Modernity, lang, and prayer

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God Is Nothing but Talk: Modernity, Language, and Prayer in a Papua New Guinea SocietyAuthor(s): Joel RobbinsSource: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Dec., 2001), pp. 901-912Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684120 .Accessed: 15/03/2011 11:59

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JOEL ROBBINS

University of California, San DiegoLa Jolla, CA 92093-0532

God Is Nothing but Talk:Modernity, Language, and Prayer in a Papua New Guinea Society

This article brings together theories of local modernity and of linguistic ideology to analyze the way the Urapmin of PapuaNew Guinea have encountered modern linguistic ideology through their Christianization. Against the prevailing anthropo-logical focus on the indigenization of modernity, this article argues the importance of attending to cases in which peoplegrasp the content of modernity on its own terms. Studying this kind of local modernity allows us to model an importantkind of contemporary cultural change and discover neglected aspects of modernity as refracted through the experiences ofpeople new to it. Here, an analysis of the Urapmin encounter with modern linguistic ideology reveals that ideology's root-edness in a model that ties meaning to intention and truthfulness and favors the speaker over the listener in the constructionof meaning. It is suggested that an awareness of the biases of this ideology can open up new topics in linguistic anthropol-ogy. [modernity, linguistic ideology, religion, Christianity, Melanesia]

on local or indigenous modernities and that con-cerned with linguistic ideology. In doing so, it aims

not only to forge a link between them but also to make con-tributions to both bodies of work. On the linguistic side, itbegins by supporting the claim that there is such a thing asa particularly modern linguistic ideology. The recognitionthat this is so has already led some linguistic anthropolo-gists to engage in a productive critique of the way the al-most exclusive emphasis on the referential function of lan-

guage in modem linguistic ideology leads many linguiststo disregard its pragmatic function (Silverstein 1976 is aclassic early statement of this position). Taking my impe-tus from the success of this critical move, I want to suggesthere that attention to the ways nonmodern people engagewith modern linguistic ideology can reveal other of its as-pects that continue to haunt our understanding of language.In particular, I want to use evidence from a study of theway one Papua New Guinea society has encountered someaspects of modern linguistic ideology to indicate the extentto which linguistic theory takes for granted certain as-sumptions about the relation of intention to meaning, thenature of

speaking subjects,and the relative

importanceof

speakers over listeners in the process of semiosis.But given that I want to argue both that there is such a

thing as a modem linguistic ideology and that nonmodemrnpeople can in some meaningful way engage it, I need to be-gin by clearing a path for myself through the rapidly thick-ening tangle of work on local modernities. The extent towhich the debates surrounding this subject remain unset-tled is evidenced by the adjectival instability that marks

them, giving us modernities that are not only local but alsoindigenous, alternative, vernacular, multiple, at large,global, and so on (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Eisenstadt 2000;Featherstone et al. 1995; Gaonkar 1999). Tacking back andforth between claims of convergence and divergence, ho-mogenization and differentiation, those taking up positionsin these debates all struggle to find ways to theorize pro-ductively the relation between the two polar processes ofthe modern encompassing the indigenous and the indige-nous encompassing the modern.

For anthropologists, the problem of comprehending therelation between these two processes is compounded bythe need not only to get things right in theory but also to doso in a way that is productive of and backed up by goodethnographic work. In practice, this has often meant listingtoward the divergence side of things and seeing indi-genized modernities as very much like indigenous culturesin general in terms of their plurality and local specification.No matter what modernity is to begin with, the argumentthat supports this practice goes, once cooked in the heat oflocal fires it will have lost its shape to a significant extentand become something indigenous and distinctive, ahomemade

productof the kind

anthropologists have longstudied. In this practice, keeping things culturally local im-plicitly becomes the only way of keeping them ethnog-raphically real.

While my own inclinations also tend in this indigenizingdirection, I want to register a worry about a corollary thatmight be drawn from our anthropological emphasis on thepowers of the local to encompass the modern. This corol-lary asserts that when local cultures cut modernity to fit

American Anthropologist 103(4):901-912. Copyright ? 2001, American Anthropological Association


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902 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 103, No. 4 * DECEMBER2001

their own dimensions, they can make it assume almost anyform they like. An argument based on this corollary figuresprominently in a recent article by Englund and Leach(2000). In that article, the authors chastise anthropologistsfor subscribing to a version of the convergence thesis thatholds that modernity everywhere introduces the same

kinds of ruptures in ideas about production, exchange, andpersonhood. In response, they present analyses from PapuaNew Guinea and Africa that suggest that in fact people areable to fit what they know of modernity quite comfortablyinto the categories of their traditional cultures.' Thus in thePapua New Guinea case, Europeans turn out to be nothingmore than an avatar of traditional types of potentially pro-ductive "others" like affines and the dead (Englund andLeach 2000:231-232). Similarly, Malawian Pentecostalswhose lives are guided by the Holy Spirit are really no dif-ferent than traditional healers whose personhood was alsoa composite of "spiritual and human agencies" (Englundand Leach 2000:235). In these two cases of local moder-nity, nothing much has changed from what went before.And this is as true for the anthropologists as it is for thepeople being discussed, for the authors analyze their ethno-graphic materials exclusively in terms that could have beenapplied to them before anyone would even have beentempted to call them modem.

