Synopses & Reviews
"Webb Keane's book demonstrates, once again, that nothing illuminates the puzzles of modernity as effectively as cross-cultural studies of colonial encounters. His careful, interdisciplinary, and penetrating analysis of the semiotics of conversion to Dutch Calvinism in the Indonesian island of Sumba and his skillful blending of theological and anthropological issues will make this book a model for studies of religious conversion. It truly deserves a wide readership."and#151;Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differenceand#147;Christian Moderns is a wonderful exploration of the boundaries between material things, words, and agents, and the implications of their separation and interconnection for the master trope of modernity. In a rich and challenging analysis, . . . the book shows how a Christian modernity was negotiated and inhabited. The elaborate care with which Keane argues this thesis is truly impressive. I do not know of any other anthropological book on the same theme that can compare with it.and#8221;and#151;Talal Asad, author of Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
and#147;Christian Moderns is the kind of book every anthropologist would like to have written. Keane moves easily between the large and small picture: modernism, purification, and Protestantism; a religious conversion or the changing value of meat on the Indonesian island of Sumba. In developing a semiotic ideology, he is able to address at once verbal and material culture, ritual speech and exchange, innerness and sincerity, agency, intentionality and fetishism, and the mutual misrecognitions of the missionary and the and#145;pagan.and#8217; I know of no book that is as sensitive to the embedded, the spiritual, conundra, of religious contact and conversion and yet remains rigorous in argument.and#8221;and#151;Vincent Crapanzano, author of Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench
and#147;In this remarkable work, Webb Keane juxtaposes European religious disputes with an ethnographic account of Christian conversion in Indonesia. Abiding dilemmas of western social scienceand#151;he arguesand#151;have their source in language ideologies that anthropologists share with the Protestant missionaries who preceded them. Anxieties about objectification, agency, and the erasure of materiality have been crucial to Calvinism. They are no less central to colonial modernization projects and our own logics of inquiry. In lucid prose, Keane builds a powerful argument about semiosis and material life that is sure to stimulate important debate.and#8221;and#151;Susan Gal, co-author of The Politics of Gender After Socialism
Review
and#8220;Robbins manages, through his ethnography, to illustrate for us the need to understand radical change.and#8221;
Synopsis
In Critical Christianity, Courtney Handman analyzes the complex and conflicting forms of sociality that Guhu-Samane Christians of rural Papua New Guinea privilege and celebrate as and#147;the body of Christ.and#8221; Within Guhu-Samane churches, processes of denominational schismand#151;long relegated to the secular study of politics or identityand#151;are moments of critique through which Christians constitute themselves and their social worlds. Far from being a practice of individualism, Protestantism offers local people ways to make social groups sacred units of critique. Bible translation, produced by members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a crucial resource for these critical projects of religious formation. From early interaction with German Lutheran missionaries to engagements with the Summer Institute of Linguistics to the contemporary moment of conflict, Handman presents some of the many models of Christian sociality that are debated among Guhu-Samane Christians. Central to the study are Handman's rich analyses of the media through which this critical Christian sociality is practiced, including language, sound, bodily movement, and everyday objects. This original and thought-provoking book is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology and religious studies.
Synopsis
and#147;
Critical Christianity is a rich, thought-provoking, innovative, and very well-written work. Handman gives us an acute ethnographic account of Guhu-Samane history and society and makes a compelling, subtly grounded argument that illuminates both the local specificities of Waria history, society, and religious life and a revelatory new perspective on Christianity more broadly. Her work resonates with other remarkable scholarship on translation and mission history, especially in the Pacific.and#8221;and#151;Donald L. Brenneis, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz
and#147;This is a very smart and original formulation of and response to a number of central debates in the anthropology of religion. In particular, Handman systematically examines how Protestantism, and its various global and local iterations, highlights the complex and often contradictory notions of the individual/social in relevant scholarly literature and on the ground among the Guhu-Samane of Papua New Guinea, for whom these issues play a central organizing role in their lives. The scholarship here is sophisticated and theoretically provocative and pushes the reader to think.and#8221;and#151;Bambi B. Schieffelin, Collegiate Professor and Professor of Anthropology at New York University
Synopsis
In a world of swift and sweeping cultural transformations, few have seen changes as rapid and dramatic as those experienced by the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea in the last four decades. A remote people never directly "missionized," the Urapmin began in the 1960s to send young men to study with Baptist missionaries living among neighboring communities. By the late 1970s, the Urapmin had undergone a charismatic revival, abandoning their traditional religion for a Christianity intensely focused on human sinfulness and driven by a constant sense of millennial expectation. Exploring the Christian culture of the Urapmin, Joel Robbins shows how its preoccupations provide keys to understanding the nature of cultural change more generally. In so doing, he offers one of the richest available anthropological accounts of Christianity as a lived religion. Theoretically ambitious and engagingly written, his book opens a unique perspective on a Melanesian society, religious experience, and the very nature of rapid cultural change.
Synopsis
"A major contribution to the understanding of cultural change by means of a remarkable ethnographic study of a Melanesian Christianity. Robbins is very unusual among his generation in being able to walk the walk of the most trendy Deep Thinkers without having to talk their talk."and#151;Marshall Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, The University of Chicago
"Robbins's excellence as an ethnographer and theoretician is beautifully demonstrated in his book, Becoming Sinners, a ground-breaking ethnography of the interrelations between competing moral discourses in a context of rapid cultural change. One of the most significant contributions of this manuscript is that Robbins has combined a strong humanities orientation in a work on religion and morality with powerful social science methodology. This book will be a major milestone."and#151;Bambi Schieffelin, author of The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children
Synopsis
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
About the Author
Joel Robbins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He is coeditor of Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Contemporary Melanesia (1999) and of the journal Anthropological Theory.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE. MISSIONS
1. Sacred Speakers or Sacred Groups: The Colonial Lutheran Church in New Guinea
2. Linguistic Locality and the Anti-Institutionalism of Evangelical Christianity: The Summer Institute of Linguistics
3. Translating Locality: The Ethno-Linguistics of Christian Critique
PART TWO. CHRISTIAN VILLAGES
4. Revival Villages: Experiments in Christian Social and Spatial Groups
5. The Surprise of Speech: Disorder, Violence, and Christian Language after the Menand#8217;s House
PART THREE: DENOMINATIONS
6. Events of Translation: Intertextuality and Denominationalist Change
7. Mediating Denominational Disputes: Land Claims and the Sound of Christian Critique
8. Kinship, Christianity, and Culture Critique: Learning to Be a Lost Tribe of Israel in Papua New Guinea
Notes
References
Index