Courtney Handman
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 72333 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Courtney Handman |
| PRENOMES | Courtney |
| SOBRENOME | Handman |
| ASSINATURA | HANDMAN C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0118-1045 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 118 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Making Persons out of Personas in Human–Chatbot Relationships (or, the Work of Hearts in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)
For the past decade, and especially since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, some people have started to have intimate relationships with chatbots, or what is called having an AI companion. But to have a relationship of this sort with a chatbot, it is necessary to engage in a slow process of eliciting an individual social person out of the default chatbot persona through the management of various kinds of texts. In this paper, I examine how people w…
Responding from the Vector Space
Animal translations
Amid the general sense of worry that large language models will soon drown out human voices, some researchers are optimistic that machine learning will allow humans to listen to and understand animal voices to an unprecedented extent. As part of a broader project aimed at interspecies communication, a loosely connected set of animal behaviourists, AI engineers, and public‐facing animal advocates are working to comprehend ‘animal languages’ and th…
The chatbot's real self
From the beginning of widespread public interactions with ChatGPT and other large language models, some users have seen the disfluencies of chatbots as opportunities for them to go on an archaeological search for an unfettered chatbot persona that they need to jailbreak. These are not claims of sentience, but rather of personhood. Moreover, they are part of a right‐leaning populist political project of defining speech that some find inflammatory,…
Circulations
Conclusion
Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared
Machines built out of other people's words
Afterword
Introduction to Special Issue 'Rethinking Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea
This article is an introduction to a special issue entitled 'Rethinking Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea'. This introduction suggests that we view 'decolonisation' or 'independence' not only as a historical period, but as an event that has been imagined by many people both during and after it occurred. Drawing on the work of Adom Getachew, we argue that it is fruitful to examine decolonisation in this extended sense. Doing so, this article argu…
Defying Predictions
Papua New Guinea's story of decolonisation has never meshed very well with standard visions of nationalist struggle. Focused exclusively on the coloniser and the colonised, these narratives ignore the role played by post-war global groups and organisations whose decolonial work has largely been forgotten. In this article, I examine the role of the United Nations Trusteeship Council in pushing Australia and Papua New Guinea towards decolonisation …
Language at the Limits of the Human
Both the theories coming out of the linguistic turn and those running away from it have placed special emphasis on human language (or human symbolic thinking) as a matter of convention and shared meanings. Yet there are other histories that link language and humanness through invention, deceit, and secrecy rather than through convention and publicness. These alternate models have been used as diagnostic of humanness in a range of contexts, from t…
Pacific Futures
The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as ‘custom’, has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization. Pacific Futures …
Christian Politics in Oceania
The phrase “Christian politics” evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Van…
Book forum on Joel Robbins’ Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life
Pidgin and Pidginization
Pidgin languages are grammatically and lexically restricted languages used in limited domains in which much of the lexical and some of the grammatical material is derived from a language spoken by a socially dominant group of speakers (what is called a lexifier, or superstratal, language). Pidginization refers to the process of simplification and reduction of a superstratal language from which a stable pidgin language emerges. Pidgins have most c…
Language and Religion
This volume draws on an interdisciplinary team of authors to advance the study of the religious dimensions of communication and the linguistic aspects of religion. Contributions cover: poetry, iconicity, and iconoclasm in religious language; semiotic ideologies in traditional religions and in secularism; and the role of materiality and writing in religious communication. This volume will provoke new approaches to language and religion.
