Languages Without Subjects

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 207228
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Languages without subjects

On the interior(s) of colonial New Guinea
Courtney Handman, University of Texas at Austin
The Protestant interior linguistic subject expressed through language or speech is often
predicated upon a contrast with languages or forms of speech that deny subjectivity. That
is, linguistic subjectivity or interior depth is often produced through the contrast with
linguistic surfaces, with languages that in one way or another are considered incapable of
supporting subjectivity. In colonial Lutheran New Guinea early missionaries felt they had
to cut through both a tropical rainforest and a linguistic forest. In the latter case they used
church-promulgated lingua francas to do so, even though many speakers would not have
the fluency that Protestant theories of spontaneous sincerity usually assume. The Lutherans
hoped to establish the subject-making depth of their lingua francas through comparisons
with and promulgation of a form of Pidgin English that they argued could never produce
a (Christian) self. In this article I examine how Lutheran missionaries tried to construct
Pidgin English as a despised semilanguage in order to contrastively shore up the possibilities
of sincere spontaneity that they were so concerned about for speakers of their church lingua
francas.
Keywords: linguistic subjectivity, missionaries, Christianity, pidgins and creoles, Melanesia
What is today known as Tok Pisin, a creolizing English-lexifier lingua franca of

Papua New Guinea, was once referred to as Pidgin English, or just Pidgin. Like
many colonial pidgin and creole languages with European lexifiers, Pidgin was de-
spised by most of the colonizers of New Guinea as a bastard, mongrel form. Not just
colonizers, either; linguists too (or, perhaps, colonial linguists too). Arthur Capell,
founding professor of linguistics at the University of Sydneythe most prominent
linguist in Australia in the early to mid-twentieth centuryactively rooted for
Pidgins eradication. He concludes his review of a dictionary of Pidgin with a deli-
cious left-handed compliment of the work: It is a pleasure to recommend the work
as long as Pidgin is current. The only danger is that a work of this nature might by
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Courtney Handman.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.017
Courtney Handman 208
its very excellence tend to prolong the life of a thoroughly objectionable form of
speech (Capell 1959: 235).
Despising Pidgin was entirely commonplace in the New Guinea colonial era
(18841975), and, as with Capell, such disfavor usually coincided with efforts or
desires to eradicate Pidgin or radically restrict its contexts of use. But the work
of the Lutheran Mission in the colonial era presents an interesting contrary case.
What makes the Lutherans unique is that they managed to both despise Pidgin
and promulgate it widely. Lutheran histories describe a reluctant move to Pidgin
(Hage 1986: 413), a language that was a necessary evil (Lehner 1930: 3). The
most positive comment up through the end of the 1960s is that it was deemed
acceptable. In an ethnographic sense, my goal in this article is simply to try to see
what it looks like to actively spread a language that one despises. But in addition
to contributing to the colonial history of New Guinea, I also hope that this case
can help us theorize other kinds of connections between language and subjective
interiority.
As a foundational tenet of so much thinking about both language and cultural
difference, it is probably unnecessary to list all of the ways in which languages have
been theorized as creating subjects. The idea that the structures of language, cul-
ture, or society speak the subject is present in writers from Durkheim to Saussure
to Sahlins. In contemporary sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology the most
commonplace link between language and subjectivity is through the concept of
the linguistic performance of identity, particularly ethnic, racial, gender, or sexual
identities (an early formulation is in Goffman 1959; see Bucholtz and Hall 2004 for
a review of contemporary work; see Butler 1990 for a different genealogy of per-
formativity). For the past few decades, linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics
have been working very productively to make linguistic interaction necessarily a
space for the performance and construction of identitarian selves.
In this article I argue that the interior linguistic subject expressed through lan-
guage or speech is often predicated upon an important contrast with languages or
forms of speech that deny or disallow subjectivity. That is, the sense of linguistic
subjectivity or linguistic interiority is often produced through the contrast with
linguistic surfaces, with languages that in one way or another are considered in-
capable of supporting subjectivity. Yet these languages of surfaces rarely get the
attention they deserve. In order to understand how language and sincerity are con-
nected within the anthropology of religion, we need to look at how language and
subject are necessarily disentangled at various moments. I am not urging a return
to thinking about language as a hegemonic, anonymous medium for conveying
information (Gal and Woolard 2001; Woolard 2016), as in Enlightenment theories
of rational speech. Rather, I am arguing that we think more broadly about the many
different kinds of institutional and ideological formations through which language
can be seen as not integral to but divorced from a self. This disentanglement is an
important component of creating the interiors through which linguistic subjectivi-
ties are at other moments made.1
1. See also Rosas (2016) recent analysis of languagelessness, a racializing way of dispar-
aging particular speakers in the contexts of standardized national languages. In making
this move away from performativity and the performance of identity as the dominant

209 Languages without subjects
In Webb Keanes (2007) analysis of the Protestant concept of sincerity, exterior

linguistic forms match, but do not fully capture, interior states. The Protestant
sense of interior spirit is marked by the language of life, soul, and generativity and
contrasts with the dead or frozen formulae of Roman Catholic practice. In lin-
guistic terms, the living interior soul can only be expressed (to the extent it is imag-
ined to be possible at all) through spontaneous speech, as close as one can get to the
generative life of the soul within the constraints of linguistic form. To that extent,
one can only be sincere (i.e., match interior and exterior) to the extent one can
mimic, however partially, the generativity of the soul in generative, non-formulaic,
spontaneous speech. The formula for sincerity is not having formulae.
Under this Protestant model, one of the necessary conditions for linguistic
spontaneity (and therefore sincere speech) is linguistic fluency. Without native-
speaker fluency, the Protestant speaker would be too focused on formfinding the
right lexeme, conjugating the verb correctly, and so on. The language would domi-
nate the speaker rather than the fluent speaker mastering the language. However,
there are at least two senses of generative fluency that are central to the Protestant
sense of spontaneous sincerity. The first is the speaker fluency that I have been
discussing, imagined as a level of linguistic knowledge in which speakers generate
forms without having to pay too much attention to them. The second is a languages
generative capacity, the sense that it has a stable order and is not just an ever-chang-
ing collection of unorganized words and phrases. Note that without this sense of
language-level generativity there can be no sense of native-speaker generativity.
That is, you cant be a native speaker of a half-language.
Lutheran missionaries in colonial New Guinea were caught in an unenviable
position as Protestants intimately aligned with traditions of Bible translation into
vernacular languages. They felt that there were simply too many languages in New
Guinea to translate Christian texts into all of them. Instead of giving up on the evan-
gelization of all the New Guinea groups in their area, however, they used a number
of vernacular New Guinea languages, particularly Kte and Jabem, as church lin-
gua francas that they would teach to potential converts of whatever ethnolinguistic
groups they evangelized. Yet this decision meant that the spontaneous sincerity of
a speaker using her or his own language was ruled out. Missionaries reports and
conference debates about language choice show a consistent worry that their flock
was harmed by the use of these lingua francas. But in these reports and debates
there is almost always a claim that at least they are not using Pidgin English, that
half-language of the colonial plantations, for evangelism.
In this article I examine how Pidgin English is a constant presence in Lutheran
documents and Lutheran practice during the colonial era. As a despised semilan-
guage, it works contrastively to shore up the possibilities of sincere spontaneity that
Lutheran missionaries were concerned about for speakers of their church lingua
francas.
trope for linguistic anthropological analyses, I follow a group of scholars who examine
alterity, effacement, abjection, or animation as modes of speaking that are not subject
making (Hastings and Manning 2004; Inoue 2006; Silvio 2010; Manning and Gershon
2013; Nozawa 2016).

