. He went into hiding, but there was no way out. Through a covert operation, the police found his hideout, at 24 Jinglinli, Zhapu Road, Hongkou district. At dawn on 28 March 1941, the entire Hongkou police corps turned out, guns at the ready, and took him away to be put on trial.
Urban legend has it that one of the police in attendance reported: “With the police aiming their weapons at his chest, Jack Riley said: ‘Hey! There’s no need for all of this, I’m no criminal! The 17 cases against me are all bullshit; all they want is my money, but I’ve already given it all to them. What more do they want from me? Ah! People call me ‘the king of the coin-eating tigers’; all they are is hunters! OK, OK, I’ll come with you.’ ”. Needless to say, by ‘them’, Jack Riley meant the Shanghai American concession authorities.
At trial, Jack Riley was sentenced to 18 months in jail, having only been found guilty of one offence, ‘failure to appear ― contempt of court’, with bail set at 20,000 US dollars. He did not have a penny left to his name, so he had to go to jail. Even so, many of his ‘coin-eating tigers’ remained in the bars, ready and waiting to gobble up people’s money. By a twist of fate, Pearl Harbor was attacked the next day. Soon after, the American authorities were taken to the camps too, and imprisoned alongside the ‘coin-eating tiger conman’. People came to the conclusion that it was a fair cop.
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Master's degree - University of Portsmouth, UK
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Années d'expérience en traduction : 11. Inscrit à ProZ.com : Jul 2013. Devenu membre en : Dec 2013.
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I offer translation, proofreading and revision services into English (UK and US), from French, Italian and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional variants).
I am a native speaker of UK English, and completed my European Master's in Translation in September 2013, working in French, Italian and Chinese to English language pairs. I am a Chartered Linguist(Translator, Education), a Member of the UK Chartered Institute of Linguists (MCIL) in all of my language pairs and a Qualified Member (MITI) of the UK Institute of Translating & Interpreting, through whom I am also qualified under ISO 17100:2015.
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