The incident is a graphic reminder that translation across languages is translation across cultures. It is the act of translation as a commitment to cultural understanding that is at the heart of the discipline of anthropology.
Anthropology is the comprehensive study of human beings as they socialize and symbolize.
Anthropology explores the full range of social groups and cultural meanings through which we encounter the world. Anthropology reveals the unstated premises and hidden categories of our own world as it makes other worlds plausible. It thus forces critical thinking about our own lives and offers genuine insight into the lives of others. For almost forty years, the department here at Yale has included faculty from all of these four subfields. Yale's Department began formally in 1937, when the multidisciplinary Department of Social Sciences divided into four autonomous units.