It is not that I do not believe that it is possible for thingsto go the way Englund and Leach describe them (thoughwhat I know about some people in Papua New Guinea andabout many Pentecostals leads me to doubt that they havethese cases quite right-see Robbins 2000). It is undoubt-edly true that people who encounter elements of a foreign

culture can make them do and mean things they never didor meant in their original environment. The ubiquitous im-age of the Papua New Guinean Highland sartorial bri-coleur decked out in updated traditional style with old tincan lids for ornaments and a ballpoint pen in his piercedseptum has been making this point for decades in both aca-demic and popular circles. The problem is that if we wantthe notion of local modernities to mean anything more thanwhat is meant by the notion that different people have dif-ferent cultures, then we cannot treat the processes of local-ization that produce them as simple analogues of the onethat produces the decoration of this Highlands warrior. In-stead, we will have to admit that modernity has some con-

tent-more content in fact than a tin can lid or a ballpointpen-and that people who would adopt it must reckon withthis content. They will of course reckon with it in their ownways, come to it with their own background under-standings and so on, but to really wrestle with modernity isto give this content some play.

What, then, is the content of modernity? Although itwould be impossible to split the modern atom in the spaceavailable here, even were I able to do so, I do want to trybriefly to characterize modernity's content in an anthropo-logically useful way. As I see it, modernity is a set of con-

ceptions and the institutions and practices they give onto. Itis, in short, a culture, and it has the kinds of contents othercultures have. This may sound like an unremarkable claim,but as Wittrock (2000) has recently pointed out, social sci-entists frequently fail to hold to it. Instead, they treat mod-ernity as a set of institutions-in particular those of the

market, of democratic governance, and of science-and ig-nore the cultural ideas that create those institutions andgive them sense. For Wittrock, a sole focus on institutionsis a mistake not just because of the anthropological com-monplace that institutions only exist within cultures butalso because a strictly institutional definition leads on tothe rather perverse argument that most Western societieshave never been modem (though in a different sense thanthat discussed by Latour [1993]) or have only been so inthe very recent past. From an anthropological point ofview, the habit of giving institutional acid tests of moder-nity is problematic for a different reason as well: the factthat it renders so many Third and Fourth World people ab-solutely nonmodem. Either one gets steamrolled by the in-stitutional juggernaut, as the most extreme convergencetheorists imagine one must, or one is not in the game at all.Anthropologists who have worked on the modernizing pe-riphery of the global market can agree with Wittrock thatthis set of choices presented to us by the institutional ap-proach to modernity is a bad one.

Having dispensed with institutional definitions of mod-ernity, Wittrock offers in their place a cultural definitionthat figures modernity as a set of what he calls "promissorynotes." These notes point to the possibility of creating"new assumptions about human beings, their rights and

agency" (Wittrock 2000:37).To be

modem,it is

enoughmerely to hold the promissory notes, to feel that one has aright to what they promise, and to struggle to redeem themthrough institutional experimentation with new kinds ofexchange, of polity, and of knowledge seeking. If we pro-visionally define modernity culturally in terms of promiseand struggle in this way, and not in terms of finished insti-tutions, we can see (1) that many local modems are canoni-cally modem in this sense, for they definitely hold someversions of these notes and work to redeem them, and (2)that modernity can be localized in an enormous variety ofways without completely losing its character as a sense ofentitlement to a future in which these domains take differ-

ent forms than they do in the present.Having in this way characterized modernity as a culture,

my argument is that the people we would want to call localmodemrnsmust at some point engage it in these terms-as aset of linked promises-and not as a jumble of disparate,unrelated elements that in their isolation yield withoutstruggle to attempts to contain them within old under-standings. I am not sure how often such engagements comeabout, and the mechanisms that bring them into being re-quire further study (cf. Sahlins 1992; Robbins n.d.). Yet,regardless of how often these engagements come about or


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ROBBINS / MODERNITY, LANGUAGE, AND PRAYER 903

what mechanisms drive them, the broader point of my ar-gument is that it is only when they do happen that weshould speak not of local, or indigenous, or alternative cul-tures but of local, or indigenous, or alternative modernities.What I want to demonstrate in this article is, among otherthings, that the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea present acase of local

modernityin

justthis sense.

For the Urapmin, the struggle with modernity has in im-portant respects been a struggle with modem ideas aboutlanguage.2 Among the promissory notes that they hold,some of the most important offer them the possibility ofbecoming new kinds of linguistic subjects. That the Urap-min focus on language in this way probably follows tosome extent from the obvious fact that language is funda-mental to social life and so also to any effort, modem orotherwise, at its reconstruction. Different kinds of futuresrequire different kinds of linguistic possibilities. But in theUrapmin case, a preoccupation with language also followsfrom the fact that the Urapmin encounter modernity with

an elaborate and very different indigenous linguistic ideol-ogy already in hand. Language is one area where their in-digenous ideas fail to mesh at all well with the modemrnones they are trying to take up. This gives their struggle alocal cast-both in relation to the fact that it unfolds tosuch a great extent on linguistic grounds and in the direc-tions it ultimately takes-and it allows an analysis of thisstruggle to exemplify what can be accomplished throughthe study of local modernities in the terms I have laid outhere.