Not only did the Lutherans think that Pidgin could not support a subjectivity,
they seemed to actively work to ensure that it could not come to have one associ-
ated with it. As merely an infrastructure of interaction, not a repository of selfhood,
Pidgin was a language of surfaces unable to plumb the depths of personhood, or so
the Lutherans tried to argue. The Lutherans spoke about the sense of generativity
that underlies Protestant concepts of spontaneous sincerity through metaphors of
surface and depth. The self could be articulated to the extent that the soul, buried
deep within one, could be accessed through a language that was equally deep. An
important question for me is how this formation of Pidgin as a language of surface
was produced through the ways in which the Lutherans actually used it.
Below I argue that in colonial Lutheran New Guinea, linguistic interiority and
the capacity for sincerity were products of the contrast between the interior depth
of the vernacular languages and the surface shallowness of Pidgin. Yet Lutheran
missionaries constantly shifted the boundary between surface and depth. Some-
times vernacular languages were deep and the vernacular church lingua francas
Jabem and Kte were shallow. At other points the church lingua francas produced
subjective depth while Pidgin was terminally shallow. By the end of the mission
period in the early 1970s, when the colonial administration was pushing universal
English education, Lutherans finally started to think of Pidgin as local, a specifi-
cally Melanesian hybrid that contained the depth of regional identity in contrast
to the surfaces of English. In that sense, then, the capacity to have a linguistically
mediated interior from which Christian utterances could emerge depended upon a
shifting field of infrastructures as Lutherans created their roads into New Guineas
interior(s).
In the forest of language

The first Lutheran missionary arrived in New Guinea in 1886 just two years af-
ter Germany took possession of what became known as Kaiser Wilhelmsland. Jo-
hannes Flierl, a young man from the Neuendettelsau Mission Society in Bavaria,
had gone to Australia to work with Aboriginal communities. But he was most in-
terested in New Guinea: I would rather go to a totally untouched heathen people,
not yet trampled on, oppressed and pushed aside by white settlers, as is the case
on the mainland of Australia. There, behind Australia, that large island of New
Guinea, that would be my idea (quoted in Wagner 1986: 35). He asked his mis-
sion society for permission to begin work there as soon as the colony was taken
by Germany in 1884. Flierl and the other missionaries from Neuendettelsau who
joined him worked to place mission stations, missionaries, and native evangelists
across the Huon Peninsula and Morobe coast. Rapid, effective expansion was the
constant refrain.
One of the most pressing issues complicating this expansion was what became
known in colonial New Guinea as the language problem. Papua New Guinea is
the most linguistically diverse place in the world. In the 1950s, linguists estimat-
ed that about eight hundred languages were spoken by a population that totaled
roughly three million. The Huon Peninsula is a good example of this linguistic
density. The first mission stations at Simbang and later Sattelberg were located in

the area of Kte-speakers. The mission as a whole was based in nearby Finschhafen,
in an area of Jabem-speakers. Although Sattelberg and Finschhafen are quite close
to one another geographically, their inhabitants are separated by a language family
boundary (see fig. 1). Kte is a language of the Papuan, or non-Austronesian, lan-
guage family; Jabem is a language of the Austronesian language family.
0 10 20 30 km
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
518
Bismarck
480 494 495
496
Sea 518
518
MAP 11
497 Language Families Province boundary
West New Britain
Madang Morobe Language area overlap
498 Austronesian
500
501; 499 147E 530'S 0 10 20 30 km
502 505
Trans-New Guinea
502 504
503 506 480 Madi 504 Yagomi 533 Kube
482 Nankina 505 Malalamai 534 Tobo
483 507 483 Ma 506 Ronji 535 Somba-Siawari
508
487 Awara 507 Domung 536 Mesem
482 517
509 488 Adzera 508 Yout Wam 537 Musom
Madang 492 North Watut 509 Bonkiman 538 Nabak
516
494 Lemio 510 Yopno 539 Nek
510 525 495 Wab 511 Som 540 Nuk
519 526
6S 496 Mur Pano 512 Wantoat 541 Duwet
515 524 527 497 Asaroo 513 Kutong 542 Nafi
498 Forak 514 Yau [yuw] 543 Nakame
511 520 521 523 499 Degenan 515 Nukna 544 Numanggang
514
528 500 Gwahatike 516 Mato 545 Ma Manda
512 522 501 Bulgebi 517 Pano 546 Nema
487 502 Guya (2) 518 Arop-Lokep (3) 547 Tuma-Irumu
513 529 503 Muratayak 519 Weliki 548 Sukurum
520 Timbe 549 Sarasira
521 Selepet 550 Finongan
547 522 Komba 551 Nimi
548 546 530
545 523 Kinalakna 552 Uri
Morobe 524 Kumukio 553 Mungkip
550 532
549 534 525 Sio 554 Wampar
539
544 531 526 Gitua 555 Aribwaung
538
543 540 533 527 Sialum 556 Labu
551
488 528 Nomu 557 Bugawac
552 542 529 Ono 558 Borong
541 535
553 530 Migabac 559 Mape
531 Kte 560 Yabem (2)
537 536
554 560 532 Dedua 561 Tami (2)
rkham 558 559
Ma Finschhafen
!
555 Notes:
1. White areas are sparsely populated or
557 560 uninhabited.
561
2. Parentheses show the number of times
556 ! Lae a language's number appears on map,
492
561 if more than once.
147E 148E
2016 SIL International
Figure 1: The Huon Peninsula showing languages of the Austronesian family (in peach)
and the Non-Austronesian, or Trans-New Guinea, family (in green). Kte is #531 and
Jabem (or Yabem) is #560. Map via Ethnologue (Simons and Fennig 2017), used by
permission.
Not only were Kte and Jabem two of the first languages that the Lutheran mis-
sionaries used, but they became the lingua francas of the mission as its workers
spread across the Huon Peninsula and points south. This meant that Lutheran mis-
sionaries and their native evangelist helpers not only had to teach local people
about Christianity, but they had to also teach these populations one of two languag-
es in which Christian evangelistic materials were prepared. In the early twentieth
century most official mission literature was printed in either Kte or Jabem, and
many children in the burgeoning Lutheran school system learned one or the other
language as part of their education. Likewise, when Lutheran missionaries from the
German Rhenish Mission arrived in 1887 (one year after Flierl) and started work
around Madang, they used a language known as Gedaged (or Graged, or Ragetta)
as their mission lingua franca.
Which of the two church lingua francasKte or Jabemwas used in any given
part of the Neuendettelsau Mission was based on the vernacular language spoken
there. If a non-Austronesian language was spoken in the area, Kte was used; if
an Austronesian language was spoken in the area, Jabem was used. This policy
obviously required knowledge of local languages and language families, and some
of the missionaries devoted considerable time to language study and linguistic