The Spatiotemporal Transformations of Lutheran Airplanes
Lutheran missionaries in pre–World War II colonial New Guinea transformed their mission when they became the first group to use “aviation for souls.” Transformations in modes of circulation (from muddy, dark paths through dense rainforests into fast, sun-filled flights above a mountainous landscape) depended upon the discursive organization of a set of different space-times—to use Nancy Munn’s term—so as to properly sacralize a mode of transporta…
A Few Grass Huts
In this article, I analyze the dynamics of Protestants’ ambivalence about their own institutional existence in the context of inter-denominational fighting between Lutheran and Catholic missions in colonial New Guinea. I argue that denominational conflict became a crucial part of the Lutheran missiological method. In particular, it gave them the chance to embrace their Lutheran infrastructure by comparing what they thought of as its life-giving c…
Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality
Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality: The Difference Denominations Make in Global Christianity Courtney Handman and Minna Opas Introduction Scholars working in the anthropology of Christianity have focused in large part on the subject in Protestantism, emphasizing the ways in which the modern subject is a Christian subject (Robbins 2004, 2007; Keane 2007; Meyer 1999; Elisha 2011; O’Neill 2010). This follows a wider trend in the …
Critical failures
Critique in evangelical Christian contexts has usually been seen as a practice in service of finding the universal. However, I examine a number of contexts in which Christian critique seems to produce serial difference. I suggest that this seriality may itself be seen as a basis on which possibility and alternatives can be found, rather than just as serial failures to reach the universal. I briefly compare different events of serial transformatio…
The Language of Evangelism
This article provides an overview of recent scholarship on the language of evangelism and missionization within the anthropology of Christianity. Attention to Christian evangelism and forms of circulation was minimized as scholars worked to distinguish the study of Christianity from the study of colonialism, often treating missionaries and missionization as a prologue to a more central analysis of transformation organized through local people and…
Languages without subjects
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 …
Walking like a Christian
Homologies between so-called soft infrastructures like language and hard ones like roads depend on ethnographically variable metaphors of circulation. In these homologies, speakers understand language to propel or inhibit forms of physical movement, affecting the embodied experiences of transportation or locomotion. In the case of Guhu-Samane Christians in Papua New Guinea, people focus on language as a kind of infrastructure as they grapple with…
Preparing a Nation?
In The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), Albert Memmi argued that colonial rule is defined by the conflict between the colonizer’s demand for the “development” of the coloni...
The Limits of Meaning
Events of Translation
Translation has long been a part of anthropology, and recently analysts have focused on the politics, poetics, and ethics of translations that account for much of the global flow of discourses. This literature can be thought of as histories of how translators forge denotational links between source and target texts and how communities engage with the texts that result. Here, however, I want to highlight a different mode of translation in which co…
Becoming the Body of Christ
In this paper I argue for the important role of churches and denominations in anthropological analyses of Protestant Christianity. While many authors have emphasized subjects and subjectivity in their discussions of Protestant individualism, I argue that Protestant individualism puts greater, not less, emphasis on Christian social groups as moral formations. Denominationalism cannot be reduced to the intrusion of politics into religious practice …
Walking like a Christian
Homologies between so-called soft infrastructures like language and hard ones like roads depend on ethnographically variable metaphors of circulation. In these homologies, speakers understand language to propel or inhibit forms of physical movement, affecting the embodied experiences of transportation or locomotion. In the case of Guhu-Samane Christians in Papua New Guinea, people focus on language as a kind of infrastructure as they grapple with…
The Language of Evangelism
This article provides an overview of recent scholarship on the language of evangelism and missionization within the anthropology of Christianity. Attention to Christian evangelism and forms of circulation was minimized as scholars worked to distinguish the study of Christianity from the study of colonialism, often treating missionaries and missionization as a prologue to a more central analysis of transformation organized through local people and…
Israelite Genealogies and Christian Commitment
Language ideological work on Protestantism has largely focused on how people engage in an intimate, immediate, and individualistic relationship with God, and the answer has been that they do so by sweeping away the debris-the history, the social relations, the sins, and the language-that keeps God at a distance. However, this focus has neglected the extent to which other Christian social formations play crucial roles in how Christians conceptuali…
Language at the Limits of the Human