From Ritual to Speech in Modern Urapmin

The 375 people who constitute the Urapmin communitylive in the Mountain Ok region of the far Western High-lands of Papua New Guinea. Within the literature on peo-ple who have remained relatively "remote" subsistencegardeners even in this era of globalization, the Urapminstand out for the vehemence with which they have rejectedwhat they see as their traditions (alowal imi kukup, "waysof the ancestors")3 and have embraced instead a set ofmodem promises of fundamental future change. Thesepromises are to some extent shaped by ideas drawn fromdevelopmentalist and state political rhetoric, but the Urap-min understand them primarily in the terms of Protestant

Christianity, and it is the religious aspect of these promisesthat will be my focus here.The story of how the Urapmin came to encounter mod-

ernity in its Christian guise is not quite the expected one ofmissionary imposition, for the Urapmin were never di-rectly missionized by Westerners. In the 1960s and 1970s,however, quite a few young Urapmin men and a fewyoung women left home to study with Australian andPapua New Guinean Baptist missionaries living amongtheir neighbors. These young people brought Christianityback to Urapmin and set up local schools to teach it to

those who had stayed at home. These efforts resulted infew conversions, but they did create a community that wasfamiliar with many of the basic tenets of Christianity. Thisfamiliarity provided the background for what the Urapmincall the rebaibal (revival), a charismatic Christian move-ment that spread through the Highlands of Papua NewGuinea in the late

1970s. The rebaibal reached the Urap-min in 1977, and within a year it had led all of them to con-vert and to discard the bones (kun) and other relics thatwere at the center of their traditional religion.

From the point of view adopted here, one can say that itwas during the early days of the revival that the Urapminbegan to put the various pieces of Christian knowledgethey had gained together into a larger picture of Christian-ity's content as a culture. Many people's testimonies fromthe revival period dwell on the experience of a gestalt fi-nally snapping into place: "suddenly I understood the Bi-ble, I was not just looking at words on the page," "I knewthat God was real and that I was a sinner," and so on. Oncethe Christian picture came into focus in this way, peoplegave up any self-conscious attempt to work Christianityinto the frames of their traditional understandings. Withvery few exceptions, Urapmin today are strikingly uninter-ested in the possibility of syncretizing Christian and tradi-tional ideas. Instead, their goal since the time of rebaibalhas been to rework their lives in what they understand to besolely Christian terms.4

People's attempts to Christianize their lives have re-sulted over the last 20 years in a riot of institutional creativ-ity that has given contemporary Urapmin life its shape.Many of these new institutions do not look canonicallymodem-group spirit possession, Holy Spirit medium-ship, regular formal confession, and a constant resort toprayer in almost all situations, for example, all look almostantimodem from a Western point of view. But in Urapminthey are all deeply informed by modem promises of per-sonal and social transformation. This is nowhere more ob-vious than in the ideas that mark Urapmin understandingsof the transformative promise of the modem linguistic ide-ology that is central to Protestant Christianity and in thenew linguistic institution of Christian prayer (Tok Pisin:beten) to which these understandings have given rise.

One of the most striking features of contemporary Urap-

min life is the frequency with which and the diversity ofcontexts in which people pray (beten) to the Christian God.Urapmin minimally begin and end their days with prayer,and most people will pray many more times during theday. Urapmin pray alone and in groups, in the village, andin the bush. They pray for health, hunting success, and gar-den fertility; for protection against events foreseen in baddreams (lumti mafak); for the relief of anger and other sin-ful feelings (aget tem mafak); to bless meals eaten withthose beyond the household; to give their sins to God; and,of course, simply to offer "praise" to God (Tok Pisin:


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amamasim Gat). Even this list is not exhaustive, however,for beyond their standard openings and closings there is nofixed content of Urapmin prayer (see below), and peopleare constantly innovating prayers in situations that makethem feel the least bit anxious in either positive or negativeterms. This flexibility has allowed prayer to become some-

thing akin to the punctuation of Urapmin social life, and itis now the most routine part of their religious practice.The ubiquity and importance of prayer in contemporary

Urapmin life have to be understood in relation to the wayProtestant Christianity handles speech more generally.With its rejection of formal ritual, Protestantism is prone toappear as a religion that is fundamentally, one might sayalmost exclusively, constituted through language. Such atleast is the way it appears to the Urapmin. Urapmin make arigid distinction between speech (weng) and action (kemin).For reasons that will be apparent later, they generally valueaction over speech, and thus they are rarely inclined to at-tenuate the division between these two phenomena byclassifying kinds of speech as kinds of action. Althoughtheir efforts to keep this distinction sharp sit uncomfortablyalongside our own relatively recent scholarly triumphagainst a similar distinction in the Western tradition (e.g.,Austin [1975] and the wide range of scholars his work hasinfluenced), we need to keep the Urapmin commitment toit firmly in place in what follows.

The Urapmin classify ritual activities as kinds of action.In fact, for reasons I will allude to later, they understand rit-ual to be the most fundamental form of action, the proto-type of the category. To be sure, some of their traditionalrituals involved a good deal of speech, but this speech,when it was not the recitation of sacred names or

spells,was held to be mendacious and largely beside the point.Urapmin religion, like that of other Mountain Ok groups,was centered around elaborate, multistage men's initia-tions (ban) (Barth 1975 and Jorgensen 1981 offer detailedaccounts of these initiations). At each stage, initiatorswould offer verbal revelations of secret knowledge (wengawem) that were proven false (famoul) at the next stage,only to be replaced by further revelations that would in turnbe proven false in the future. Men all remember that one ofthe primary things these initiations taught them was thatwhat was said in them was not trustworthy. The thingsdone in the ritual-the beatings administered, the manipu-lations of bones and vegetable and animal substances-were important, but the words spoken for the most partwere not. Some early stage initiates might believe that theolder men knew things that made their speech trustworthy,but as men became initiators themselves they learned thatbecause too much knowledge had gone to the grave withold men of the past who refused to share it, the search forverbal truth was in vain. In the end, they came to doubt thevalue of pretty much all that was said in ritual contexts.What was important about ritual then was its quality as ac-tion, not the speech it contained. Women were largely

barred from this ritual sphere, but initiators misled themverbally as well about the content of these rites, and, thus,adult women came to share with men a general distrust ofritual speech.

