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INTRODUCTION
Beyond Logos:
Extensions of the LanguageIdeology Paradigm in the Studyof Global Christianity(-ies)
Jon BialeckiUniversity of California San Diego
and
Eric Hoenes del PinalUniversity of North Carolina Charlotte
As the careful reader may intuit from looking at the title situated above,
this special section of Anthropological Quarterly is entitled Beyond
Logos: Extensions of the Language Ideology Paradigm in the Study of Global
Christianity(-ies). This title is inelegant enough that it perhaps warrants anexplanation. Why entitle it Beyond Logos? What is meant by Logos, why
is logos something that we should wish to go beyond, and what does this
going beyond have to do with the extension of language ideology in its
engagement with a questionable object like global Christianity(-ies)? Why
global Christianity(-ies) in the first place, something which is obviously so
suspect that the editors of this special section hedge, if not outright prevar-
icate, as to whether it is even presentable as a single object at all, invoking
the kind of clever-by-half play of parenthetically suggested alternate read-
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 3, p. 575594, ISSN 0003-5491. 2011 by the Institute for EthnographicResearch (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
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ings that mark the worst stylistic moments of self-consciously post-modern
writing? Most importantly of all, how does all this serve as both a mobiliza-
tion and an interrogation of the concept of the language-ideological sincere
Christian speaker, one of the most productive ideas put forward by the
emerging Anthropology of Christianity?
Why indeed?
Logos
As a song says, the ver y beginning, metaphorical or otherwise, is a very
good place to start, so lets start with logos (). Logos, of course, is
the Greek term that was used to reference both word and speech, dis-
course and reason; but as far back as the pre-Socratics, it also served as a
philosophical term of art, indicating an originary ordering and knowl-
edge, giving it a conceptual load quite different from other analogous
words, such as rhema (), which could be glossed as having the same
English-language plain meaning. It is in the second philosophical sense
that logos had quite a career in the classical and Hellenistic era. Here it
was sometimes thought of as being a Heraclitan world-building fire, atother times conceived of as the stoic indwelling, an immanent and ani-
mating force of reason (or the logos spermaticos). Around the start of the
Common Era, logos found its way into the hands of the Jewish middle-
Platonist Philo of Alexandria, who specialized in creating allegorical read-
ings of the Septigant, making the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible
in effect yet another Platonic text. With Philo, logos was used as a techni-
cal term for a mediating hypostatic emanation from the divine, which
served as a barrier between God and the material world. At the sametime, logos was also imagined as Gods chief means of acting on the
world (through the act of creation) and in the world (through a sustain-
ing providential order). This triple duty of obscuring, creating, and struc-
turing was possible because of the ambiguous status of logos for Philo. It
was as at once an aspect of God, an instrument of God, and the structur-
ing principle immanent to the creation that God had forged by way of
logos (Radice 2009). Called at once divine, the creators first born son,
a high priest, and reason itself by Philo, it is obvious that for him logos
was a privileged cosmological term.1
While Philo, and his particular reading of logos, did not end up having
many interlocutors among either the later Platonists or the post-temple
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rabbinic writers, there is strong reason to suspect that his reading of logos
was directly or indirectly quite influential with another setnamely, the
authors of the collection of epistles and biographic accounts that would
become the New Testament (Runia 1993, Siegert 2009). Though Philos
abstract, philosophical conception of God is not exactly co-terminus with
the God of the New Testament, traces of a concept homologous to Philos
logos can be seen in both the Epistle to the Hebrews and in (some) Pauline
depictions of Jesus as intercessor, high priest, and image of the divine.2
Resonances with Philos logos are most notable in the Johannine works,
particularly the opening lines of the gospel of the fourth evangelist: In the
beginning was the Word [], and the Word was with God, and Word was
God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through
him, and without him not one thing came into being (John 1:1-3, NRSV).
