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In
Circulations, Courtney Handman examines the surprising continuities in the ways that modernist communications discourses shaped both colonial and decolonial projects in Papua New Guinea. Often described as a place with too many mountains and too many languages to be modern, Papua New Guinea was seen as a space of circulatory primitivity—where people, things, and talk could not move. Colonial missionaries and administrators, and even anticolonial delegations of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, argued that this circulatory primitivity could be overcome only through the management of communication infrastructures, bureaucratic information flows, and the introduction of English. Innovatively bringing together analyses of radios, airplanes, telepathy, bureaucracy, and lingua francas,
Circulations argues for the critical role of communicative networks and communicative imaginaries in political processes of colonialism and decolonization worldwide.
Courtney Handman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea.
"Courtney Handman offers a dynamic perspective on the ways in which ideas, people, languages, and things move, or don’t, as a critical part of how nations are imagined and engineered. This is an extremely thoughtful—and thought-provoking—book."—Bambi Schieffelin, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, New York University
"Circulations is an intellectually exhilarating book with a wry sense of humor that explores the modernist take on the social world by analyzing why Papua New Guinea's distinctiveness is viewed as such an evocative site of communication problems."—Ilana Gershon, Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology, Rice University, author of The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office
"Taking in everything from airplanes to pathless forests, telepathy to new languages, Courtney Handman brings a fresh vision to some of the classic ethnographic scenes. Her breadth of imagination and depth of insight make for fascinating reading."—Webb Keane, author of Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter and Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination
"Circulations is a finely observed and persuasively argued account of how colonial frames helped create and intensify conditions of isolation and fragmentation—and set the terms for decolonizing agendas. A must-read for scholars of culture, language, empire, and decoloniality."—Matt Tomlinson, author of God Is Samoan: Dialogues between Culture and Theology in the Pacific
232 pp.6 x 9Illus: 10 b/w illustrations, 2 maps
9780520416000$34.95|£30.00Paper
Apr 2025