As I will discuss in detail below, the Urapmin distrust ofritual speech is only one expression of a very general skep-

ticism toward the reliability of the spoken word." Giventheir skepticism toward spoken language in both ritual andeveryday contexts, it is a matter of some moment for theUrapmin that they see Christianity as having transformedtheir religious life by replacing most occasions of religiousaction with ones of religious speech. The church servicesthe Urapmin often hold twice daily, for example, are con-structed primarily out of talk. The same is true for theirconfession rites (Tok Pisin: autim sin), the moral harangues(weng kem) that provide the most public face of theirChristian life outside of church, the prayer healing ceremo-nies that go on in people's houses, and the inner speech ofprivate self-examination that all Urapmin adults claim is a

crucial part of their Christian lives. Where ritual was,Urapmin Christianity seems to say, there speech shall be.

As if this wholesale replacement of ritual action withspeech was not troublesome enough from an Urapmin per-spective, the problems it raises are compounded by the factthat much of this Christian talk is talk about talk. Urapminreligious discourse is peppered with reports of divinespeech drawn from the Bible. Sermons and other religiousdiscussions return with numbing constancy to refrains of"that is what He [God] said," "That is what Jesus said," or"That is what it [the Bible] says." This ceaseless relianceon reported speech is grounded in the very definition of theChristian life as the

Urapminunderstand it. For to be a

Christian consists in "listening" to "God's talk" (Gat amiweng) so that one can "hear," "follow," and "obey" it (allglosses on "to listen," weng senkamin). Thus the Christianlife, when it does not consist in talking to God in prayer,very often consists in talking about what God has said sothat it can be heard and followed. In Christianity, then, talkfollows talk and charters talk that produces more talk. Thistight circuit leaves little room for the kind of ritual action-initiation, sacrifice, taboo observance, and so on-that wasso important to traditional Urapmin religious practice.

As much as they are committed to Christianity, manyUrapmin struggle with its reliance on speech rather than

ritual action. One could illustrate this point by consideringthe debates people sometimes have over the propriety ofthe rituals they have had trouble giving up-pig sacrificeand bridewealth exchange, for example-but in keepingwith my theme here I want to turn instead to a striking ver-bal expression of people's disquiet over Christianity'scommitment to speech. This expression took the form of aclich6 that I sometimes heard in church services and severaltimes discussed with pastors who used it spontaneously intalking to me. The clich6 has it that "God is nothing buttalk" (Gat ka weng katagup; Tok Pisin: Gat em i tok tasol).


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ROBBINs / MODERNITY, LANGUAGE, AND PRAYER 905

The phrase weng katagup, "nothing but talk" (Tok Pisin:tok tasol), is a common one in Urapmin speech. In my ex-perience it generally has strongly derogatory connotations.To say something is only talk in Urap, much as in English,is to dismiss it as unlikely to transpire. The consistentlynegative connotations the phrase carries renders anoma-

lousits use

bycommitted Christians to characterize the

Christian God. Thus when I first heard people say "God isnothing but talk," it piqued my interest. I thought that itmight represent some sort of critical tear in the apparentlyseamless fabric of Urapmin piety. Yet I was never able toget very far with this interpretation of it. When I asked pas-tors what they meant by it, they always referred me to thefirst verse of John's gospel. Translated from the Tok Pisinversion the Urapmin use, this verse reads "Long ago Talkexisted. Talk existed alongside God. And Talk itself wasGod" (N.B. Talk is capitalized throughout) (Anonymous1978:166).6 Its worth noting at the outset that none of thisquite amounts to saying that God is nothing but talk. But

even had the verse contained this phrase, problems of in-terpretation would have remained, for glosses on the verseitself were extremely hard to come by. People generallyclaimed to find it one of the more cryptic passages in theBible. This left my attempts to garner a rich interpretationof the phrase "God is nothing but talk" stalled in an exe-getical cul-de-sac.

It now seems to me that this phrase is important to theUrapmin despite its seeming evaluative incoherence be-cause it said something true about Christianity-that it is areligion of talk-while at the same time its derogatoryovertones, however suppressed, indexed problems many

Urapmin peoplehave with the Christian

promotionof

speech to the center of religious life. It was, in short, overprecisely the issues this phrase pointed to, ones of how topositively value speech and understand its importance inChristianity, that people in Urapmin were struggling moststrenuously with modem linguistic ideology in the relig-ious guise in which it had entered their lives.

Christianity, Modern Linguistic Ideology,and Prayer

Many of the ways Protestantism has been historicallyentangled with the content of modernity are well known,

but its relationship to modem linguistic ideology has notbeen widely examined. Before considering the Urapminencounter with the Protestant version of linguistic moder-nity, then, it will be helpful to have a brief account of mod-em linguistic ideology more generally. At the heart of thislinguistic ideology is a tight coupling of intention andmeaning that is grounded in the postulation of a speakerwho has both an ability and an inclination to tell the truth.This ideology understands speakers to attempt in mostcases accurately to represent their thoughts and in doing soto report thoughts that are themselves accurate in relation

to the world or are appropriately hedged if they are not.The expectation that subjects speak truthfully in theseways-saying what they mean and meaning what theysay-grounds the tight coupling of intention and meaningbecause without that expectation a grasp of the speaker'sintention would be of only dubious worth.