description. Otto Dempwolff, a medical doctor who read reports of the Lutheran
Mission, was the first to posit that the Austronesian language family spreads across
coastal New Guinea and throughout the island Pacific. These classifications be-
came the basis of the administrative organization of church communities. All Kte-
language congregations belonged to the Kte District and all Jabem congregations
belonged to the Jabem District.
But why would Lutherans, of all people, decide to promulgate languages that
people did not natively speak? After all, Martin Luther was the champion of ver-
nacular-language Bible translation. Luther thought the Catholic Churchs use of
Latin kept the laity from having knowledge of or even interactions with God. Lu-
ther advocated for a priesthood of all believers that could partly do away with
Roman Catholic hierarchies that mediated between God and the faithful. Luthers
translation of the Bible into German set off the modern era of translation, in which
the Protestant norm is that one is supposed to read a Bible in ones own first na-
tive language. Flierl wrote that only by acquiring a knowledge of the natives own
language was it possible to completely understand and instruct him. Our Lutheran
Mission holds to the principle of instructing the native in his own vernacular
(1936: 26). As Lutherans, the missionaries in New Guinea felt an obligation to
evangelize as much as possible in terms of local categories and local languages.
Yet the definition of locality was extremely elastic, and based on the problem of
penetration, a colonial term of art for the entrance into new localities. Because
as much as the Lutherans were concerned with native-language authenticity, they
were also concerned with how one actually arrived at the natives. Given the prob-
lem of access, the church lingua francas were both helpful and local enough: Kte
could stand in for all non-Austronesian languages; Jabem could stand in for all
Austronesian languages; Gedaged could cover the entirety of the Rai Coast. For the
Lutherans, there was a nonspecificity to New Guinea languages below the level of
language family that made them interchangeable. As one Lutheran missionary put
it, All New Guinea languages have practically identical thought categories, ideas,
and concepts (Kuder 1959: 8; for a more extended discussion of this issue see
Handman 2014).
Questions of penetrative access get more overt discussion when the Lutherans
discussed infrastructural issues of transportation. The considerations here are less
about Herderian self-expression and authentic conversion and more about the
communicative pathways through a landscape that to colonial eyes was exoticized
and eroticized as impenetrable, dark, mysterious, and difficult to traverse. We can
get a sense of how landscape, language, and infrastructure are all connected as a
complex whole by looking at an example of missions promotional material from
roughly 1935 aimed at members of the Iowa Synod of the Lutheran Church in the
United States (This is for your information, n.d.). American Lutherans supported
a number of overseas missions in New Guinea, India, and sometimes Madagascar.
Here India and New Guinea are presented in abbreviated form through a series of
contrastive statistics that are meant to give the American reader a flavor of life on
the mission field.
Described in terms of infrastructural problems and possibilities, the Indian
mission field is depicted as a wide-open space of mobility compared with New
Guineas impenetrability. For India: RoadsFairly good highways and railroads.

Considerable auto travel. Note that for a population totaling about one mil-
lion souls only fifteen missionaries are allocated to India at this point (ca. 1935).
Things look rather different over in New Guinea. For one thing, travel is arduous
and slow. No railroads, driveways or bridges, except foot and bridle paths and an
occasional hanging bridge suspended by vines, or a log laid across the deep ravine.
Boats and canoes are used along the sea shore but very little on rivers, these usually
being turbulent mountain streams. Within this impenetrable zone live a relatively
small number of people. Indeed, until 1933 the population for the Lutheran sec-
tion of the Territory of New Guinea was counted at roughly 46,000. It was only a
few years prior to this notice that another 200,000 souls were discovered in the
highlands. The New Guinea field was difficult to access and had an extremely tiny
population in comparison with the area around Madras, yet at this point twenty-
seven missionaries had been sent out there, almost twice as many as were in India.
The discrepancyaside from the romanticism of New Guinea that the young
Johannes Flierl articulatedcomes from the interconnection of the landscape
and languages. Because, just like the dense foliage that kept the missionaries from
evangelizing by auto, the density of languages kept them rooted to ever-smaller
corners of the New Guinea field. In India, all is simple: Language of the people
Telegu (which our missionaries learn in about two years). In New Guinea, all is
complicated:
Language of the peopleMany different languages and dialects divide the
people into countless tribes and clans. The language selected to become
the universal one of our Mission is Ragetta [i.e. Gedaged], a Melanesian
vernacular. In the far inland the Papuan or mountain language, Kte,
may have to be added. Every missionary is compelled to learn at least
two native languages besides Pidgin English which is gaining ground
right along.
Beyond just the distinction in number of languagesone Indian versus hundreds
of New Guinea onesis the fact that Telegu has a long literary history. In New
Guinea the missionaries had to develop orthographies for all of these languages.
Processes of recording and transcription are likened to pathways through dense
jungle in a later internal history of the mission:
Already in 1886, the flying foxes of Finschhafen were well-equipped
with ultra-sonic squeakers and echo-sensitive ears and wingtips to find a
pathway through thick jungle in the dark, tropical night. By comparison,
Senior [Johannes] Flierl was ill-equipped to penetrate the jungle of
languages that confronted him. No tape recorders, no word processors,
and no computers were available to him and his fellow missionaries. In
their wisdom, they decided to make only a narrow pathway through this
jungle by using one or two local languages, which they hoped everyone
would learn. (Hage 1986: 409)
Kte, Jabem, and Gedaged were these narrow paths, linguistic roads though a land
and language situation that resisted colonial penetration.
Paths and movement are important themes of the early Lutheran years. Many
of the missionaries equated the capacity for New Guineans to move freely with
the quality of being Christian. Missionaries argued that prior to colonization, fear