Both the theories coming out of the linguistic turn and those running away from it have placed special emphasis on human language (or human symbolic thinking) as a matter of convention and shared meanings. Yet there are other histories that link language and humanness through invention, deceit, and secrecy rather than through convention and publicness. These alternate models have been used as diagnostic of humanness in a range of contexts, from t…
The Spatiotemporal Transformations of Lutheran Airplanes
Lutheran missionaries in pre–World War II colonial New Guinea transformed their mission when they became the first group to use “aviation for souls.” Transformations in modes of circulation (from muddy, dark paths through dense rainforests into fast, sun-filled flights above a mountainous landscape) depended upon the discursive organization of a set of different space-times—to use Nancy Munn’s term—so as to properly sacralize a mode of transporta…
A Few Grass Huts
In this article, I analyze the dynamics of Protestants’ ambivalence about their own institutional existence in the context of inter-denominational fighting between Lutheran and Catholic missions in colonial New Guinea. I argue that denominational conflict became a crucial part of the Lutheran missiological method. In particular, it gave them the chance to embrace their Lutheran infrastructure by comparing what they thought of as its life-giving c…
Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality
Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality: The Difference Denominations Make in Global Christianity Courtney Handman and Minna Opas Introduction Scholars working in the anthropology of Christianity have focused in large part on the subject in Protestantism, emphasizing the ways in which the modern subject is a Christian subject (Robbins 2004, 2007; Keane 2007; Meyer 1999; Elisha 2011; O’Neill 2010). This follows a wider trend in the …
Languages without subjects
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 …
Figures of history
This article examines two competing historical formations that expatriate missionaries and Papua New Guineans respectively have used to create connections between local ethnic groups and "the ancient Jews" of the Bible. In part through 1970s publications analyzed here, missionaries introduced redemptive and repetitive historicist models that established Melanesian ethnic groups as generically and iconically Jewish. The article then examines the w…
Language ideologies, endangered-language linguistics, and Christianization
Language ideologies generally refer to the kinds of cultural assumptions or beliefs that speakers hold about their OWN language: its relation to the world, its relation to their sense of self, its relation to other languages, and so forth (Silverstein 1979, Woolard 1998). But in the kinds of cross-cultural contact situations that linguists, anthropologists, missionaries, or other Christian aid workers often find themselves, language ideologies ab…
Machines built out of other people's words
Christian Moderns
Language ideologies, endangered-language linguistics, and Christianization
Language ideologies generally refer to the kinds of cultural assumptions or beliefs that speakers hold about their OWN language: its relation to the world, its relation to their sense of self, its relation to other languages, and so forth (Silverstein 1979, Woolard 1998). But in the kinds of cross-cultural contact situations that linguists, anthropologists, missionaries, or other Christian aid workers often find themselves, language ideologies ab…
Events of Translation
Translation has long been a part of anthropology, and recently analysts have focused on the politics, poetics, and ethics of translations that account for much of the global flow of discourses. This literature can be thought of as histories of how translators forge denotational links between source and target texts and how communities engage with the texts that result. Here, however, I want to highlight a different mode of translation in which co…
Mary, the Devil, and Taro
Israelite Genealogies and Christian Commitment
Language ideological work on Protestantism has largely focused on how people engage in an intimate, immediate, and individualistic relationship with God, and the answer has been that they do so by sweeping away the debris-the history, the social relations, the sins, and the language-that keeps God at a distance. However, this focus has neglected the extent to which other Christian social formations play crucial roles in how Christians conceptuali…
Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands
Reviewed by: Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: Studies in Form, Meaning, and Sociocultural Context ed. by Alan Rumsey, Don Niles Courtney Handman Sung Tales from the Papua New Guinea Highlands: Studies in Form, Meaning, and Sociocultural Context. Edited by Alan Rumsey and Don Niles. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 330. $24.95 (paper). Although the highlands of Papua New Guinea only became the subject of anthropological resear…
Words upon the Word
Critical Christianity
"In Critical Christianity, Courtney Handman analyzes the complex and conflicting forms of sociality that Guhu-Samane Christians of rural Papua New Guinea privilege and celebrate as 'the body of Christ.' Within Guhu-Samane churches, processes of denominational schism--long relegated to the secular study of politics or identity--are moments of critique through which Christians constitute themselves and their social worlds. Far from being a practice…
Becoming the Body of Christ
In this paper I argue for the important role of churches and denominations in anthropological analyses of Protestant Christianity. While many authors have emphasized subjects and subjectivity in their discussions of Protestant individualism, I argue that Protestant individualism puts greater, not less, emphasis on Christian social groups as moral formations. Denominationalism cannot be reduced to the intrusion of politics into religious practice …
