https://www.ucpress.edu/books/circulations/paper

Rachel Apone: Thank you for this creative, rich, and thought-provoking book! The book offers a fascinating argument about the history of Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and speaks to foundational issues in linguistic anthropology such as language ideologies and their relationship to power. But it also weaves together so many other themes and issues, making the book of interest to anyone studying infrastructure, bureaucracies, decolonization, temporality, or imagination. Can you first tell us a little bit about how this project developed? What were your motivating questions? How did those questions develop or shift as you did the archival research? What did the archival research process look like?

Courtney Handman: Thank you for these questions! Yes, a couple of times I hint at the fact that the final form of this book ended up being a bit of a surprise based on where I started with it. Initially, I was thinking this was going to be a book about why Tok Pisin has become the dominant language in Papua New Guinea over the 20th and early 21st centuries while being so intensely disliked by speakers and non-speakers alike. At the same time, I was working on questions of religious infrastructure among the colonial Lutheran missions, and how their intense focus on creating so many supposedly secular transportation networks was related to their more self-consciously religious goals. Initially, I was thinking of these as somewhat disconnected projects, but at a certain point it became clear that the way that people in colonial Papua New Guinea were talking about “the language problem” (the fact that there are many hundreds of languages spoken) overlapped with the way that they were talking about problems of moving around an incredibly mountainous place and unifying people into some larger social form (a synod, a colony, eventually a nation).

As you were hinting at in your question, the archives organized the final shape of the research too. When I went to the Australian national archives to look at the way that the colonial administration handled Tok Pisin, I started to see how many of those files were in response to the demands of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, which had oversight powers of Australia’s administration of the Territory of New Guinea, including their 1953 demand that Australia eradicate Tok Pisin. I had been hearing about this demand since the moment I first became interested in Tok Pisin’s history back when I was in college, and I was excited to finally dig into this part of Papua New Guinea’s history. The Trusteeship Council is not well-known now, but in the years after World War II it played an important role in decolonization. As I talk about in the second half of the book, its more anti-colonial delegates helped to create a kind of top-down project of bureaucratic decolonization that contrasts sharply with the more common imagination of decolonization as a bottom-up process of national struggle by colonized peoples. As I was working through these files, I started to see that even the most vocally anti-colonial delegations on the Trusteeship Council who wanted to hurry the Territory of New Guinea towards independence were thinking about Papua New Guinea in ways that mirrored the colonial and missionary discourses I had already seen: there were too many mountains and too many languages for Papua New Guinea to really be modern, and something needed to be done — to Tok Pisin, to English, to the aviation networks, to the road networks, and so on — to fix this circulatory problem.

So the book eventually took shape around the issue of what was allowing for all of these repetitions of the same problems: under what conditions do languages seem to be just like roads? Under what conditions do both colonizers and those demanding decolonization see this equivalence? In that sense, this became a book that wasn’t about languages on their own or infrastructures on their own, but about the imaginaries and material forms of circulation that organized these different channels.

Rachel Apone: As I already hinted at, one exciting aspect of this book was that it brings together a range of phenomena into the same frame. In addition to Tok Pisin, the book considers Lutheran radio and aviation networks, plantation labor and ‘telepathy tales’ and bureaucratic information flows during decolonization, just to name a few issues. In the introduction, you tell readers you are focusing on “channels,” which you define as “the institutionally and culturally codified means of enabling communication” (3). Can you tell us a little bit about how channels relate to or depart from other concepts such as “infrastructure” or “media” or “code”? If more (linguistic) anthropologists attend to the cultural formation of channels, do you have a sense of what other questions, insights, and conversations this might open up?

Courtney Handman: I borrow “channels” from Jakobson’s discussion of speech events as involving speaker, addressee, context, code, message, and channel/contact. In that sense I am in conversation with folks like Chip Zuckerman and Shunsuke Nozawa, who have written about phatic (channel-based) functions of language. One of the things that I like about the term is that talking about channels can be somewhat agnostic about the nature of the channel. To talk about “codes” usually means talking about languages as grammatical systems. To talk about “infrastructures” usually means focusing more on technological or socio-technical systems. To talk about “media” usually means talking about mass media. But “channel” doesn’t necessarily have those specific connotations, and I try to use it in a way that can encompass all of them. In doing so, I also try to see the ways that different channels can get conflated or talked about together in various sorts of historical or ethnographic contexts.