In time, early Church apologists and exegetes would further strengthen the
ties between Philo, his logos, and Christianity by borrowing from him (often
without giving creditsee Runia 1993, 2009); but in these opening pas-
sages from the Gospel of John we already see the start of the Christian
career of the Philonic idea of the logos as singular first cosmic principle,
mediator, structure, and force. The chief differences between the earlierlogos and this new Christian instance of it are twofold. First, the Word is not
just personified in the same abstract way that other platonic conceptions
like sophia were; instead it is imagined as an actual singular agentive
individualJesus of Nazareth. The second difference is that now the
Philonic logos is deployed not in the setting of philosophical speculation
nor in the allegorical interpretation of Jewish law, but rather as part of an
antinomian Jewish apocalyptic movement that would move on to reshape
the Roman Empire and beyond.3
Given the peregrinations undertaken by the term logos and the concep-
tual baggage that it acquired on its Mediterranean walkabout, it is not
surprising that the polysemy of the term gave it at once an ordering power
and a mutagenic instability. Connoting a power both spiritual and mate-
rial, transcendent and immanent, agentive and yet an implement, logos
enacts a kind of glissando across varying conceptual fields. This is perhaps
best illustrated, in all its heterodox ebullience, in Goethes Faust, where
the books eponymous doctor of philosophy and theology struggles to
translate the first line of the Gospel of John into German. In this passage
(also appearing as the epigraph to the Hoenes del Pinal contribution to
this issue), we see a range of potential readings sequentially actualized in
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Fausts stumbling attempts at translation, starting with an initial reading
of the term as in the beginning was the Word, a term at which he
balks, moving on to translating logos as thought, power, and finally set-
tling uneasily with in the beginning was the Deed 4 (Goethe ln. 1224-
1237). At once metaphysical and pragmatic, logos serves as an abstract
term that functions as a point de capiton between immaterial transcen-
dental truths and this-worldly actions; yet it is also understandable as
word in so far as one grants that it entails not just a representational,
denotative function, but also a pragmatic, perlocutionary one.
(Christian) Language Ideology Paradigm
We mention all this because there is something in the theological uses of
the term logosin this hierarchical enchainment of conception, language,
order, materiality, and actionthat captures the complexities of a
Christian language ideology that anthropologists of religion have been
trying to give a theoretically informed ethnographic account of. At the
same time, there is something in logos that seems to lay out the architec-
tural logic of this linguistic-anthropological tool itself. To understand whatis being claimed here, and why it should be of interest, one needs to reflect
on two recent turns in anthropology: 1) the forging of language ideology
as both a field of inquiry and organizing theoretical concern among lin-
guistic anthropologist; and 2) its adoption and expansion by anthropolo-
gists who take on Christianity as a vital part of their ethnographic domain.
A focus on language ideologiesthose representations, whether
explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of language and human
beings in a social world (Woolard 1997:3)has been at the forefront oflinguistic anthropology since the early 1990s, and has arguably been crit-
ical to that subfields contribution to the state of Anthropology more gen-
erally for the last two decades (Duranti 2003). Seeking to offer a mediat-
ing link between peoples ideas about the nature of language and
communication, and the social formations that they inhabit while having
those ideas (or alternately challenging, amending, or rejecting them), lan-
guage ideology has offered anthropologists a robust model through which
to examine how contemporary social life is shaped and experienced dia-
logically. Importantly, the turn to language ideologies as an organizing
concept has meant that linguistic anthropologists have brought the study
of language to bear on topics which had traditionally been more closely
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associated with sociocultural anthropology, such as identity formation,
power and politics, aesthetics, morality, and epistemology to name but a
few (Woolard 1997). Although the methods for identifying what counts as
a language ideology and how to analyze them vary, work in this vein has
consistently sought ways to make linguistic data culled from relatively
micro-level actions speak to macro-level social concerns. It is per-
haps that concern for finding ways to ground abstracted concepts (like
power) in everyday practices (like conversations) that has made language
ideology an important analytic tool for anthropologists interested in the
social life of discourse.