governed movement. In a manuscript titled The secular involvement, which

largely covers Lutheran infrastructural improvements in New Guinea, the equation
of movement and Christianity, of movement as Christianity, is highlighted clearly.
Prior to missionization, New Guineans were afraid of all outsiders, did not travel,
and built the villages in hard-to-reach, easy-to-defend locations. But after conver-
sion, according to the author, the impenetrable jungle opens up into communica-
tive pathways.
The new-won freedom from fear had encouraged these young christians
[sic] to build roads on which the miti [gospel in Kte] could travel as
they expressed it. As time went on similar developments could be noticed
in other areas. As the Gospel took possession of the minds of the people
their old fears and hatreds disappeared. No longer felt they imprisoned in
their tribal area. Now they began to move about. (Kuder n.d.c.: 14)
In this passage the difference between the miti (gospel) and the road on which it
travels seems to collapse. The Lutherans vacillate between the sense that languages
are communicative roads and the sense that they are key components of creating
believing subjects. If languages are simply infrastructural, then any language might
do, whether Kte, Jabem, or the local vernacular for a given area. If languages are
self-making, however, then each potential convert has to be addressed in terms of
her or his native language, as when Flierl and many others argue for only using
the local vernacular. The use of church lingua francas expressed both positions at
once: they were roads through the dense and imposing jungle, itself an image of
the opacity of the populations linguistic forest, but they were also keyed to particu-
lar language families, Austronesian and non-Austronesian. Winter (2012: 10922)
argues that early (ca. 1929) support for the church lingua francas was an exten-
sion of German nationalist ideologies then ascendant in the Weimar Republic. Yet
even a missionary like Georg Pilhofer, who was most vocal about wanting to create
a Papuan volk through the spread of Kte, realized that this required a steady
project of inculcating a church lingua franca so that it could eventually become a
nation-forging entity for speakers of other languages. As I argue below, the depth
of the lingua francasthe sense in which they connect to native soulswas only
secured through comparisons with Pidgins surfaces.
Missionaries were so invested in the sense that Kte, Jabem, or Gedaged was
the language of the people (even when it was promulgated by the mission itself)
that they refused to give up on the three different languages. In the post-World
War II era, with American and Australian financial support very low and all for-
mer German support ruled out as a possibility, it would have made good economic
sense to bring the nearly bankrupt mission together under a single lingua franca.
Yet missionaries were too committed to their own lingua francas to do so. Theolog-
ically it made sense to unite the potential church under a single linguistic umbrella,
so that only one Evangelical Lutheran Church of New Guinea might eventually ex-
ist. But the Lutherans could not decide on one language. Thus,
the introduction of three unifying languages [the lingua francas] did not
produce a solution either of the problem of language, or of the problem
of the unity of the Church. What happened was that three Churches had
come into being. They were all Lutheran but they had nothing more

to hold them together than the fact that they had all grown out of the
work of a mission, and that they all reflected the character of the Papuan
people. (Vicedom 1961: 52)
According to Vicedom, the controversy about languages was never settled
(ibid.: 53). It was in the context of this controversy that the members of the Lutheran
Mission resolved at their 1956 annual meeting to accept Pidgin English in those
emerging situations where a church lingua franca was inadvisable (Hage 1986:
413). But this move toward Pidgin was made with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner
headed to the gallows. In Hartley Hages retrospective account of Lutheran educa-
tion, under the subheading Reluctant acceptance of Pidgin, he writes: If mission-
aries had been able to agree on the use of only one church vernacular, the practical
need for using Pidgin would hardly have arisen within the church (ibid.). Hage
refers to the mission fathers like Johannes Flierl when he writes: Little could these
men know that the centenary of their arrival would be celebrated in a language for
which they had the lowest possible esteem (ibid.: 409).
How does a mission use a language it despises, especially a Protestant mission
oriented toward the text? More importantly, what traces of that dislike might be left
on the language? In the next section I argue that Lutheran missionaries negative
attitude toward Pidgin enabled its success as an infrastructural force that united the
mission as a whole. By using Pidgin as a desubjectivized language, whatever em-
phasis there was on interior subjectivity could reside contrastively in the Lutheran
lingua francas, the linguistic-administrative units of congregational life.
Pidgin English in New Guinea

What is now known as Tok Pisin was initially a pidgin language with a reduced
grammar and a vocabulary taken largely from English. It has its early roots in the
trading jargons used on ships criss-crossing the Pacific. In the late 1800s, it was
used for communication among indentured laborers on the plantations of the
Western Pacific (see Mhlhusler 1977, 1978). Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and
Papua New Guinea all have lingua francas that stem from this Melanesian Pidgin
source. Unlike the colonial languages of the Atlantic, which creolized quickly on
slave plantations, the Melanesian pidgins were largely second languages that local
men learned during three-year stints of labor. In this type of blackbirding labor
system, men were sent to plantations but could eventually leave and were even
dropped off somewhere in the vicinity of their home areas. These returning labor-
ers spread the language unevenly through the territory.
The various colonial administrators of New Guinea would have liked to eradi-
cate the language, but a combined lack of time and resources meant that little at-
tention was paid to the issue. During the short-lived German era (18841914),
administrators built one high school where they planned to teach German in hopes
that it would be the colonial lingua franca rather than Pidgin. The high school was
constructed in 1911, just three years before Australia took possession of the colony
at the start of World War I. After the war, New Guinea was administered by Austra-
lia as a League of Nations Mandated Territory. During World War II the Japanese

