Interview with Gili Kliger
Gili Kliger joined the Stanford History Department as Lecturer in September 2024. She received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 2022. A historian of modern Europe, Gili’s first book manuscript, tentatively titled Found in Translation: Empire and the Invention of the French Social Sciences, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Her work is also published in American Historical Review, Modern Intellectual History, New German Critique, and Aeon. Gili has taught and advised undergraduate students as a College Fellow in Social Studies at Harvard.
How did you become interested in European history?
In college I happened to take a seminar entirely devoted to the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. We read nearly everything Arendt wrote, and I was so taken by the questions she raises, none of which have easy answers: How do we assign guilt and responsibility in the face of crimes, like the Holocaust, that implicate huge numbers of people? Was Nazism an aberration or the culmination of forces intrinsic to modern European political life? How do we come to terms with the fact that so many states originate in violence? How does language distort truth? I went to graduate school initially just to keep reading Arendt but was led, through her, to broader questions about how to interpret and make sense of Europe’s nineteenth and twentieth century.
Your article “Translating God on the Borders of Sovereignty” (AHR, 2022) builds upon a dataset of 1,000 vernacular translations of the Bible. What are some opportunities of using digital humanities (DH) methods?
I guess I should say that I didn’t necessarily set out to do a digital humanities project. Rather, the project developed organically from the questions I was tackling. I was sifting through sources produced by nineteenth-century missionaries in parts of the British, French, and U.S. empires, including books they published as well as their unpublished letters and diaries, and I noticed that these missionaries spent a lot of time talking about the work they were doing translating the Bible. Translation— including the challenges and frustrations of learning a new language or the logistics of printing things —seemed to be a central preoccupation for them. And so I started to wonder whether nineteenth-century missionaries were especially prolific in terms of their translation output. I was doing research in the archives in London at the time and I came across at the British Library a series of pamphlets that missionary organizations would periodically put out, listing every known bible translation. I started compiling this information with the goal of plotting the rate of vernacular scripture production across time. All of that is to say, rather than thinking of digital humanities as a separate subfield or methodology, I tend to think of it as a resource that can help flesh out, provide context for, or communicate the observations and findings arrived at by more traditional methods.
What are your thoughts about utilizing DH in teaching?
I am in favor of it! I am immensely grateful, for example, to the team of researchers at University College-London who made available the “Legacies of British Slavery Database” documenting slave owner compensation issued after the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833. In my class on reparations, students work with the database to identify how and where the individuals who received compensation reinvested that wealth. I think this helps make very concrete the lesson that the wealth generated overseas, on plantations in the Caribbean, can be directly linked to domestic developments in the U.K., including, for example, the rapid expansion of the railway system in the 1830s and 1840s.
Tell us more about your book manuscript, Found in Translation: Empire and the Invention of the French Social Sciences.
My book explores the influence of colonial, ethnographic sources in shaping the modern French social sciences. I focus on the work of three key figures: Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Going into the project, I was aware that a field like anthropology is heavily bound up with the history of colonialism. But it soon became clear to me that really all of the new social scientific disciplines in the nineteenth and early twentieth century benefited from work that was produced in colonial settings, about societies that were recently or soon to be colonized. I wanted to understand the connection between these two histories, between the expansion of Western empires, on the one hand, and the emergence of modern European social thought, on the other. Through my research, I found that most of the sources that social scientists drew on in this period were produced by missionaries and other cultural and political mediators whose job was to translate between European and Indigenous languages. I argue that these mediators helped to circulate back to Europe a large number of words in Indigenous languages that were not so easy to translate. The difficulty of finding an adequate translation and the gaps those Indigenous words exposed forced European scholars to reckon with the limits of their language and concepts. I show that these translation problems sit at the heart of several canonical texts that transformed the intellectual history of modern Europe.
How does historicizing social research help us understand imperial governance?
Colonization involved both the overtly violent political project of seizing land, drawing up new borders, sending in armies to quell dissent, and extracting labor and resources, as well as the more insidious work of mediators like missionaries, who helped assimilate subject populations. Translation, including the translation of treaties as well as scripture, was understood to be key to these efforts: colonization would be more effective if its messages were conveyed in native languages. Translation, however, is inherently unstable. In trying to suggest an equivalence between two words, translators inevitably encounter dissonance, friction, idiosyncrasies, ideas that don’t quite match up. By tracing the origins of social research back to acts of translation, I want to show that the production of social scientific knowledge was, in certain cases, a fertile site of ideological conflict and subversion, not just an exercise of unilateral power and control, as is often assumed.
Which classes will you offer at Stanford?
In Fall 2024 I am teaching a seminar titled HISTORY 239B: Reparations in Law and History. Each week we explore a different historic reparations case and unpack the moral, economic, or legal logic that undergirds that case. My Winter 2025 seminar HISTORY 206F What is Freedom? will focus on classical thinkers in the history of modern European political thought, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx. In Spring 2025 I’ll teach HISTORY 10D/110D: Modern Europe: Race, Migration, and Colonialism exploring major cultural, political, economic events from the French Revolution to post-1989 European integration efforts.
What texts inspired you the most in your career? Why?
Right now I would probably say Marcel Mauss’s 1925 “Essay on the Gift,” which is the subject of one of the chapters of my book and is also, in some ways, the inspiration for my next research project on reparations. It’s a text I love to teach, to write about, and to talk about. In it, Mauss looks at gift-giving practices in a number of societies and notices that even though we think of gifts as something we give voluntarily, out of a sense of generosity and selflessness, there was also plenty of evidence to suggest that gift-giving is a form of economic exchange: we give with the expectation that we receive something in return. His point wasn’t to make us feel cynical about giving gifts (that we pretend to be generous and kind but really we’re just out for our own self-interest) but to ask what might happen if we stopped thinking of these two sets of practices (gift giving and economic exchange) as entirely distinct. What would happen if we brought to market relations the feelings and commitments we associate with sharing gifts with our loved ones? When we say that someone is being transactional, that sounds like a bad thing. But actually our best relationships usually depend on maintaining a kind of balance, making sure that we give as much as we take, that we acknowledge our debts to each other, that we try and make good on those debts.