It is in this vein that anthropologists of religion, and especially those
interested in Christianity have come to take up questions of how the lan-
guage ideology(-ies) implicit in Christian belief and practice shape the reli-
gious lives, communities, social commitments and subjectivities of
Christians. Responding in part to the growth of Christianity in the global
south (Jenkins 2002, 2008), and in part due to the realization that the
secularization hypothesis of dwindling religiosity in the global north
was not coming to pass (Casanova 1994), there has been a substantial
increase in the amount of ethnographic and anthropological attentionpaid to Christianity as an object of inquiry (Bialecki, Haynes, and Robbins
2008; Cannell 2006; Tomlinson and Engelke 2006; Lampe 2010; Robbins
2003; Scott 2005). While this has led to diverse ethnographic and theoret-
ical projects, it is the repurposing of the concept of language ideology by
anthropologists of Christianity that has forged the most sustained and
developed discussion. One of the most striking things about this turn is
that many forms of Christian (and particularly Protestant) language ideol-
ogy have been found remarkably regularized, very much bearing a fam-ily resemblance to one another irregardless of the local conditions in
which they have been found. Sites range, for example, from civil-war era
England to missionized villages in Papua New Guinea and Oceania, from
African townships that first came to be Christian under colonial rule in the
19th century to the always-already Christian suburbs of the Midwestern
United States (see generally Bauman 1983; Bielo 2009a; Crapanzano
2000; Engelke 2007; Keane 2007; Robbins 2004b; Schiefellin 2002, 2007;
Shoaps 2002; Stromberg 1993; Tomlinson 2009). Yet despite the great
variety of field-locations, spanning differences in the specific historic
length and magnitude of their engagement with forms of Christianity, this
family resemblance portrait holds. Viewed as a gestalt, then, the Christian
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language ideologue put forward in this literature could be identified by
a rather small though recurrent constellation of features, chief of which
are a marked predilection for sincerity, interiority, intimacy, intentionali-
ty, and immediacy as an ethics of speech, and a privileging of the refer-
ential aspects of language. Concomitant with this, there is a tendency
towards discomfort with, if not an outright rejection of the social, mate-
rial, and historic substrate of language (among which we might count rit-
ualized speech genres), which sometimes extends to a suspicion of fixed
texts5 and other non-personalized instances of language use.
One could draw on a number of types of speech events regularly
invoked by Christians to illustrate this point (genres such as conversion
narratives [Stromberg 1993, Harding 2000] or preaching [Bauman 1983,
Wharry 2003]), but prayer is perhaps the most telling example of how the
features of Christian language ideology play out in practice. Joel Robbins
(2001) account of prayer among the Christianized Urapmin of highland
New Guinea will serve as an example. Before conversion, Urapmins lin-
guistic practices were informed by an epistemology that was generally
suspicious of the evidentiary value of spoken language. Since their con-
version en masse during a revival in the 1970s, however, they have beeninaugurated into a religion that claims, as their Tok Pisin translation of
the first lines of John reads, that long ago Talk existedand Talk itself
was God (Robbins 2001:905). When engaging this Talk-God, Urapmin turn
their attention to their own interior train of thoughts, often closing their
eyes and withdrawing from the greater material world and non-prayer
social life if they feel that they can do so safely (Robbins 2004b:262; also
see Keane 2007:181-186). They then speak out loud, addressing an invisi-
ble, immaterial God (see Keane 1997a) (and, incidentally, whoever else isin earshot, constituting a set of intended overhearers [Goffman 1981]). In
addressing this invisible God, they must speak the truth, their personal
truth, for the Urapmin believe that God is already aware of their thoughts,
and will not brook deceit. The linguistic content of Urapmin prayer is
therefore driven by the interiority it expresses (or, perhaps more accurate-
ly, creates). Other than being required to deploy a few fixed linguistic
tokens to mark the opening and closing of the speech event, Urapmin can
express whatever is on their minds and on the tip of their tongues in
prayer and, in doing so, commit themselves publicly to these intentions
and truths (something that would not have been deemed possible under
their dominant pre-conversion language ideology).
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This sketch of Robbinss work on prayer recapitulates the major ele-
ments of Christian language ideology as it has emerged in the anthropo-
logical literature. Of course, this project of identifying and charting a spe-
cific language ideology has not gone without direct (Luhrmann 2004) or
oblique (Comaroff 2010, Hann 2007, Mosko 2010, Scott 2005) criticism.
