Citation-Mediated Translation:
The Chinese Journey of The Social Life of Things and “The Cultural Biography of Things”
論文引用型譯介：《物的社會生命》與〈物的文化傳記〉的中文旅行
A reception study of Arjun Appadurai's 1986 Cambridge volume and Igor Kopytoff's chapter in Chinese academia: an anthology selection exists (Peking UP, 2008), a canonical review appeared in Sociological Studies (2007), yet the volume's reception still runs through citation rather than text — a paradox this essay names citation-mediated translation and traces to its methodological costs.
A reception study of Arjun Appadurai's 1986 Cambridge volume and Igor Kopytoff's chapter in Chinese academia: an anthology selection exists (Peking UP, 2008), a canonical review appeared in Sociological Studies (2007), yet the volume's reception still runs through citation rather than text — a paradox this essay names citation-mediated translation and traces to its methodological costs.
Editorial Abstract
This Chinese-language reception study examines how The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Appadurai ed., Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Igor Kopytoff's chapter “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process” (pp. 64–91) have travelled into Chinese academia. It reconstructs the volume's origins in the University of Pennsylvania Ethnohistory Program (1983–84 workshop; May 1984 symposium), explicates the two theoretical engines — Appadurai's commodity situation and politics of value, Kopytoff's biographical method and singularization — and then documents the Chinese evidentiary record: Huang Ying-kuei's Taiwanese anthology on things and material culture (Academia Sinica, 2004), Shu Yu's canonical review in Sociological Studies (2007, no. 6), and the anthology selection in the Material Culture Reader (Meng Yue & Luo Gang eds., Peking University Press, 2008). The paradox that translation exists yet reception remains citation-driven is theorised as “citation-mediated translation,” a type distinct from full-translation and reader-anthology reception; its costs — conceptual drift around singularization, the loss of the volume's dialogic case-study architecture — are traced in detail. The full Chinese article is published in the Chinese Overseas Study Review.