This modem linguistic ideologythat ties

intention,meaning, and truthfulness tightly together is well attestedin the unwitting ethnography of modernity that goes underthe name of the philosophy of language (cf. Duranti 1993:25-27; Keane 1997a:680; Silverstein 1979). It is central,for example, to the work of Grice (1989), Austin (1975),Searle (1969), and those who follow them. Furthermore,an impressive if eclectic group of scholars has also in morewitting fashion approached the historical development ofthis ideology qua ideology. What they show conclusivelyis that the promises this ideology makes about languageand the linguistic subject are fundamental to many of theinstitutional experiments that have characterized moder-nity in the West. Thus, Luhmann (1984) and Shapin (1994)demonstrate that the ideological creation of the truth-tell-ing subject was crucial to the development of modem sci-ence. Foucault (1978; see also Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983)in a similar way shows how the possibility of telling thetruth of the self in confessional and other contexts was cen-tral to the emergence of modem individualism, a point alsomade by Trilling (1972) in a somewhat different way.Habermas (e.g., 1998), for his part, uses the model of thehonest communicator to ground what he considers a fullymodem emancipatory politics, while Simmel (1950:313)argues that the grand scale and complex division of labor

characteristic of modem societies depend on the assump-tion of the truthful speaker if they are to be viable.

To this list of institutions in which modem linguisticideology is embedded has to be added that of Protestant-ism. Keane (1997a) has recently reminded us how centralthe intention/meaning/truth model has been to the constitu-tion of Protestantism as a distinct kind of Christianity. Thisis crucial to my argument here, for it is through Protestant-ism that the Urapmin have most forcefully encounteredthat model and the ideology that produces it.7 It is this pointthat I now want to explore.

In light of the importance secrecy held in their tradition-

al religion, it is perhaps not surprising that the Urapmintend to distinguish their traditional past and their Christianpresent not as contrasting periods of darkness and light butas ones of hiddenness and openness: the modem present isa time when important religious and social information isin the "open" (kem diim), rather than "hidden" (bantap).The promise of openness, of shared thoughts, feelings, andknowledge, is one of the most important ones modernityhas made to the Urapmin. Yet, considered in these terms,the realization of the Urapmin modernizing project has en-countered considerable difficulty when it comes to language.


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For while they recognize that as modem, Christian subjectsthey are supposed to speak truthfully at all times by accu-rately and openly representing their inner states in speech,their traditional linguistic ideology does not constitutethem as subjects capable of performing in this way. Try asthey might, they find it hard to believe that language will

ever be able to express adequately what it is people think,feel, or desire.To understand why this is so, we have to flesh out the

account of traditional Urapmin linguistic ideology I beganto develop earlier when considering the Urapmin distinc-tion between speech and action. The part of their linguisticideology that the Urapmin most frequently express explic-itly is that which holds that thoughts, feelings, and desiresare hidden in the human heart (aget-the seat of allthought and feeling) and cannot be reliably communicatedthrough speech (weng). Too much can happen between theheart and the mouth, Urapmin say, for one to imagine thatwords reveal what a person thinks. People thus distrustwords, and the possibility of knowing what others arethinking on the basis of what they have said and the possi-bility of deriving the meaning of what is said by relating itto the intentions that produced it are not even regulatingideals for them. The assumption that speech is unreliable isvery general, and it governs Urapmin approaches to speechin a wide variety of domains (I discuss this in more detailin Robbins 2001a). As a result, the Urapmin accord knowl-edge gained through speech a very low epistemologicalvalue, and people are always careful to distinguish knowl-edge they have learned only by hearing it (weng senkamin)from that much more reliable knowledge that they have

gained through seeing it (tamin). The hearing/seeing oppo-sition in regard to reception clearly parallels the speak-ing/acting distinction that Urapmin people use to evaluateproduction. And just as the speaking/acting opposition hasbeen troubled by the Christian replacement of ritual actionwith speech, that of hearing/seeing has also been chal-lenged by ideas that Christianity has introduced.

Urapmin problems with the hearing/seeing oppositioncenter on issues of listening and follow from the way theUrapmin distrust of speech leads them to construe the se-miotic process whereby meaning is produced. Given thatspeech cannot convey people's intentions, it should comeas no surprise that for the Urapmin its meaning is not

grounded in them. Instead, listeners are responsible for cre-ating the meaning of what they hear (for discussion ofcomparable cases, see Duranti 1992; Kochman 1981;Kulick 1992, 1998; Schieffelin 1986, 1990; Silverstein1998).8 This listener orientation of Urapmin and, moregenerally, Papua New Guinean linguistic ideology is verypronounced and is embedded in broader ideologies of so-cial action, ideologies discussed by Wagner (1974, 1977)and Strathern (1988) in terms of the notion of elicitation.According to these models, Melanesians see sociality as aprocess whereby people discover their own capacities in

the effects they register on others. Social life becomes thena process in which each actor tries to create contexts thatothers will complete by relating to him or her. Only whenpeople do perform such acts of completion does the origi-nal act have meaning and the original actor become a sub-ject appropriate to that sort of action. In this run-it-up-the-

flagpole-and-see-who-salutes notion of semiotic function,others give one's actions meaning, just as they do one'sspeech.

From the point of view of modem linguistic and socialideology, including its Protestant form, this decenteredmodel of speech and action encourages an irresponsibledisregard for the power one's own intentions have to createmeaning and shape social life. For Protestant Urapmin, acrucial problem thus becomes the one of how to make one-self a responsible speaker whose speech truthfully conveysone's intentions and creates contexts for which one cantake responsibility. Although Urapmin linguistic ideologystill does not let them constitute themselves as such sub-jects in everyday speech, it does let them do so in Christianprayer, prayer that is often intoned out loud in the presenceof others and serves to communicate with them as well aswith God.