However, for many researchers working with Christian populations, this
variant of language ideology has been productive in making intelligible
phenomena distributed across different aspects of the sociocultural ter-
rain; not just changes in speech and ritual as seen above, but changes in
conceptions, representations, and practices of kinship, time, exchange,
and money have been accounted for by recourse to Christian language
ideology (Schieffelin 2002, Keane 2007, Schram 2011). If it has been suc-
cessful in this regard, it is because the metapragmatic ordering of ethical
and unethical language found in Christian language ideology practices
also functions as an ordering of agency, subjectivity, sociality, and the
material world (see Keane 2007). To the extent that ethical language is
seen as internally originated, signifying, and predicated on immaterial
truths and invisible agentsas opposed to socio-centric and indexical or
iconic, then it is also individuating. This understanding of the functionand power of speech therefore highlights the arbitrary, material, and
hence human-crafted nature of forms of representation that are predicat-
ed on a strong enmeshment between the sign and its subject. At the level
of the political and the economic, this endorsement of the individual as
the proper site of agency can be corrosive of embedding social forms
forms that in some areas new to Christianity often already have non-
Christian supernatural warrants for their existence (see e.g. , Meyer 1999).
Finally, we should note that while it is in convert-Christian societiesthat the work of Christian language ideology is most visible, that does not
mean that its effects are limited to those spaces alone. In fact, there is
reason to think that this particular set of speech ethics has been working
to remake the West ever since the Protestant Reformation, if not earlier.
It is because of Christian language ideologys potential for a totalizing
reordering of the entirety of the protocols for social and material interac-
tions that Webb Keane (2007), who has done the most to think through
what is entailed in the Christian language ideological process, locates the
solution not just in language but in the general workings of semiosis. For
Keane, the semiotic ideology at the heart of Christianity is so protean that
he identifies it as the driver in the Wests slow distillation of the
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autonomous individual during the Early to Contemporary Modern Eras, as
the engine of the purifying work of modernity, in Latours (1993) sense
of the term.
Beyond
Given both this explanatory power and ethnographic breadth, it is perhaps
not going too far to suggest that as things stand now, Christian language ide-
ology is the Anthropology of Christianitys first instance of a Kuhnian nor-
mal science (see Robbins n.d., Kuhn 1996). We should remember, though,
that it is not just modernity at large that has Christian roots. As both the-
ologians and social scientists have reminded us, the social sciences them-
selves owe a debt to Christian theological, metaphysical, and ontological
speculation, and for better or worse our secular theories and models are in
many ways colored by this heritage (see Asad 1993, Burridge 1973, Cannell
2005, Milbank 2006, Sahlins 1996). Given this inheritance, it should not be
too surprising to see that Christian language ideology, not just as a lived
social practice but also as an academic apparatus, has certain conceptual
overlaps and resonances with the theological formulation of logosdescribed above. While we are not going as far as to suggest a specific
genealogy linking logos and the theoretical account of Christian language
ideology,6 the similarity of the two ideas can be seen when they are placed
alongside each othernamely, they both posit a singular (in all meanings
of the word) spark of transcendent immaterial truth that has participatory
creating and fixing effects on the material world. For Christians, that singu-
lar source is the abstract truth of God. For anthropologists writing ethno-
graphic accounts of Christianity as lived practice, Christian language ideol-ogy can play a similar ordering and originating role.
This seeming homology is of note because this well-ordered chain of
being, in which a single truth influences all practices, is not the mode in
which all language ideologies are imagined to operate. As we have
already alluded to in Robbins account of prayer cited above, Christian
language ideologies, especially in convert cultures, are often presented as
vying with other non-Christian visions of what constitutes ethical and
effective language. The previously mentioned pre-conversion Urapmin
suspicion of the spoken word is just one instance of the sort of language
ideologies that can run alongside Christian-derived ones. Another exam-
ple could be found in Webb Keanes (1997b, 2007) depiction of the diver-
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gent linguistic practices of converts and non-converts on Sumba in Eastern
Indonesia. There, as he describes it, those who have opted not to convert
to Christianity have increasingly adopted heavily formulaic and deferen-
tial language, filled with lexical items connotative of earlier periods in
local history, when praying to their non-Christian ancestor-gods. The point
is not that there is any commonality to these contra-Christian language
ideologies that exist as coeval options or still meaningful predecessors;
but rather, that language ideologies often struggle alongside one another,
offering competing visions of the nature of language and its relationship
to human sociality. This is all in line with how linguistic anthropologists
have treated language ideologies as social facts worthy of scholarly atten-
tion, since it was in large part the conflict between various language-ide-
ological formations that allowed these scholars to chart the effects of
metalinguistic discourses on other fields of social and cultural action
(e.g., Gal 1993, Briggs 1997, see also essays in Blommaert 1999).
