The Spatiotemporal Transformations of Lutheran Airplanes

Abstract

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 transportation that had until then been used almost exclusively in service of colonial resource extraction at the New Guinea gold fields. The mission prized movement and circulation as a Christian evangelistic practice in and of itself, in which the “message” and the process of its spread could be conflated. Yet this emphasis on circulation has been obscured by the almost exclusive attention within the anthropology of religion to evangelism as a form of agonistic comparison between Christianity and local culture and within linguistic anthropology to circulation as about type-token relations among texts.