Paying attention to channels in this agnostic kind of way will hopefully open up conversations about otherwise less-emphasized aspects of communicative encounters. In linguistic anthropology, we tend to start our analyses of different communicative events after the process of creating a channel is done. We can analyze an interaction because that channel has been mobilized or formed, and people have started talking, or texting, or signing. But by not looking at channel formation, it leaves a lot of the work of how communicative events happen, or how people try to create the contexts for communicative events to happen, by the wayside. Even when issues of channel formation come up, we tend to downplay them. For example, one of the most consequential concepts for linguistic anthropology for the past 20 years or so has come out of Asif Agha’s work on enregisterment. In his analysis of the creation and spread of British Received Pronunciation, he uses Saul Kripke’s concept of the speech chain to talk about the spread of knowledge of RP. Linguistic anthropologists clearly have depended a lot on Agha’s discussions of enregisterment to talk about what people are doing in different speech events. But outside of some work on publics, like Andrew Graan’s idea of ‘discursive engineering,’ there has been less attention paid to the speech chain itself — its formation, its textures, its transformations. In a certain sense, then, I am thinking about channels as a way to look comparatively at how people cultivate and envision the sorts of speech chains they are in.

As I talk about in the introduction, I think of channels as elements of what Lee and LiPuma called cultures of circulation. For them, the primary regimes of circulation are publics and nations, and they focus mostly on the mass media forms that support them. By keeping the concept of regimes of circulation so linked to mass media, though, they end up ignoring other forms of circulation, for example bureaucracy. The kinds of channels I look at in the book are often not broadcast media, but rather the narrowcast (point-to-point) media used to try to link one mission to another or one office to another. And in focusing on channel formation itself I am emphasizing the places and times in which participants feel like channels are unstable, something that has been especially but not exclusively true for colonial contexts.

In terms of broader connections across anthropology, I have always wanted to see more interaction between linguistic anthropology and science and technology studies. Bruno Latour’s early ideas in Science in Action about the recruitment and translation of scientific allies in different controversies have always seemed like one place where that could happen, although elements of Latour’s actor network theory made his idea of translation at times frustratingly minimalist. Paying attention to the semiotic forms of channels and channel construction could be one way to complicate the story of network formation that he tells.

To go back to the book more specifically, when I was first looking at some of the historical materials that I was working with, I kept thinking in terms of the classifications used in the archives: some documents were about language, some were about radios, some were about airplanes, and so on. But it became clear that people who were on the ground in Papua New Guinea during the colonial and decolonizing eras were not keeping these categories very separate. A two-paragraph item in a colonial newspaper would jump between radios, communist infiltration from Indonesia, Tok Pisin, and telepathy; or a line of questioning about a report to the UN Trusteeship Council in New York would move from aviation networks, to the language problems, to English, to the presence or absence of Papua New Guinean demands for self-government. And at some point I realized I needed to pay more attention to how those links were being made. There is always the risk of making a category so general that it loses any analytic purchase, but the openness of ”channels” has been productive for me in thinking about the kinds of overlaps and connections I saw people making in Papua New Guinea.

Rachel Apone: The book is divided into two parts. The first focuses on Lutheran missionaries and other colonial actors and the second part focuses on the UN Trusteeship Council and its role in the decolonization of PNG. This concept of “circulatory primitivity” anchors both sections—you show how both colonial and decolonial actors constructed PNG as a fragmented place where ideas/information, people, and goods do not easily circulate. At a few different points you draw our attention to what might be called erasure–constructing PNG as a place of circulatory primitivity required erasing or ignoring vast exchange networks, the movement of people through kin networks, and so on.  Can you thematize or reflect a bit on the relationship between erasure and “circulatory primitivity”? I’m curious why these forms of circulation are erased? Why aren’t colonizers discussing kin and exchange networks as illicit forms of circulation?

Courtney Handman: This is a great question. The historian Tracey Banivanua Mar talks about this dynamic of the visibility and invisibility of movement for the colonial Pacific broadly, and I think it is especially true for Papua New Guinea. On the one hand, there are all these (very incorrect) colonial discourses about the immobility of Papua New Guineans: that they stay within their small worlds, that they are scared to move around because of the threat of violence from other groups, that they are hemmed in by mountains and the lack of any larger lingua franca that could allow for a larger polity to form. On the other hand, there are all these colonial regulations that restricted Papua New Guineans’ movements, which would suggest that there was some recognition that people were highly mobile and needed to be constrained.

So it is not simply that colonizers did or did not recognize the mobility and circulation of Papua New Guineans. They were thinking about circulation in terms of the modernist imaginaries that they were bringing with them, which emphasized the modernizing effects of movement itself. And that meant that, as with any kind of modernist historical imaginary, there had to be a supposedly pre-modern moment against which colonial progress could be tracked. For missionaries, they used the figure of the immobile Papua New Guinean as the before side of a before/after comparison about the effects of Christianization. They used that immobility to distinguish themselves from those they ministered to: mobile missionaries armed with sacred texts travel long distances to give them to immobile people, some of whom themselves come to take up those texts and bring them to yet more distant others.

