Efficacy, Truth, and Silence: Language Ideologies in Fijian Christian Conversions MATT TOMLINSON Anthropology, School of Political & Social Inquiry, Monash University Scholarship on Christian conversion in indigenous societies has highlighted the ways in which many missionaries have considered their effectiveness to derive from their representation of universal truth. Claiming to speak for the univer- sally true God, and teaching people how to read about God as well as speak to him in prayer, missionaries have often justified their efforts and explained their success with reference to truth versus falsehood. Local audiences, however, have not always correlated truth and efficacy in the same way, as shown in recent work on Christian conversion in colonial and neocolonial con- texts (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; 1997; Keane 2007; Rafael 1988; Robbins 2004). Indeed, for missionized subjects, distinguishing between truth and effi- cacy, and evaluating their alignment, can be critical tasks whose execution shapes the mission encounter. Debates over truth and efficacy often draw participants’ attention to particu- lar kinds of language use. In preaching, praying, catechizing, and introducing literacy through teaching Scripture, Christian missionaries have introduced new practices in countless societies; they have also introduced, or attempted to introduce, new frames for interpreting such practices. Thus distinctions of truth and efficacy are often conditioned by ideologies of what language is, how it works, and who can use it in specific ways. In this article, I show Acknowledgments: Archival research has been conducted at the National Archives of Fiji in Suva, the Mitchell Library in Sydney, the Tippett Collection at St. Mark’s National Theological Centre Library in Canberra, the Turnbull Library in Wellington, and the SOAS Library in London, with the generous support of the Social Science Research Council (IDRF), Bowdoin College, and the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. A condensed version of this paper was presented at the anthropology colloquium at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa in April 2008, and I thank the audi- ence for their suggestions. In addition, David Akin, Andrew Arno, Amelia Bonea, Ilana Gershon, Debra McDougall, Trevor Stack, Andrew Thornley, and the reviewers for CSSH generously read and responded to drafts of this article. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Paul Geraghty and Sekove Bigitibau for their corrections and clarifications on matters of translation. All errors are my own. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2009;51(1):64 – 90. 0010-4175/09 $15.00 #2009 Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History doi:10.1017/S0010417509000048 64