Joel C. Kuipers, Language, identity, and marginality in Indonesia: The changing nature of ritual speech on the island of Sumba. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, 18.) Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi, 183. Hb $59.95, pb $19.95.

Abstract

Kuipers' book is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Weyewa Highlands of western Sumba, an island in eastern Indonesia. His initial fieldwork in 1978 resulted in his work Power in performance (1990), about Weyewa “ritual speech” (tenda) – a set of political, religious, and personal verbal genres utilizing a large stock of traditional couplets, in which the two lines are parallel in both rhythm and meaning. Returning to the field in 1989, 1990, and 1994, Kuipers discovered that the obvious loci of change – new schools, roads, economic activities, and religious ideas – could not by themselves account for the direction of change in Weyewa language practices. Stimulated by a recent body of literature in linguistic anthropology dealing with “linguistic ideology,” Kuipers attempts in the present volume to show that changes in ritual speech genres – reinterpretations, erasures, refunctionalizations, and condensations – cannot be explained without taking into account local and imported beliefs about the nature of language.