Two aspects of prayer come to the fore when we con-sider how it allows people to constitute themselves astruthful speakers in ways that they cannot in other genresof speech. The first is prayer's formulaic, ritualized quali-ties. Like other ritual actions, Urapmin prayers have dis-crete beginnings. To begin a prayer, one first asks all ofthose present to close their eyes. Once people have closedtheir eyes and thus marked a discrete break with the flow of

social life up to that point, the person praying will use oneof several formulae to call out to God and mark the formalbeginning of the prayer ("God, we are your children" and"God, we are your piglets" are two of the most common).With these two opening moves in place, it is impossible forthose praying or listening to doubt that an act of prayer hasbegun. Along with these openings, prayers also have pat-terned closings, wherein the person praying intones that "Ihave spoken (or asked) sufficiently and what I have said istrue" (afenko-this metalinguistic statement of truth is acalque from the English use of amen that draws on itsoriginal Hebrew meaning and is never used in reference tospeech in this way in other contexts). With this ending,eyes open, marking the return to life outside of prayer.

The Urapmin understand all rituals to be discrete, formalevents of this kind. They also understand them to committhose who participate in them to the goals at which they areaimed. This commitment is grounded in participation itselfand is not a function of the intentions of participants.9 Onecannot pray for something without committing to wantingit to happen, just as one cannot sacrifice a pig without in-tending to give it to a spirit or engage in a dispute settle-ment exchange without intending to settle the dispute inquestion. Complete in themselves, requiring no human


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sermon that are at its center. "Let us just pray," he said,"and go home."

Following his call, the congregation began a noisy col-lective prayer. Shortly after everyone began to pray, Pita'svoice rose above the rest, and as their prayers subsided, hecarried on alone. This is his prayer, picked up at the point

where his voice becomes dominant:'"Thank you father God.

I am angry about your work. Your work is not in goodshape. A man [Satan] has come and made us uninterested, andso Father God, you are looking at me.

God, there is a problem about your work. I have been an-gry. My heart has become heavy. God, now the time has comefor me to do your work, and I want to do your work. I amready to do it, but they are always uninterested in me. That iswhat they have been doing. This is not very good, and God Ipray to you. It is you God that I am asking. The kinds ofthoughts I am having about this in my heart, heavy thoughtsare coming up, angry thoughts are coming up. This is not a

problem with the work of this ground, no God, it is a problemwith your work.I am angry about this, and so God, please, you must have

pity on me. This is why I am praying to you.God, it is your work, and I want to do your work. I was do-

ing it, and the church said "no." This is what I am angryabout.

I have been angry, and God I am praying to you. Thesekinds of thoughts I have been thinking, I have not given themto the church. No, I still have them, and so God I pray to you.You be with me. You clear away the dirty things, the dirtythings I have done. About this, I am asking you please to clearit away. This prayer comes to you, and so you God can clearthis anger away.

And God, you send your peacefulness down and you helpus sheep. You help them and continue looking after them.I have been saying we family [alimal] have not been doing

your work well God. [He is praying completely alone at thispoint.] I have been angry about this, this problem with yourwork. I was angry about this problem with your work. Youmust clear away this anger and put me inside your own newlife.

Each of us in the church too, pastors, deacons too, brothers,and sisters, we [ningkil nuyo] have been arguing back andforth about your work. So God, you! Clear away this anger,and God put [give us] your new life [inside of us], give usnothing but your peacefulness.

We brothers and sisters [ningkil], we family [alimal] mustcontinue to worship in church. That is why I call to you. Itwould be bad if a man comes into our midst and destroys itlike that. He will bring all kinds of things, all kinds of behav-ior inside. Please, you clear this away, and then God remainwith us.

I am calling to you, and now my anger I leave it to God.I have asked sufficiently, and it is true.

This prayer largely ended the dispute that provoked it. Itdid this by compelling those who heard it to accept thatPita, their leading pastor, had forsaken his anger. After itwas over the service went on, and the issues that had occu-

pied the congregation for so much of the morning nevercame up in church again.

For present purposes, I want to make only a few analyticpoints about this prayer, points that touch on aspects of itthat are common to many Urapmin prayers. First of all, it isclearly an expression on Pita's part of a willingness to give

up the anger that has brought him into this dispute. If notprecisely an apology, it is an offering of peace. As such, itis aimed not only at God but also at the rest of the congre-gation, who here take on the participant role of sanctioned"overhearers" (cf. Goffman 1981) or even that of whatLevinson (1988:196) in another connection calls "targetedoverhearers" who are expected to understand that what issaid is in some respects addressed to them. Pita's aware-ness of these overhearers is signaled by his occasional use,increasing as he goes on, of first person plural subject con-structions and by his reference to alimal, a term that trans-lates as "family" but is also used to refer to the congrega-tion as a whole, and to ningkil, which refers to age-matesand has the sense of "brothers and sisters." At the sametime as he signals this awareness however, Pita repeatedlymakes it clear that God is his primary addressee. All pra-yers, no matter how much they play to the gallery (andmany do so even more extensively than this one), have thisfeature of a constant reiteration of the speaker's intentionto address God. This reiteration is not merely rhetorical,and prayers are not in any way productions designed onlyfor overhearers (cf. Heritage 1985:99), for as I arguedabove it is only by virtue of being addressed to God thatwhat is said in prayer becomes true for those who overhearit. It is this need to keep God in the position of official ad-

dressee that shapes the constant return in prayer to phraseslike "God, I am praying to you" even when speakers arevery much concerned with expressing their feelings or in-tentions to those who overhear what they are in the first in-stance saying to God.

