Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women

Abstract

What do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.

Ancestral cites: Citation politics and canonical figures in Protestant communities

“…Rateaver’s theological views could be interpreted as providing an alternative to scholarship on “pure” Christian theological reflection or dematerialized piety. As Halvorson and Hovland (2021) have argued, clarifying who it is that seeks to ideologically maintain “purified” forms of Christianity is important; its pursuit relies on time for reflection and relative political and economic security, all characteristic historically of white masculine trajectories of institutional privilege.…”

Feminist cites: A review of feminist relations to and citations of the canon

“…Over the past couple of decades, anthropologists have analyzed Protestant language use as the manifestation of a specific language ideology that prizes disembodied individual sincerity and immediacy. Yet, as Britt Halvorson and I have explored, this only seems to account for some instances of Protestant language use while leaving out others, such as many instances of language use by Protestant women (Halvorson and Hovland, 2021). For example, in the instance of Dons speaking outside the church in July 1911, this moment of language use seems to go far beyond concerns with interiorized sincerity.…”

Value moves in multiple ways: Ethical values, the anthropology of Christianity, and an example of women and movement

“…In the second part, I follow one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Lutheran women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. While I am usually drawn to describing these Protestant women within a semiotic language-and-bodies framework (Halvorson and Hovland, 2021; Hovland, 2020) that in many ways is an extension of poststructuralist virtue ethics, I will in this article experiment with working along interfaces instead. Working along the interfaces within the “family” of “ethical values” as well as the interfaces between different theoretical approaches, I will explore how this example shows that ethical values move in multiple ways through the social, material worlds of Christianity: people realize values, people produce values, and people work on values.…”