And yet there is a tendency for this sense of multiple, competing claims
to a semiotic true north to fall away when taking up Christian language ide-
ology on its own terms. That is to say, the sense of logos as a singular order-
ing truth seems to bleed into discussions of Christian language ideology asa unitary field of anthropological inquiry. Why should it be that the social
contestations that have long been a feature of linguistic anthropologists
work on language ideologies stops at the doorway to the church? This may
be overstating the case a bit since anthropologists have noted differences
between, say, Protestant and Catholic Christians in the same field site
(Keane 2007), or between various Euro-American based missions and inde-
pendent African churches (Engelke 2007). Nonetheless, even when differ-
ence and contestations are featured in the literature, this often takes thesense not of differential variation, but of varying levels of realization of
the same semiotic ideological principle (i.e., the individuated sincere
speaker). Likewise, anthropologists have put forward accounts of Christian
language practice that stand in sharp contrast with the sincere speaker
who aspires to transcend the material with her works (Coleman 2006,
Meyer 2010). While these are often shown to be different from other
Christian language-ideological formations, the sense of them as vying with
other co-present Christian formations is not what is foregrounded (for an
exception, see Bielo 2009b). It is as if the transcendent logic of logos is still
working in the background to estop fully thinking through Christian lan-
guage not as a single object, but as truly manifold, as divergent and diverg-
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ing ways of relating speech to concerns about the person, community, the
cosmos, etc.
Extension
That task of thinking through the heterogeneity of language use by self-
identified Christians, and asking how other linguistic ideological forms
challenge, complicate, or supplement the prototypical sincere speaker is
the project that the authors of this special section of AQ have taken up. In
some instances, the differences between competing language and semiotic
ideological stances are reflexively marked, mapping onto differing self-
identified Christian groups; and in others the strands are unmarked,
woven together such that their discordant characters lay occluded and
remain hypocognized. Furthermore, in some cases, the differentiation is
still in embryo, with the ethics and aesthetics of language very much in an
early and, perhaps, untimely stage of their self-articulation. In all cases,
though, the idea of language ideology as a generic concept is pressed
against the more specific normal science of a singular Christian language
ideology, transforming both categories in the process.Of the papers presented here, Eric Hoenes del Pinals contribution on
gesture ideologies is the one that owes the most direct debt to the lan-
guage ideology paradigm, and the one in which the schismogenetic pull
of two different approaches to semiosis have done the most to engender
different and mutually antithetical forms of Christian belonging. In exam-
ining how two groups of Catholics in a single parish in Guatemala create
and signal congregational difference, non-verbal communicative prac-
tices have become both a site for the production of difference and ameans for the enactment of formally opposed forms of piety, which are
nonetheless grounded on the same principles linking bodily discipline to
moral standing. Applying methodologies used to study communication as
a multi-modal phenomenon to his data (in particular those used to parse
gesture) alongside the theoretical framing of language ideologies, Hoenes
del Pinal identifies two gestural ideologies. The first, found among the
wide body of Mayan Catholic parishioners, is characterized by an empha-
sis on control, constraint, and respect. In contrast to this, the same
techniques identify a gestural ideology of spontaneity, effusiveness, and
joy among the nouveau Charismatic Catholics that have just started
establishing themselves in the parish. While the mainstream and
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Charismatic Catholic communities are separated from one another by the
gap between these two moral intuitions as to what constitutes proper reli-
gious comportment, Hoenes del Pinal also observes that these disparate
ideologies unite them as well since both ideologies presume a basic index-
ical relationship between forms of performed embodiment and personal
morality; and he suggests that it is this enveloping metapragamatic belief
that serves as the zero-degree of mutual comprehension necessary to give
intelligibility to their disputes in the first place.