Army occupied large swaths of the north coast, and from after the war until In-
dependence in 1975, New Guinea was administered by Australia as a United Na-
tions Trust Territory. During these brief, interrupted moments of administration,
colonial officers wanted to introduce English, but no coordinated policy was set in
place until the late 1950s. All of the United Nations Trust Territories had to have a
concrete plan for movement toward Independence, and the Australian plan rested
on education in English.
The earliest colonial proponent of Pidgin was the Roman Catholic Mission. In
the 1930s the Catholics decided to make Pidgin a liturgical language and started to
produce the necessary literature. They wanted to help create a universal language
for the territory. Fr. Joseph Schebesta compiled a dictionary and was preparing it
for publication when he was killed in World War II. The manuscript dictionary
was published by Fr. Leo Meiser in a very limited run in 1945, but it was the basis
of Fr. Mihalics influential and widely used dictionary published two decades later
(Mihalic 1968).
Even Catholics who were working to promote the language were vocal about
what appeared to them as Pidgins flaws. Chief among these flaws was its tendency
toward constant and radical change. In Meisers preface he states this dictionary
cannot be considered as an exhaustive and final compilation, but only as a collec-
tion of words in current use among those who speak the language (Meiser 1945: 2).
It is unclear how this differs from any other dictionary for any other language, yet
the rate of change is something for which Meiser had to apologize. The one thing
that does not change in the history of Pidgin is the extent to which people comment
on its constant change. But this change marked Pidgin as not a living but rather a
dying language. Arthur Capell argued that later Australian policies were definitely
aimed at causing Pidgin to commit suicide, albeit as painlessly as possible, by tak-
ing more and more English over into it (Capell 1955: 72). As he notes a couple of
pages later, It is only a question of time (ibid.: 74).
The perceived instability of the languageand the possibility that it was in the
midst of self-harmprovoked a strong contrast with the other New Guinea lan-
guages that missionaries dealt with. According to the missionaries, those vernacu-
lars were deeply rooted in the land, so much so that they produced an impenetrable
jungle that had to be cleared with focal languages that could stand in for all of the
New Guinea thought categories. Pidgin, by contrast, looked like no language at all
from the colonial perspective.
As Hage noted in the quotation above, the early missionaries had the lowest
possible esteem for the language. Johannes Flierl was particularly adamant that
Pidgin could not be used in missionary work. In commenting on other missions in
New Guinea, Flierl writes that the Seventh Day Adventists
show their predilection for Pidgin English, this horror of horrors.2 The
Catholics also favour Pidgin English very much. Bishop Vesters told the
conference at Rabaul that it was a simple and easy vehicle of conversation
with the native. The Lutheran and Methodist representatives opposed
this statement of the Bishop. It was a superficial language. (1936: 26)
2. Flierl is referencing a comment he had cited earlier in his essay from another colonial
administrator who had called Pidgin that horror of horrors (see Flierl 1936: 13).

Flierl disagrees with the bishop that Pidgin could be a vehicular language (another
term for a lingua franca), implying that it is incapable of penetrating the dense
jungle of New Guinea.
The Lutheran position on Pidgin remained negative well into the twentieth
century. Otto Theile, the Australia-based head of the New Guinea mission, spoke
about pidgins spoken in both New Guinea and Aboriginal Queensland as useless in
missions work. In a speech titled Missionary methods, Theile condemns anything
but the vernacular:
Among themselves they [meaning, Aboriginal Australians and New
Guineans] use the vernacular, and I am convinced that if we would
understand their innermost thoughts we must be able to converse with
them in the vernacular. We can therefore, not support the proposals that
for primitive natives Pidgin or English be adopted as a means of bringing
to them the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They must hear the message in their
own tongue. (Theile n.d.: 10)
Theiles speech provides us with a clear sense that Pidgin was seen as a language
that could not reach the soul. It was not a language that constituted a perspective
from which to speak, which for Theile is reserved for those innermost thoughts
that had to be turned inside out in order for the conversion process to take place.
Instead of the linguist Capells image of a language that was committing suicide, we
get here the Lutheran missionary image of a language that was simply never alive.
This Pidgin lacks any dimension, staying at the surface of evangelism rather than
plumbing the souls depths.
What Theile leaves out, however, is that the church lingua francas like Kte
and Jabem that the mission was using in New Guinea were vernacular languages
but not the vernacular languages for most of the converts in their domain. Kte
and Jabem only had about a thousand speakers each at the time of Flierls arrival
in 1886. But in 1959 the Lutherans estimated that over 200,000 people spoke or
could understand some amount of Kte (Kuder 1959). Theile plays with the mean-
ing of vernacular here, assuming that anything vernacular and local was also inti-
mate and interior. The possibility that Kte or Jabem as lingua francas could reach
the souls of converts only emerges contrastively when put in relation to Pidgins
deficiencies.
The threat of desubjectification of the lingua francas is explicitly addressed in
Stephen Lehners paper presented to the annual Lutheran Mission conference in
1930. Lehner disparages Pidgin as a language of evangelism for several pages. He
gives examples of what he thinks are the most ridiculous circumlocutions (hat
belong fingerthimble; trousers belong letterenvelope) and an extensive quote
from what he says is the Proclamation of Annexation read to local people when
Britain took possession of Germanys Pacific colonies after World War I (British
new feller master, he like him black feller man too much he like him alsame you
picanin alonga him). Pidgin is the language of last resort, for example when as a
result of mixed marriages Pidjin [sic] will be the language of the newcoming gen-
eration. The only real option is using a vernacular if one wants to actually reach
the innermost self where Christian conversion happens, a space of subjectivity in-
accessible to Pidgins this-worldliness.

If he [the missionary] has an opportunity to use a New Guinea language,

which is so rich in detailed expressions, there should be no doubt as to
which is to be used. May traders use Pidjin and may Governments even
give Proclamations in it, and may an Anthropologist use it to find out
facts:a missionary cannot use this language if he wants to arouse the
hearts of the people. (Lehner 1930: 2)
Against the gibberish of Pidgin, Lehner holds up the native language as the only
route to real conversion. But he has to catch himself at the end of the paper: the Lu-
therans do not in fact use the mother tongue languages of their potential converts.
I hope that these pages do not give some people the idea regarding the
introduction of one or two centralized languages, for which many of
the tribes should give up their mother tongue. I admit that doing this is
only a compromise forced by the fact that there are too many different
languages, but not the ideal solution to the problem. Unfortunately it is
impossible to cultivate 20 to 30 languages and produce school material
and literature in all of them. But the introduction of another New
Guinean language, even if it is not of the same structure, is still quite
different than introducing a European language in order to get away from
the difficulties that the many tribal languages present. (Lehner 1930: 3)
Lehner has to apologize for a Lutheran policy which seems to go against all of the
principles he laid out in his opposition to Pidgin. He implies that the use of the
lingua francas is a logistical issue onlyif they could use all the native languages,
they would. But even the nonlocal lingua francas are superior since they are less
different from a local language than Pidgin or English would be. Moreover, Lehner
thinks that learning any local language is enough to show ones good intentions.
Not only do church languages share in the sense of generalized New Guinea-ness
that allows missionaries a route to the potential converts heart, but they also reveal
the hearts of the missionaries as being filled with good intentions toward their
colonial charges.
Lehner is not the only one who equates the use of Pidgin with colonial domina-
tion and church languages with salvation. Georg Pilhofer (1938) reports on a con-
versation he had with an administrator in the highlands in which the latter urges
him and the rest of the Lutherans to use Pidgin rather than Kte or Jabem. Pilhofer
replies, No Protestant Mission will teach the Gospel in Pidgin. Only the Catholic
Mission can do that. For they are, first and foremost, concerned with acquaint-
ing their followers with ritual forms and formulas. We are not against Pidgin as a
means of communication between white and black. However, for the actual mis-
sion work we decline to use it (ibid.: 3). Ritual forms and formulas, administrative
proclamations, anthropological inquiries: these are all acceptable uses for Pidgin
since they do not depend upon reaching the depths of the person.
Keeping Pidgin in flux

