Translation has long been a part of anthropology, and recently analysts have focused on the politics, poetics, and ethics of translations that account for much of the global flow of discourses. This literature can be thought of as histories of how translators forge denotational links between source and target texts and how communities engage with the texts that result. Here, however, I want to highlight a different mode of translation in which connections between source and target texts become models of transformation for communities that engage with them. Moreover, participants can actually enact transformations in ritual moments that foreground the relationships between translated texts. I focus on Guhu-Samane Christian communities of Papua New Guinea who use performances of the local-language translation of the New Testament to comment on the kind of Christian transformations they have experienced. This perspective offers a particularly compelling way to investigate Christian models of temporality.

This article provides an overview of recent scholarship on the language of evangelism and missionization within the anthropology of Christianity. Attention to Christian evangelism and forms of circulation was minimized as scholars worked to distinguish the study of Christianity from the study of colonialism, often treating missionaries and missionization as a prologue to a more central analysis of transformation organized through local people and local cultural change. However, issues of circulation are at the heart of many Christian experiences, especially for those within evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic worlds. This research is discussed here in terms of Christian cultures of circulation specifically and of models of communicative circulation more generally. Framing the language of evangelism in terms of circulation allows for the integrated discussion of a wide range of related issues, including work on translation, missionary training practices, and material formations of evangelism.

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