Focusing on an American Evangelical study group, James Bielos essay
takes up the question of how ideologies of text and spoken language inter-
sect. At issue here are the ways that members of the study groups apply an
interpretive frame to key Biblical passages. In interpreting these passages
as possibly being promises made by God to human beings, the members of
this group invoke the sincere speaker model of Christianity. However, dif-
ferences arise when the speech ethic is turned into a hermeneutic as the
group members attempt to parse exactly which passages constitute this
kind of sincere speech within a larger wholethe divinely inspired
words of the Bible. In Bielos account, the discussion and debate about the
role of promises in the Bible, their implications for understanding thisancient text as a relevant source of guidelines for life in the contemporary
world, and the kind of theological thinking this implies show that there are
multiple ways to understand the sincere speaker. This, of course, becomes
a source of tension when one is dealing with the sincere speaker ne plus
ultra. Unlike the Mainstream/Charismatic opposition found by Hoenes del
Pinal, differentiation is not so much at the propositional level, since in
Bielos account both the Lutheran Mens Bible study group and their pros-
perity-gospel non-denom brother believe in the overall evidential valueof the Bible, and also that it consists of a series of promises from God.
What separates them are the thresholds at which an interpretation of
promise can be made, the frequency with which such threshold is
crossed, and the intensity with which such a characterization must be
maintained once it has been applied. In short, the issue is the differential
celerity with which these two sets of interpreters rush to their categorizing
conclusions and the tenacity with which a promise is held onto as singular
interpretation of a passage of text.
Contrasting with Hoenes del Pinal and Bielo is Courtney Handmans
article on of the question of the Hebrew roots of the Guhu-Samane of
Papua New Guinea. Whereas the previous two authors describe groups
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divided by a common Christian semiotic ideology (to paraphrase George
Bernard Shaw), Handman describes a moment when a community is
searching for a supplement to the dominant semiotic ideology that might
allow them to work through some of the antinomies that come with the
standard Christian language ideology. At first blush, the Guhu-Samane
seem to be perfect exemplars of the sincere speaker model, endorsing a
semiotic individualism to such a degree that one public figure claims that
proper Christian religiosity consists of denying ones entire ancestrya
move that can have detrimental ramifications in a place where kin ties are
the guarantors for property and exchange claims. Despite the legal utility
of kinship as a linguistically framed and endorsed mode of belonging, it
is often publicly rejected during revivals. This is because within the con-
fines of religious revival kinship serves to tie contemporary pious, saved
Christians to previous generations of cursed, sinful non-Christian ances-
tors. However, in the wake of this transvaluation of kinship wrought by
Christianity, there are also hesitant moments during which the Guhu-
Samane attempt to redeem kinship as a Christian category. By using an
indexical-iconic logic of abductive relationalityor semiotic hunting
and peckingsome Guhu-Samane search for signs that their ancestorshad some knowledge of Hebrew, finding tentative evidence for this in the
etymology of words and names, as well as in strange glyphs in the land-
scape. The hope is that this evidence might show that the Guhu-Samane,
who tradition holds migrated to this part of Papua from regions unknown,
are actually the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel. The attrac-
tion of this hypothesis to the Guhu-Samane is that this rescuing of kinship
would give them a socio-centric mode to think of their own potential for
participating in proper (might we hesitantly add global?) Christianity,and give them a way to deal with the numerous kin and denominational
differences that fracture their social landscape.