As the IndiaNew Guinea comparison revealed, all Lutheran missionaries learned
and used Pidgin. But for a long time Lutheran approaches to Pidgin were disorderly

and slapdash. In contrast to the Catholics, who started early on in the 1930s with
creating a Pidgin orthography, the Lutherans seemed to actively work to keep Pid-
gin in a state of disorder. Two documents that have been filed next to one another
in the Lutheran archives demonstrate the extent to which Lutherans wrote the lan-
guage idiosyncratically.
The first is a Pidgin translation of the famous hymn Nearer my God to Thee,
which appears to have been translated by Jerome Ilaoa, a Samoan Lutheran mis-
sionary, in 1933. Spelling or grammar that differs from what became the standard-
ized form of Tok Pisin is underlined. I have tried to produce this hymn using stan-
dardized Tok Pisin underneath each line.
Nearer My God to Me [sic]. By Jerom Ilaoa. 1933
1 Klos tu, o God, long yu,
Klostu, o God, long yu
Near, oh God, to you
2 Klos tu long yu,
Klostu long yu
Near to you
3 Kuros e kin bring im mi
Kros i ken bringim mi
The cross can bring me
4 Klos tu along yu
Klostu long yu
Near to you
5 Trabel en pen i kam
Trabel na pen i kam
There is trouble and pain
6 Mi no kin lusim yu
Mi no ken lusim yu
I cannot leave you
7 Mi laik i go along yu
Mi laik go long yu
I want to go to you
8 Klos tu along yu
Klostu long yu
Near to you
9 Insaid long santu hart
Insait long bel holi
Inside your sacred heart
10 Mi laik i haid
Mi laik hait
I want to hide

11 *Jesus yu dai for mi

Jisas yu indai pinis long mi
[alternately: Jisas yu indai pinis long kisim bek laip bilong mi]
*Jesus you died for me
12 Mi no kin fraid
Mi lo ken poret
I cannot be afraid
13 Taim soul i karim pain,
Taim sol [tewel] i karim pen
When [my] soul is pained
14 Mi ken i kom along yu
Mi ken kam long yu
I can come to you
15 Klos tu long yu o God
Klostu long yu o God
Near to you oh God
16 Klos tu long yu
Klostu long yu
Near to you
With a significant but not enormous number of changes, this looks roughly simi-
lar to contemporary Tok Pisin (so much for the argument that it is changing at an
extraordinary rate). I have underlined the words that would have to be corrected
to make it conform to contemporary use; the changes are largely minor. Word
final voiced obstruents are usually devoiced in Pidgin and contemporary spell-
ing reflects that (haid/hait in line 10; fraid/poret in line 11). The phrase in line 9
sacred heart rendered as santu hart both ignores the Pidgin word for heart,
bel, that is used in a later stanza in this translation, and displays the Catho-
lic tendency to render theological terms in Latinate form (santu).3 Within this
largely phonemic spelling, there is a lack of standardization: the preposition long is
sometimes along (lines 4, 7, 8, and 14); the transitive marker -im is sometimes not
connected to the verb (line 3). The predicate marker i is used with first-person
verbs, although this is not done in standard Tok Pisin. The worst problems are in
line 11, where (1) the English preposition for is used for the benefactive construc-
tion died for me rather than using a purposive construction belong kisim bek laip
bilong mi, to save you [lit. to get your life back], or something similar; and (2) the
3. The Roman Catholic Society of the Divine Word mission, active in the neighboring
Madang District, was the first to use Pidgin for catechetical and liturgical texts. The
fact that Ilaoa uses a Latinate term here suggests that this is in fact a very early attempt
at using Pidgin within a Lutheran context when the theological vocabulary would have
been extremely small and in flux. It may also be important that Ilaoa, as a Samoan
missionary, did not feel the kinds of deep-seated antipathies toward Catholics that his
fellow German, Australian, and American Lutheran missionaries felt, although this is
only my speculation.

completive marker pinis is left out, rendering it Jesus passed out rather than Jesus
died for me.
If the Lutherans regularly used an orthography and grammar that matched
the hymn translation above, one could talk about a regular Lutheran Pidgin norm
emerging. However, right next to this document in the archival record is a version
of the Our Father in Pidgin, translated by a German-speaking Australian mission-
ary (undated, but a similar version of the prayer is in Lehner 1930: 2).
Das Vater-unser in Pidgin [The Our Father]
1 Pappa belong me fellow he stop on top,
Papa bilong mipela i stap antap
Our (EXCL) father is above
2 Name belong you he tamboo,
Nem bilong yu i tambu
Your name is taboo
3 fashion belong you he come,
pasin bilong yu i kam
your ways came
4 something he stop along bell belong you all he make him on top all the same
you me make him down below,
samting i stap long bel bilong yu ol i mekim antap olsem yumi mekim daunbelo
something that is in your heart they do above like we (INCL) do below
5 Kaikai belong me fellow, all time you give him me fellow,
kaikai bilong mipela oltaim yu givim mipela
you always give us (EXCL) our food
6 loose him trouble belong me fellow past time all right,
lusim trabel bilong mipela pastaim, orait
first remove our (EXCL) troubles, then
7 you me loose him trouble belong brother belong you me;
yumi lusim trabel bilong brata bilong mi
we (INCL) remove my brothers troubles
8 you look out, Satan he no try him me fellow too much,
yu lukaut Seten i no traim mipela tumas
watch that Satan does not test us (EXCL) a lot
9 alltogether something havy he stop belong skin belong me fellow you loose
him;
olgeta samting hevi i stap long skin belong mipela yu lusim
remove the burdens from our (EXCL) bodies (skins)
10 alltogether bush, alltogether strong, alltogether light too much belong yu all
time.
olgeta bus, olgeta strong, olgeta lait tumas bilong yu oltaim
all the forests, all the powers, all the light really always yours