People more and more resort to these dispute-resolvingprayers, for they work just as reliably as exchange andhave a flexibility that exchange does not. It would havetaken weeks to arrange for all the exchanges needed tobring to a close a major argument such as the one thatPita's prayer ended in minutes. It should be noted that itwas able to effect such speedy resolution not simply be-cause it allowed Pita to act as a truthful speaker capable ofverbally conveying his intention to end the dispute. Alsocrucial to the production of this effect was the fact that hisaudience was constituted of people capable of listening forthe truth of what he said, something they had not been ableto do in the past. This points out a final aspect of the wayChristian linguistic ideology has transformed the semioticcapacities of Urapmin subjects. Just as God makes peopletruthful speakers by virtue of His ability to hear them assuch, so too does He model for those who overhear thequalities of a listening subject who can accomplish thisfeat. He further trains people to seek the truth in speech by


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demanding that they approach his own verbal productionsas completely honest and veridical. In these ways, truthfulspeakers become matched with listeners who can hearthem, completing a circuit that allows Urapmin to voicemodernity, as they would say, in the open.

In closing up these ethnographic considerations, I wantto dwell for a moment on the innovation of the

participantrole of the overhearer. Even as I came to expect to encoun-ter it on a daily basis, the split address of Urapmin prayerwas always striking to me in the field. Taking the form of akind of sacralized stage whisper, prayer's reliance on themediation of a divine third party always seemed awkwardto me, even if that third party was what allowed people tospeak the truth to each other. Later it occurred to me thatpart of the Urapmin comfort with this form of socialitymight be accounted for by the fact that, for them, Christi-anity itself seems largely overheard, a matter of listening towhat God tells others in the Bible. But even more impor-tant, I have come to think, particularly after reading someof Keane's (1997a, n.d.) recent work on the way Protes-tantism downplays the objects and words that connect peo-ple to one another, is the way the Urapmin maintain amarked awareness of and worry over the fact that all com-munication is mediated. In the past, it was objects that car-ried this mediating load in exchange or language that car-ried it somewhat poorly in speech. Now it is not onlyobjects and speech that mediate between people, it is alsoGod. In all cases, though, the Urapmin attend as much orsometimes more to the fact of mediation as they do to themessages these mediations convey. Western linguisticmodernity, by contrast, tends to downplay the fact of me-

diation in its valuation on transparency, clarity, accuracyetc." This modem obliviousness of mediation is a state theUrapmin are not willing to enter, and it is this unwilling-ness that keeps their modernity decidedly local even as thatmodernity teaches them how to speak the truth.12

Conclusions

One could point in conclusion to a variety of reasonsone might want to study local modernities that are engagedwith capital M modernity as I have done here. Given con-straints of space, I want to focus only on one rationale here.This rationale is founded on the conviction that a study of

local modernities that gives credit to the role played withinthem by the cultural content of modernity may return to thecomparative side of anthropology's project some of thecritical force it sometimes has difficulty conjuring up atpresent. In these self-consciously multicultural, globaliz-ing times, reports of cultural difference do little to disruptour own settled understandings. Canons of appreciation arein place that at once respect these differences and in doingso dull any critical edge they might have. Through such ap-preciative containment, Western elites now politicallymanage cultural differences but do not struggle with the

content of those differences as something that might chal-lenge their own outlooks. In doing so, they avoid preciselythose kinds of cultural struggles with otherness that localmodems embrace. In studying local modernities, then, wemight regain a sense of the stakes for which these strugglescan be fought.

In this regard, consider again the case of the Urapminconfrontation with linguistic modernity. At the center ofthis struggle for the Urapmin is an attempt to accommo-date a traditional listener-oriented semiotic to the speaker-oriented one of modernity. In the case of prayer this ac-commodation has been smoother than it has been in othergenres of speech, but even here rapprochement has had topass through the agency of listening, through the ear ofGod, in order to take place. The logic of listening has leftits mark on their modem linguistic ideology by makingsincere speech something they can only overhear. This iswhat makes Urapmin linguistic modernity a local one andwhat makes its advent among them part of a struggle andnot a rout. But if, following Englund and Leach (2000), weaddress only the indigenizing aspect of this struggle, if weignore the enormous efforts Urapmin people are making totalk to each other in new ways, we equally indigenize theUrapmin for ourselves by placing them in preformed cate-gories of anthropological understanding that need no revi-sion to take their case in. The approach of this article hasasked us to consider the benefits of forestalling this move,of focusing on the struggle itself and in so doing taking ona version of that struggle as our own by refusing to natural-ize the Urapmin as either traditional or modem.

Were we to undertake this exercise, we would quicklyhave to confront some of the limits of our own linguisticideology. Foremost among these would be the dominancewithin it of the intention/meaning/truth model and the sin-cere speaker it posits. This model has put the agency of lis-tening very much in the shade. There have to be sure beenhints of the power of listening in the literature of sociolin-guistics. They have arisen in particular in accounts of Pa-cific and African American linguistic ideologies, in discus-sions of religious language and of audience roles, and insometimes implicit ways in considerations of resistanceand appropriation (critical commentaries on the model canbe found in the works cited on page 906 as well as in Du

Bois 1992; Duranti 1993; Keane 1997a, 1997b; Rosaldo1982; Woolard 1998). But notwithstanding the importantpoints made in these literatures, the critique of the inten-tion/meaning/truth aspect of linguistic modernity haslagged far behind that of its emphasis on the referentialover the pragmatic function of language. More to the point,the critical literature on this aspect of linguistic modernityhas not yet coalesced into an ethnography of listening thatwould rival in sophistication the ethnography of speakingthat played such a key role in moving sociolinguistics be-yond the modemrnideological emphasis on reference. This


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article has tried to bring the Urapmin struggle with linguis-tic modernity to bear on the construction of an ethnographyof listening of this kind and, in doing so, to illustrate theway in which the study of local modemities as modemitiesmight not dissolve our discipline in a welter of similarities,an ever narrowing space in which hell is other modems,

but would instead allow it to continue to develop by facingsquarely the kinds of differences and struggles with themthat now shape life in many parts of the world.

