Moving Words: Christian Language and the Modern World

Abstract

Within the anthropology of Christianity, much attention has been paid to the convergence of Christianity with modern understandings of language. In this essay, I review scholarship that traces the historical connections between modern and Christian views of language, particularly in British colonial attacks on Hindu language practices, and I examine two recent ethnographies that offer different vantage points on the variety of ways in which contemporary Christians use language in a self-consciously modern way.

KEYWORDS:

• anthropology of Christianity
• colonialism
• language ideology
• modernity

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Harr

ADAM HARR is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Lawrence University. His research examines new forms of talk and sociality that emerge from contemporary intersections of ancestral ritual and electoral politics in eastern Indonesia.