11 Him he true.
Em i tru.
It is true (amen)
Not only is the orthography completely wedded to standard English, but several
lines are ungrammatical or semantically questionable. Line 10 lacks a verb. The
translator does not seem to understand the distinction between inclusive we,
which refers to speaker and addressee (marked INCL in the text above), and exclu-
sive we, which refers to speaker and others but not the addressee (marked EXCL
in the text above). For example, God is included in the we that creates Gods will
on earth (line 4) and who forgives those who trespass against us (line 7).4 Ortho-
graphically, the language is presented as nothing more than bad English, and if one
is reading from an English vantage point it reads as close to gibberish. It follows
none of the more phonemic spellings that were in the hymn. But if you put it in an
orthography that obscures the etymological links to English that are so transpar-
ently presented in the original document, the language starts to look much more
familiar, as can be seen in the transliteration I put beneath each line. Unlike the
Catholic dictionary, which early on adopted an orthography much closer to what
appears in the hymn, Lutheran missionary attempts at employing Pidgin kept the
language verging on the edge of linguistic suicide.
In the mid-1950s the Lutherans were starting to face off against the administra-
tion, which was decidedly opposed to the church lingua francas. Yet the administra-
tion was also deeply opposed to Pidgin. When it threatened to cut off subsidies for
mission schools using church lingua francas, mission President John Kuder tried to
recruit the administration in common cause against Pidgin: Pidgin would be a very
miserable substitute for an indigenous church language, and its general adoption as
such would mean a disastrous impoverishment. ... The man who teaches or preach-
es in Pidgin will find it very hard to dip below the surface of things (Kuder 1959: 7).
Yet already in 1954, it is clear that the president of the mission was contemplat-
ing such a shift, even while maintaining his negative attitude toward it: Because
Pidgin gives us access to so many people the question arises whether we should
not cultivate it rather than use it merely as a necessary evil? (Kuder 1954: 9). They
had already developed a partial Pidgin liturgy, but this was meant only for the use
of laborers on plantations or near the towns, that is, the Melanesians who were
already alienated from their native contexts by being in multiethnic labor camps
(Kuder n.d.b.: 5). For the in situ natives, they passed a resolution at their annual
meeting that certain new areas could be evangelized in Pidgin, but should not be
used in older areas to take the place of the church lingua francas.
Lutherans discussed two main reasons for this official recognition. First, they
were battling with other denominations for dominance in the highlands. Teaching
the Lutheran lingua francas to potential converts during year-long confirmation
classes was taking too long. Other missions were picking off the students by of-
fering immediate baptism. Reluctantly, in 1956, the Lutherans allowed the use of
Pidgin in these hotly contested new highlands areas in an effort to keep as much
4. In contemporary Tok Pisin versions of the Our Father prayer, only the exclusive
first-person plural pronoun mipela is used.

of their flock as they could. Second, the missionaries were starting to make more
concerted efforts to turn the mission into a church, and to have local people take
over for the American, Australian, and German missionaries. Yet because these
expatriate missionaries were never able to decide on a single church language, the
New Guinea Lutherans had no single language with which to communicate. Pidgin
was partly accepted because it was the only language in which synodal meetings
among members of the Kte, Jabem, and Madang Districts could take place.
Soon after deciding to accept Pidgin, one of the Lutheran missionaries began
to work in limited ways with the Catholic Fr. Mihalic on standardizing Pidgin and
translating the New Testament into it (see Cass 1999). The New Testament was pub-
lished in 1969, an official orthography in 1970, and a grammar and dictionary in
1971. Yet even when codifying the language, the missionaries orienting horizon was
always an English-language future with Pidgin on a modernizing suicide mission.
Fr. Francis Mihalic, the Catholic missionary most responsible for standardizing Pid-
gin, writes in the preface to the first edition of the dictionary that the codification of
Pidgin is just meant to span the gap to that farther shore of English-language flu-
ency (Mihalic 1968: ix). In other words, missionaries do not suddenly disagree with
the anti-Pidgin rationales that were articulated in earlier decades. They continue to
disparage Pidgin in familiar ways even as they start to use it.
The extent to which Lutherans worked to maintain Pidgin outside of the realm
of stable linguistic subjectivity even as they used it is most clearly on display in 1971
correspondence between John Kuder, the head of the mission, and John Sievert, who
before his retirement was the first Lutheran assigned to work with Mihalic on Pid-
gin. Kuder complains about Sieverts replacement in the Pidgin work, Paul Freyberg.
Freyberg was taking too long with his Pidgin translation of the Lutheran statement
of faith. Before getting to Kuders comments, it is important to note that Kuder had
been working on the statement of faith for at least five years. Hammering out the
theological differences among the different Lutheran mission societies was a seem-
ingly never-ending task. Kuder also worked hard to make the statement of faith spe-
cific to and appropriate for the New Guinea context. It was something of a parting
gift, as the mission was formally in the process of being nationalized, going from a
Euro-American-run mission to a church that would be run by New Guineans. This
final stamp of theological authenticity and truth in the statement of faith was meant
to set the new church on the right path. Kuder had been worrying over it for years
and yet he notes that Freyberg is taking too much care with the Pidgin translation.
I cant see that this is going to be done in the immediate future. What
seems to me would be a much better solution would be that a few of us
who are not quite so good in Pidgin as Paul is [come together] and that
we should get it out the best we can. Then it can be worked over and
revised where necessary to bring it into line with our changing use of
the Pidgin itself[]to have somebody prepare what we think is a perfect
copy is like Sisip pushing the stone up the mountain. He never reached
it. (Kuder n.d.a: 3839)5
5. This is from a written transcript of Kuders responses to Sieverts written questions that
Kuder recorded by audiotape. I have added in material in square brackets to help cor-
rect for the disfluencies of his off the cuff remarks.