Notes

Acknowledgments. This article is based on research inPapua New Guinea (carried out between January 1991 andFebruary 1993) supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation,the National Science Foundation, and the University of Vir-ginia. I thank the anthropology department of the Universityof Papua New Guinea, the Institute of Papua New GuineaStudies, and the government of the Sandaun Province for theirassistance during this period of research. Versions of this pa-per have been delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Ameri-can Anthropological Association (1999), the University ofChicago, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences So-ciales, Paris. I thank those who offered comments at these oc-casions and others who have responded to the argument inmanuscript. In particular, I thank David Akin, Roy D'An-drade, Stephane Breton, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha,Jonathan Friedman, Susan Gal, Maurice Godelier, Don Gard-ner, Judith Irvine, Dan Jorgensen, Nancy Munn, MarshallSahlins, Bambi Schieffelin, Michael Silverstein, RupertStasch, Kit Woolard, and several anonymous reviewers forAmerican Anthropologist for suggestions and questions thatled me to rework various parts of the article. Several recentand not

sorecent conversations with

MiyakoInoue were in-

strumental in helping me begin to approach some of the basicissues addressed here. The responsibility for the final productis, of course, mine alone.

1. Englund and Leach do not employ the terminology ofconvergence and divergence, and in fact they claim to workbeyond notions of "tradition" and "modernization" (2000:244), but their analytic practice nevertheless illustrates wellthe corollary of the divergence view I am considering here.

2. The Urapmin are not unique among Papua New Guineagroups in terms of the importance language ideology hasplayed in their encounter with modernity. Schieffelin (1996,2000) and Kulick (1992) discuss comparable cases in similarterms.

3. Terms in the Urap language are given without an identi-fier. Terms in neo-Melanesian Tok Pisin, the most widespreadlingua franca in Papua New Guinea and a language that is veryimportant in Urapmin Christian discourse, are noted as such.

4. I am not arguing here that there are no domains in whichtraditional cultural ideas are not still in play or in which theUrapmin bring Christian and traditional ideas into relationwith one another but, rather, that in their own understandingthe Urapmin are aiming to adopt Christianity on its own termsto as great an extent as possible.

5. I emphasize that I am discussing spoken language here,for the Urapmin approach the new Christian phenomenon of

written language differently than they do speech. I discuss thisdifference in more detail elsewhere (Robbins 1997; cf. Schief-felin 2000).

6. In Tok Pisin the passage reads: "Bipo tru Tok i stap. Toki stap wantaim God. Na tok em yet i God."

7. I should make it clear that I do not mean to suggest thatthe intention/meaning/truth model represents the whole of

modern linguistic ideology. It is, however, an important as-pect of that ideology and one that is elaborated at many sites(Philips 2000) and subject to a good deal of speaker awareness(Silverstein 1981). My discussion in the previous two para-graphs is in part meant to document the extent of this elabora-tion and awareness. The Urapmin have had to reckon withthese aspects of modern linguistic ideology precisely becausethey are so extensively and explicitly elaborated in the Protes-tant culture the Urapmin are confronting.

8. As Irvine (1996:132) points out, those who study lan-guage have recently replaced the folk notion of "hearer" withthe analytic one of "addressee" and in doing so have suc-ceeded in productively complicating their understanding ofthe participant structure of speech events. In relation to thismove, my reliance on the term listener might seem to be a re-gression to borrowing from a folk model (albeit this time anUrapmin one). But my choice of this term is a considered one.The term addressee still assumes that the speaker's intentiondefines if not the meaning of what is said, then at least theaudience to which it is addressed (cf. Kochman 1981). This isnot an assumption that the Urapmin make in any simple sense.Underlying these terminological issues is, as Silverstein(1998:142-143) has recently argued, the point that we need toattend to the possibility that some linguistic ideologies maydistribute semiotic agency in ways different than our own.

9. This of course accords perfectly with Rappaport's(1979, 1999) theory of the general nature of ritual action. I am

not making a case for its general truth here, however, but amrather arguing that it is at least an Urapmin model and as suchis one that is related to their ideologies of personhood and lan-guage as well as of ritual. I consider Rappaport's theory andits relation to Urapmin and other Melanesian cases in detailelsewhere (Robbins 2001b).

10. Like many prayers, this one was delivered in a mixtureof Tok Pisin and Urap. The translation was made from a tape.I have interpolated a few words in brackets. In a few cases thatI will discuss below, I have also put in brackets the originalUrap terms that Pita used.

11. Giddens's (1990) discussion of modernity as "disem-bedding" provides a useful reference point here that starts notfrom modern linguistic ideology per se but from the broad cul-

tural changes that are linked to it.12. The argument about overhearing that I have made here

bears comparison with Urban's (1988:397) argument aboutoverhearing as a way of gaining access to another person's"inner self' in the context of ritual wailing among Amerindiangroups in Brazil (see also Graham 1995:124).

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