The Anthropology of Christianity, 16. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. xiv, 307 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28376-3.
The impact of Pacific ethnography in shaping the sub-discipline of the Anthropology of Christianity in the last decade can be hardly overstated. Courtney Handman’s ethnography of the Guhu-Sumane people of Papua New Guinea makes a contribution to important debates currently going on among scholars of Christianity. Handman argues against secularist positions that interpret schisms as part of this-worldly political projects, suggesting that schism is indeed intrinsic in Protestant religious worldviews and practices, calling for a view of “politics as contestation or critique. In this sense, Protestant Christianity is fundamentally political, because critique is a fundamental part of the religious experience” (241). Much scholarship on Protestantism, the argument goes, focuses primarily on the individualization of the Christian self, overlooking those forms of sociality from which people exercise a critical reflection on their social realities, leading to schisms in the effort to produce more effective moral worlds. The argument of the book is supported through the analysis of denominational fights among two Pentecostal churches active among the Guhu-Samane: New Life Church (NLC) and Reformed Gospel Church (RGC).
The theoretical and highly readable chapters that form Critical Christianity are organized in a logical chain that prepares the ground for, and at the same time teases out, the threads that support the author’s main argument. The first part of the book provides the reader with a detailed (although sometimes teleological) history of evangelization of the Waria Valley. The first chapter sketches how Lutheran missions, established in the area during the German colonial regime, bypassed the linguistic diversity of the area by adopting different linguae francae and creating a regional network of evangelization. The second chapter analyzes the Church Growth movement’s missiology as elaborated in the USA, with their emphasis on developing countries, an anti-colonial and anti-institutional attitude, and particularly the idea that the evangelical mission is not to make people into Western Christians but rather indigenous ones. These principles led to specific projects of Bible translation into vernaculars to enable people to access God directly and in their own terms. The third chapter details how this missiology informed Ernie Richert, a translator from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and his translation of parts of the Bible into the Guhu-Samane language, creating a linguistic and ethnic identity previously unknown, connected to a sense of having been chosen by God. It is from this standpoint that, since the late 1970s, stemmed the revivalism investigated by Handman.
The second part of the book focuses on specific forms of sociality. In chapter 4, Handman describes how revivalists made “the village” into the centre of the new Christian sociality as dictated by the Holy Spirit. Contrasting this new focus of sociality with previous forms of social organization (the not-localized matrilineal clans as opposed to the usually unstable and schismatic villages), the author teases out how these frictions shape the project of creating a Christian life. Chapter 5 describes how Christian sociality enabled an overwhelming multivocality, sometimes perceived as “inconclusive talk,” in contrast with a previous time when parsimonious speech led to action.
The previous sections provide the overarching context to fruitfully engage with the remaining chapters describing aspects of the denominational fights, articulated through positioned comparison and critical reflections on worship practices. NLC and RGC differences are produced locally by critically reflecting on the relation with the initial SIL project, producing a friction between those who strictly adopt the Guhu-Samane language in their biblical readings during services and those who also use other languages. More differences between the two Pentecostal denominations are brought up by the embracement or refusal of some traditional elements (for example, musical instruments) during services. The last chapter engages with the forms of genealogical imagination implicit in the speculations about a common lineage encoded in the view of Guhu-Samane being the “lost tribe of Israel” (with its promises of future unity into Christianity overcoming the denominational differences). All these ethnographic chapters contribute to delineate how the theological paradox of Christianity as a universally achievable goal, and its multifaceted local realizations, are articulated locally.
A conclusive chapter is remarkably absent. The book offers thought-provoking insights on the study of forms of sociality, but it fails to knot together the points made throughout the chapters into an explicit theory that could effectively dialogue, as Handman unequivocally aims to do (18), with the scholarship on non-Protestant forms of Christianity. The argument that a socially positioned critical reflection on one’s own “culture” is indeed part of certain forms of Christianity (notably Pentecostal; 245), has important implications for reconfiguring the ways in which an Anthropology of Christianity poses its questions. The focus on a linguistic analysis, which undoubtedly stems from local discourses as much as research agendas, supports Handman’s argument that theological positions as much as local practices drive to schismatic movements. With the notable exception of chapter 7 and scattered ethnographic vignettes, the reader seldom comes to know how these tensions are experientially perceived and used in the daily lives of the Guhu-Samane, and the conflicts are not made as alive as the powerful ethnographic vignette vividly sketched at the very beginning of the book.
Those critics of the study of “Christianity per se” will find to a certain extent the same shortcomings they impute to studies relying on language-focused analysis and ultimately on Christianity as a peculiar form of “cultural logic”; nevertheless they will also find extremely stimulating insights. Critical Christianity will appeal to scholars of Christianity and world religions more generally for its arguments, linguistic anthropologists for the careful attention to linguistic ideologies, and Melanesianists in general for its potent questions and hints to a different perspective on the study of sociality.
Dario Di Rosa
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
pp. 731-733