Jon Bialecki returns us to the United States to offer an account of the
language ideologies evidenced in spiritual practices (such as prophecy,
deliverance from demons, and speaking in tongues) of middle-class Neo-
Charismatic Southern Californians. Centering his article on an ethno-
graphic description of a visit by a prophet to a church home-group
which included both prophetic speech and a dramatic deliverance from
demons, Bialecki identifies two different ethics of language, which,
though they appear contradictory, are equally endorsed by these believ-
ers. One of these ethics of speech, which he terms centripetal, is iden-
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tifiable as the sincere speaker of Christian language ideology. The other
formation, which he calls centrifugal, differs from it in that it is the
alterity of the origins of the speech that gives it value. That is, it is speech
worthy of attention precisely because of the fact that it stems from a
source other than the present speaker, who is merely its animator (and
not its author [Goffman 1981]). Furthermore, it is the materiality of both
language and bodies that serves as the index and guarantor of the
authenticity of alien-originated centrifugal speech. As in Hoenes del
Pinals contribution, linguistic and bodily actions (although certainly ver y
different kinds of each) come to be understood as working in tandem to
give an evidential basis for religious actions. Despite the seeming orthog-
onal nature of these two different, yet interwoven ethics of speech,
Bialecki claims that, at least in this form of Christianity, they are organi-
cally related in so far as each answers a crisis in the other. Instances of
demonic attack and deliverances from it, like the one he vividly describes,
serve as a means of managing these semiotic crises and making both
ethics of speech effective in believers religious lives. Unlike the cases
described by Bielo and Hoenes del Pinal in which opposing understand-
ings of language serve to create difference, here the two vying languageideologies coexist entwined and unmarked.
Finally, in Matthew Engelkes contribution, we see an ethics of lan-
guage use as a nascent form struggling to be brought in to being as part
of a larger self-conscious project of religious revitalization. Engelkes
ethnographic object is the Greater Manchester campaign of the Bible
Society of England and Wales, an attempt by the organization to prove to
the wider secular community that the Bible is relevant to their lives. As
in Bielos paper, the issue for the ethnographic subjects is one of how tocreate a hermeneutic frame that links an ancient text artifact to contem-
porary social action. In Engelkes case, however, a receptive audience is
anything but guaranteed, and so in its campaign the Bible society deploys
an ambitious multi-media advertising blitz, consisting of innumerable
adverts, events, and even a contest with a monetary prize. The cam-
paign is a response to what the Bible Society feels is a crisis in the author-
ity of its message. As they see it, in secular England the regnant form of
Christian languageor rather, its popular stereotypehas lost the charge
of immediacy often associated with standard Christian language ideology
in other spaces (e.g., among Guhu-Samane). The historicity of Christian
language in general and the Bible in particular seems at once obvious and
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problematic to both Christians and non-Christians, and the Bible itself
now appears to index a previous era that, in the mind of many
Mancunians, has nothing to offer the present one. In an attempt to undo
this temporalization, the Bible Society appropriates the aesthetics of tex-
tual genre that have immediate relevance to 21st Century Mancunians
the tabloid-newspaper. As Engelke shows, this re-entextualization of the
Bible has, at best, mixed results. While the goal is to craft a message
infused by contemporary sensibilities, in trying to not appear to be
preaching to this audience, it ends up only conveying the Bibles coeval-
ness and not its moral force or eschatological vision. Furthermore, the
anxiety that a presentation of the Bible in fully secular drag might alien-
ate the Bible Society s fiscal supportersthe Anglican grammies whose
donations keep the Bible Society afloatleaves the campaign unrealized.
Here we have a Christian semiotic ideology with aspirations to transcend
the marked space to which it has been relegated in a late capitalist soci-
ety by attempting to recapture an effectiveness of its Christian origins, but
that possibility seems, at least in this case, to have slipped away.
Global Christianity(-ies)
In tandem, the five essays presented here struggle against any conception
of a singular Christian logos, highlighting the idea that language ideolo-
gies are plural and often in conflict with each other. These essays do not
reject the conception of the sincere speakerindeed, several are predi-
cated upon itbut they do show us how the overwhelming success of the
Christian sincere speaker model as an analytic has occluded the underly-
ing creativity and instability in Christian semiotic forms.7 Gestural, full ofintensities and thresholds, splintered into minor languages which con-
test one another as forces and which give rise to a stuttering in the dis-
junctive shuttling between them, full of subjunctive alternatives and
embryonic new directions (compare Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 1987;
Deleuze 1997; Lecercle 2002), Christian language ideology here comes off
as more than it was without losing that which it already had. What then
might this mean for anthropological thinking about Global Christianity?