Figures of history
This article examines two competing historical formations that expatriate missionaries and Papua New Guineans respectively have used to create connections between local ethnic groups and "the ancient Jews" of the Bible. In part through 1970s publications analyzed here, missionaries introduced redemptive and repetitive historicist models that established Melanesian ethnic groups as generically and iconically Jewish. The article then examines the w…
Languages without subjects
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 …
Walking like a Christian
Homologies between so-called soft infrastructures like language and hard ones like roads depend on ethnographically variable metaphors of circulation. In these homologies, speakers understand language to propel or inhibit forms of physical movement, affecting the embodied experiences of transportation or locomotion. In the case of Guhu-Samane Christians in Papua New Guinea, people focus on language as a kind of infrastructure as they grapple with…
Critical failures
Critique in evangelical Christian contexts has usually been seen as a practice in service of finding the universal. However, I examine a number of contexts in which Christian critique seems to produce serial difference. I suggest that this seriality may itself be seen as a basis on which possibility and alternatives can be found, rather than just as serial failures to reach the universal. I briefly compare different events of serial transformatio…
The Language of Evangelism
This article provides an overview of recent scholarship on the language of evangelism and missionization within the anthropology of Christianity. Attention to Christian evangelism and forms of circulation was minimized as scholars worked to distinguish the study of Christianity from the study of colonialism, often treating missionaries and missionization as a prologue to a more central analysis of transformation organized through local people and…
Language and Religion
This volume draws on an interdisciplinary team of authors to advance the study of the religious dimensions of communication and the linguistic aspects of religion. Contributions cover: poetry, iconicity, and iconoclasm in religious language; semiotic ideologies in traditional religions and in secularism; and the role of materiality and writing in religious communication. This volume will provoke new approaches to language and religion.
The Spatiotemporal Transformations of Lutheran Airplanes
Lutheran missionaries in pre–World War II colonial New Guinea transformed their mission when they became the first group to use “aviation for souls.” Transformations in modes of circulation (from muddy, dark paths through dense rainforests into fast, sun-filled flights above a mountainous landscape) depended upon the discursive organization of a set of different space-times—to use Nancy Munn’s term—so as to properly sacralize a mode of transporta…
A Few Grass Huts
In this article, I analyze the dynamics of Protestants’ ambivalence about their own institutional existence in the context of inter-denominational fighting between Lutheran and Catholic missions in colonial New Guinea. I argue that denominational conflict became a crucial part of the Lutheran missiological method. In particular, it gave them the chance to embrace their Lutheran infrastructure by comparing what they thought of as its life-giving c…
Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality
Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality: The Difference Denominations Make in Global Christianity Courtney Handman and Minna Opas Introduction Scholars working in the anthropology of Christianity have focused in large part on the subject in Protestantism, emphasizing the ways in which the modern subject is a Christian subject (Robbins 2004, 2007; Keane 2007; Meyer 1999; Elisha 2011; O’Neill 2010). This follows a wider trend in the …
Pidgin and Pidginization
Pidgin languages are grammatically and lexically restricted languages used in limited domains in which much of the lexical and some of the grammatical material is derived from a language spoken by a socially dominant group of speakers (what is called a lexifier, or superstratal, language). Pidginization refers to the process of simplification and reduction of a superstratal language from which a stable pidgin language emerges. Pidgins have most c…
Pacific Futures
The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as ‘custom’, has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization. Pacific Futures …
Christian Politics in Oceania
The phrase “Christian politics” evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Van…
Book forum on Joel Robbins’ Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life
Language at the Limits of the Human
Both the theories coming out of the linguistic turn and those running away from it have placed special emphasis on human language (or human symbolic thinking) as a matter of convention and shared meanings. Yet there are other histories that link language and humanness through invention, deceit, and secrecy rather than through convention and publicness. These alternate models have been used as diagnostic of humanness in a range of contexts, from t…
Preparing a Nation?
In The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), Albert Memmi argued that colonial rule is defined by the conflict between the colonizer’s demand for the “development” of the coloni...
The Limits of Meaning
Sociology (20 obras) · Philosophy (17 obras) · History (15 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (14 obras) · Anthropology (11 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Political science (11 obras) · History (9 obras) · New guinea (9 obras) · Ethnology (8 obras)