In this essay, the author begins by exploring the fundamentally oral nature of interpreting and the neglect by interpreting scholars of precious insights from literacy/orality studies. It is then argued that interpreting studies are characterised by a signal bias towards prestigious forms of interpreting practice in developed countries and that this geopolitical partiality has to be challenged by a new ‘cultural turn’ in interpreting studies. Similarly to what has already occurred in translation studies, this turn would encourage scholars to explicitly address questions of power and issues such as class, gender, race in interpreting situations. Examples are taken from colonial history and the development of tourism to illustrate areas that could be usefully investigated by a more explicitly material history of interpreting, guided by the ‘cultural turn’ paradigm. Particular attention is paid to ambivalent perceptions of the interpreter, to the role of the interpreter as returned native, to the shift from heteronomous to autonomous interpreting and to the part played by interpreting in occasioning the emergence of the native as a hermeneutic subject.