Even though Kuder was deeply concerned about this document, he is getting ready
to insist upon what he thinks will be a middling translation into Pidgin. One will
always have to bring it into line with our changing use of the Pidgin because the
Pidgin itself is always changing to an extent that does not seem to be true of other
languages. That is, trying to get a Pidgin translation into proper order is Sisyphean
because of the instability of Pidgin itself.
As is clear from Kuders comments, a few Lutherans like Paul Freyberg did think
that Pidgin could be a language of the self, or at least worked under that assump-
tion. Certainly after Kuder left and the leadership of the church moved into New
Guinean hands, Pidginor what is now called Tok Pisincame to be an important
part of Lutheran practice. In many places Tok Pisin took over from Kte, Jabem, and
Gedaged. But in the mission era itself, there is an ongoing ambivalence about Pid-
gin. It is recognized as incredibly useful to unite the mission given the missionaries
incapacity to find a single church lingua franca, and yet it was kept separate from
those lingua francas and the vernacular languages of the people. Kuders refusal to
let Freyberg work on the translationhis refusal to even admit that a proper Pidgin
translation was possiblepoints to the ways in which Pidgin was maintained as a
language without subjective depth. Even with Kte and Jabem sidelined and Pidgin
English on its way to becoming the main Lutheran language by the time of Papua
New Guineas independence, many Lutheran missionaries maintained a sense that
Pidgin was incapable of producing a sincere conversion.
Conclusion
The separation of subjectivity and language has most often been tied to Enlighten-
ment and positivist scientific practices. To the extent that language can be purified
of various infelicities or biases, it can be a transparent medium for the communica-
tion of truth. The view from nowhere is made possible here (or is imagined as pos-
sible here) because language can be perfected. What is especially interesting in the
Lutheran case is that Pidgin was delinked from a subjective self not because it was
perfecta laboratory instrumentbut because it was so deeply flawed. It changed
too quickly, it did not have its own center, it was committing suicide by slowly be-
ing eaten up by English. And for about seventy years the Lutherans both used the
language and left it in that imperfect state. Without semantic or subjective depth,
it was imagined by the Lutherans to be a language of infrastructure and no more.
But in providing this linguistic shallowness, missionaries could point contrastively
to the relative depth of the church lingua francas, which were so ambivalently con-
nected to particular communities of speakers.
In analyses of the history of Malay (the precursor to Bahasa Indonesia), many
scholars suggest that the Dutch colonial forces did not want to have anything to
do with the language (Meier 1993; Siegel 1997; Errington 2003). It was out of the
colonizers neglect that Malay was able to transform into a language of an incipient
nationalist identity. Without the elaborate honorific registers required in Balinese
or Javanese, or the deference required in speaking to a colonial officer, speaking
Malay to other inhabitants of the Dutch East Indies felt like one was speaking out-
side of the prevailing social demands for status and order, where one could imagine

a new political world. But in the case of Pidgin in the Lutheran Mission, we see
that even in the process of using the language, the Lutherans worked to make it
a language without subjective force. Rather than characterize their engagements
with Pidgin as negligence, it is better to think of it as a series of refusals, a kind of
antiattention that kept Pidgin in a subordinate position as Lutherans policed the
boundary between the interior and the exterior, the place for conversion and the
place for mere information transfer.
Given their Lutheran inheritance, it is especially surprising that the missionar-
ies discussed here were at best ambivalent about the relationship between vernacu-
lar language and the possibility for the sincere expression of conversion. In certain
contexts, the Lutheran missionaries tried to create a kind of denominational unity
that avoided language almost entirely (see Handman 2014). For the missionaries
hoping to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable forest of languages on the Huon
Peninsula, the church lingua francas became the discrete paths for doing so. Yet
their status as vernaculars that penetrated both the forests of New Guinea and the
interior souls of the people was made possible through the contrast with Pidgin.
Pidgin circulated as a language of surfaces, but did so in order to provide depth to
the lingua francas.
Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (2003) contrast the theories of Locke and
Herder as the two main apostles of modernist language ideologies, the one advocat-
ing a rational and transparent language of logic and the other describing the partic-
ularistic languages of ethnonational groups. While these two modes of imagining
language are often opposed to one another, the extent to which they are dependent
upon one another is not often attended to. Yet the languages of particularism, the
heart languages of sincere speech, contrast with the imagination of language as
divorced from the production of a self. The Lutheran use and abuse of Pidginthe
missionaries capacity to despise the language that they helped promulgatesug-
gests that we ought to plumb both the linguistic depths and surfaces.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was supported by a Summer Research Assignment from
the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. I thank the ar-
chivists at the Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, in Elk
Grove, IL, for their guidance and help in locating a number of documents that
I discuss here. I presented an early draft of the manuscript at the 2016 SALSA
conference at the University of Texas at Austin, and I thank the organizers for
that opportunity. I thank Niloofar Haeri for organizing and inviting me to partici-
pate in a set of panels at the American Anthropological Association meetings in
2014 and 2016 that was the original basis of this special section. The other partici-
pants in this special sectionNiloofar Haeri, Ayala Fader, Sonja Luehrmann, and
Matt Tomlinsonall provided extensive and insightful criticisms. Ilana Gershon,
Paul Manning, Robert Moore, Joshua Reno, and James Slotta each read and very
helpfully commented on drafts of the manuscript. Finally, I thank the editors and
anonymous reviewers for Hau.

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Langues sans objets: Des intrieur(s) de la Nouvelle Guine coloniale

Rsum : Le thme protestant du sujet intrieur exprim dans la langue ou le langage
prsuppose souvent un contraste avec des formes langagires qui nient la subjectivit.
Cela veut dire que la subjectivit linguistique, la profondeur intrieure, est souvent
produite par lintervention dun contraste avec des surfaces linguistiques, avec des
langues qui dune faon ou dune autre, sont considres incapables de servir de socle
la subjectivit. En Nouvelle-Guine, lpoque coloniale, les premiers missionnaires
luthriens semblent avoir eu limpression de devoir dbroussailler deux jungles, lune
constitue darbres, lautre de signes linguistiques. Pour cette dernire, ils utilisrent
les lingua franca autorises par lglise, mme si bien des interlocuteurs ne poss-
daient pas laisance linguistique que les thories protestantes sur la sincrit sponta-
ne prsupposaient. Les luthriens espraient tablir la profondeur de leurs lingua
franca et leurs capacit susciter des subjectivits par la comparaison avec une autre
forme plus institutionnalise de pidgin-English quils nestimaient pas capable de pro-
duire un sujet (chrtien). Dans cet article jexamine comment les missionnaires luth-
riens ont tent de faire passer le pidgin-English pour un peudo-langage dprci, afin
de mettre en valeur, par contraste, les possibilits de spontanit sincre contenues
par la lingua franca parle par les fidles de leur glise.
Courtney Handman is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Texas at Austin. She has conducted field and archival research in Papua New Guin-
ea since 2002, both with Guhu-Samane communities in Morobe Province and with
members of the Bible translation organization SIL International. Her work focuses
on the religious publics produced through missionary discourses and ambivalences
about institutions in Protestant practice. Her book Critical Christianity: Translation
and denominational conflict in Papua New Guinea was published by the University
of California Press in 2015.
Courtney Handman
Department of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
2201 Speedway, Stop C3200
Austin, TX 78712
USA
chandman@austin.utexas.edu

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2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 207228