Given the connection of circulation and modernity, Papua New Guinean modes of circulation became visible mostly when they seemed to interfere with colonial projects. In the contexts that I talk about in this book, that often meant labor contexts. Where people were moving around to avoid getting blackbirded (kidnapped for indentured labor), or were telepathically connecting to others to warn them of the approach of colonizers, then forms of mobility were recognized but seen as illicit. Another moment when Papua New Guinean mobility became visible to colonizers happened when patrol officers complained that people were not present at their registered home village to participate in being counted for a census or for tax collection. At that village level, colonizers and missionaries were clearly aware of kin-based travel and long-distance exchange networks. But this typically was read as simply an annoyance that was ultimately not important and thus erasable, or as more specifically illicit attempts to evade governance that would get registered but registered pejoratively.

Another reason that local forms of mobility were ignored or erased was because these modernist concepts of circulation were so connected to ideas of large-scale polities and forms of mass media, too. To the extent that Papua New Guinean forms of circulation did not produce larger-scale polities like nations or markets or publics, then they could be ignored as irrelevant or castigated as illegitimate.

But your question more broadly points to the ways that as much as circulation was seen as somehow able to produce modernity or modernist forms, each part of colonial and decolonial society had to tell a story about why movement wasn’t doing the kind of work it was imagined to do. If people weren’t becoming modern in the right way, that was because some other kind of circulation would be better. And these conflicts among colonial projects produced all kinds of illegitimate forms of circulation that had to be constrained or regulated. Everyone agreed that the colony needed a lingua franca, for example, but when that turned out to be Tok Pisin rather than English, they argued that Tok Pisin wasn’t producing the right kind of circulation. This constant ability to affirm the importance of circulation while also being critical about any particular form of it is a point that I can say more about.

Rachel Apone: A couple of times in the book, you reference contemporary concerns about misinformation. But, given the historical scope of the book, we never really get a good sense of your take on that issue. Do you think contemporary concerns about misinformation could challenge the modernist imaginary that more flow and mobility is always better? Or do you think that concerns about misinformation are ultimately a recapitulation of modernist concerns about illicit forms of circulation? Do you have a sense of how concerns and discourses about misinformation are playing out in Papua New Guinea?

Courtney Handman: One of the things that I argue throughout the book is that while there was a broad consensus in the modernity of circulation, every colonial or decolonizing actor had a different idea about what the right kind of circulation would be. And these different views of particular circulatory connections and networks were often quite contradictory. Those channels always had to be reworked, remolded, or sometimes removed, always with the assumption that getting the channels right could create the desired social forms. And this dynamic seems to be at work in the way people worry about misinformation now as well.

To answer your question I would first want to emphasize that there is a panic about misinformation because of the still-present sense that more information should produce better outcomes. Even if the liberal sense of wanting to decide the issues within a marketplace of ideas feels antiquated and inadequate to the contemporary moment, fundamental ideas about choice and freedom are organized around circulation-based principles, for example that you need to be made aware of your options in order to choose (something that is enshrined in all of our IRB practices of informed consent). As with concepts of freedom of speech more generally, the assumption is that information should not be withheld.

Then, as with the cases that I was looking at in the book, there is the sense that the problem that needs to be solved has to do with the way information is circulating. In other words, insofar as people have recently attempted to fix the problems of information by trying to fix the way that information circulates — by trying to get us out of our communicative bubbles and silos — they are still participating in a project of circulatory modernity. Clearly there is more that is happening in terms of a shift away from liberal models of speech in places like the US, so even though circulation is not the only perspective for understanding the rise of illiberalism, I think it is a necessary one.

I’m not sure I have enough of a sense of the current dynamics in Papua New Guinea to make substantive claims about the way people are thinking about or handling questions of misinformation there. Fringe theories from the US circulate widely there. On one of my recent trips, I was surprised to realize that a pastor who I had known for a long time was telling me that he had recently been convinced by websites advocating the flat earth theory. In contrast to the many sources of information that are available now and that get debated as being legitimate or not, the colonial era sources of suspicion were relatively few: the fears of encroaching communism or so-called native telepathy, for example. But even if the distinction between the sanctioned as opposed to illicit sources of circulation is less clear, nevertheless my sense is that people are still trying to make that distinction. That is, they are still hoping to solve questions of social forms by reforming circulation.

I actually want to hear your answer to the question of how the problem of misinformation is playing out in contemporary Papua New Guinea, since some of your own work deals so creatively and thoughtfully with these issues. In lieu of being able to do that in this forum, I just want to end by thanking you for all of your fantastic questions and engagement with the book.