Given this diversity of semiotic-ideological stances, it would be easy to
assume that there is no such thing as global Christianity, that one can at
most speak only of global Christianities, or perhaps even only of socio-
representational forms that are identified in some folk-categories as
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Christian. There are other ways of grasping these phenomena, however,
that avoid essentialism without dissolving the object into pure mist. The
sincere-speaker can be thought of as a response to a problem posited by
Christianityhow is it that one connects with an immaterial, invisible God
when one is subsumed in the material, visible world (Keane 2007, Engelke
2007)? The focus on the subjective, ideational, and transitory, in short the
immaterial features of material language, is one solution to this conun-
drum. As the papers in this section show, though, it is not the only answer
possible. Rather than seeing the plurality of responses as a reason to shut
down the pursuit of Christianity writ large as an object of anthropological
inquiry, the problem itself, including the multiplicity of solutions, could be
seen as the object. That is to say, in this line of thought, these recurrent
problemsor better yet, problematicsare Christianity in its virtual form
(see Deleuze 1994:168-221, Bialecki 2010), and the various semiotic cum
social/political assemblages we see in these ethnographic pieces are just
the various actualizations of this virtual Christianity as it interplays with
other forces extant in each of these throws of the dice, each of the contin-
gent but not wholly arbitrary socially and culturally shaped worlds in
which the term Christian is productive for people. The singular and theplural, Christianity and Christianties, are then both the proper voicings of
object for study for the anthropology of Christianity, and those taking up
this project should find ways to address both of these.
This may be going too far (or, in the eyes of some, not far enough) in lay-
ing out a larger project of sustained inquiry and discussion. It certainly
brings us to the limit of the concerns of this special section, but then com-
ing to the limits was the point of this project in the first place, taking the
idea of Christian language ideology to a place at which it would seem tohave been spent, where its utility as an explanatory model seems to sput-
ter out, and which invites readers to seek out other avenues along which
to proceed. While we have not transversed that limit, or possibly even
approached it asymptotically, the articles show that in the anthropology of
Christianity located underneath the normal science of language ideology
there are multiple other forms, forms rich and diverse enough to push the
study of Christian language ideology beyond logos.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
All but one of the papers in this special issue began as a panel session organized by theeditors and held at the 2007 Society for Anthropology Biannual Meeting in Phoenix,Arizona. We would like to thank Tanya Luhrmann, Joel Robbins, and Bambi Schiefflin,
who were also a part of that original panel. We also would like to thank Jordan Haugfor providing a bibliographic reference that was key in developing this introduction.
ENDNOTES1These aspects of logos should be distinguished from Philos account of non-cosmiclogoi, logos endiathetos (the internal logos), and logos prophorikos (the uttered logos),terms which were most likely taken from the Stoics (Kamesar 2004).2These Pauline similarities do not mean that there are not sharp differences betweenthese two authors. One can even intuit a Pauline rejection of aspects of a Philo-likeproto-gnostic spiritual anthropology of pure mind ascending away from the material(Siegert 2009:190).3We should note that there were also Christian accounts of logos, such as Origens, thatoperated more on a logic of immanence, dispersion, and difference (see Higgins 2010),but these readings of logos were rendered anathema by the Church.4It is at this point in the narrative, it is worth noting, that Mephistopheles, who hasbeen present in Fausts study in the guise of a black poodle, reveals himself as a Satanicpresence who is, unbeknownst to Faust, engaged in a wager with God to test the limitsof the doctors desire and will. Readers of this journal should not make too much ofthe fact that Mephistopheles takes on the form of a scholar as well.5The Bible would, of course, generally be exempted from this, although there are casesin which even it is deemed suspect for its fixity and brute materiality (see Engelke2007).6Though if one were to be made, it would most likely run through homologies madebetween logos and human language by Saint Augustine in The Holy Trinity.7And, therefore, this can be thought of as being in spirit with the call for an attentionto diversity in Christian forms of religiosity made in Cannell 2005.
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