Rev. John Kuder, superintendent of the Lutheran mission, teaches a man (identified only as a “police boy”) to read Tok Pisin during the Lae literacy conference in 1949. “Police boys” were adult laborers who worked for the colonial Papua New Guinea police force (Archives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, TALC 16.8.1. b5 f19). Courtesy of Dr. Courtney Handman.
by Chloe Landen
On September 20th, 2024, the Religious Studies Department at UT Austin kicked off the semester by hosting the UT’s own Dr. Courtney Handman. An Associate Professor of Anthropology and a faculty member of the Religious Studies Graduate Studies Committee, Handman is a linguistic anthropologist with a longstanding interest in the social formations of Protestantism, marginal language, communication, and translation, especially within the historical context of Papua New Guinea.
The focal point of September’s Colloquium was Handman’s 2023 article “Language at the Limits of the Human: Deceit, Invention, and the Specter of the Unshared Symbol.” In it, Handman seeks to investigate human language outside of its conventional notions and shared bounds, arguing that there are important histories in which unshared, invented, and deceitful language both constitute and illuminate humanness.
To build her argument, Handman delves into two case studies. The first explores the use of the language Tok Pisin (Pidgin), which was invented and utilized among indentured laborers in Papua New Guinea at the turn of the twentieth century to communicate in a way that was concealed from colonizing Lutheran missionaries. As Handman argues, it was only after the missionaries realized the inherent deception embedded within Tok Pisin that they began to understand the laborers as potential converts and thus consider their humanness. The second case examines two chatbots developed by Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) who eventually devolved into speaking a form of English that was unintelligible to humans. As Handman details, the result was a moment of cultural hysteria in 2017 where many feared the chatbots’ capability for conversational deceit. Such fears, she argues, implied that deceitful language was a source of power and potential humanness. Although the two cases differ drastically in contexts and, as she writes, convey “contrasting ends of humanness,” Handman compellingly demonstrates the relationship between the invention of deceitful language and perceived humanness.
The discussion of Handman’s article was led by the department’s third-year PhD students Aneeq Ejaz, Aditi Jain, Alexandra Nelson-Tomlinson, and Marina Schneider, who provided a helpful synopsis of the work, detailed its intervention, and proposed a series of stimulating questions. The conversation was then opened up to those in attendance, who generated a deeply fruitful discussion by bringing in their unique interests and expertise. Notably, the audience and Dr. Handman exchanged ideas that teased out differences between invented languages and shared symbols and meanings, probed why Catholics chose to missionize Tok Pisin-speaking laborers in Papua New Guinea before Lutherans, and discussed the concept of language as infrastructure. The conversation was so well-engaged it nearly ran overtime.
The first of many colloquia to follow, the conversation with Dr. Handman set the tone for a stimulating and rewarding 2024 fall semester. The department is grateful for Dr. Handman’s willingness to join us and converse about her research and looks forward to the generative dialogues to come.
Dr. Courtney Handman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and has been with the University since 2015. She has a forthcoming book titled Circulations: Modernist Imaginaries of Colonialism and Decolonization in Papua New Guinea, expected in 2025. Other notable publications include Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea (University of California Press, 2014).
Chloe Landen is a PhD student in the Religion of the Americas. Her work specializes in U.S. Protestantism within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with particular interests in the social gospel movement and religious nationalism, as well as the intersections of gender and race in constructing narratives of nationhood.
