Abstract
Everyday interaction is a key mechanism of political and socio-economic persistence and transformation. Forms of sociality are interactionally and discursively achieved through self-reflexive enactions and representations. To capture the relevance of language to politics, ethnopragmatic accounts such as Donzelli’s One or Two Words combine ethnographic field methods with the analysis of communication – in this case of audio-recorded linguistic data drawn especially from political oratory. Accordingly, the key premise of this book is that ‘apparently unremarkable transformations in linguistic routines’ (p. 6) are central to understanding the constitution of ‘modes of power as well as forms of collective belonging and political imagination’ (p. 11), specifically in the Toraja regency of southern Sulawesi, an island of the Indonesian archipelago. Donzelli’s analysis highlights, on the one hand, the role of discursive, stylistic and linguistic choices in the production of ‘forms of collective belonging and social exclusion’ (p. 19), and on the other, how political communication has been impacted by shifts from the highly centralized New Order regime headed by Suharto to the post-Suharto Reform Era marked by neoliberal democratic reforms.
One or Two Words is divided into two sections of three chapters each, the first centring on the economic and interactional achievement of collective belonging whereas the second focuses on the relation of social hierarchy and political imagination with patterns of language use. The first two chapters attend to self-reflexive discourses of Toraja identity in which speakers enact a figure of locality and put forward opposing narratives of belonging. Speakers positively or negatively characterize Toraja ethnolinguistic identity when they code-switch into Toraja where Indonesian would normally have been considered more contextually appropriate (Chapter 1), while the cohesiveness of this identity – aestheticized by the centralism of the New Order – is challenged by decentralizing projects elevating regional traditional difference to a politico-juridical distinction (Chapter 2). The following chapter centres on local norms of sociality such as ritual obligations and the reciprocity of labour and commensality, including how liberalization, privatization and technologies such as WhatsApp have created new opportunities for the lower-ranking classes and the transnational diaspora to participate in Toraja cultural life beyond the limits of social rank and the administrative boundaries of the regency (Chapter 3). These chapters are important contributions to the study of how communicational choices constitute a politics of self-representation by performing, debating and participating in Toraja forms of collective belonging.
Subsequent chapters focus on how national and local structures of power are materialized through discursive representations of linguistic registers and the topoi of the local and the state. Chapters 4 and 5 attend to language ideologies concerning Toraja structures of power in which locally-valued ways of speaking invest a speaker with social authority and moral refinement. Whereas during the New Order Indonesian was figured as straightforward, transparent and capable of encompassing regional languages, the highly-formulaic ritual register of Toraja – access to which is socially uneven – is positively valued for its semantic richness, indirectness and opaqueness (Chapter 4). Furthermore, as opposed to the neoliberal ideology of transparent good governance in terms of personal accountability, Toraja orators employ formulaic speech, such as a ritual register and self-abasing honorific formulae, to mitigate their agency and represent themselves as unintentional conduits of social decision making (Chapter 5). Donzelli refers to such dynamics of the post-Suharto era as a ‘vintage aesthetics of the margins’ (p. 238) – in which speakers present Toraja as local and untranslatable into Indonesian (see Chapters 1 and 4), as issuing from traditions that are politico-juridically distinctive and not subsumable under a centralist politics (see Chapters 2 and 5), and as grounded in societal values that are morally superior to the New Order’s bureaucratism (see Chapter 3) – that is, an aesthetic crossover of indigenous revivalist anticipation of democratic reforms with transnational neoliberal ideologies of decentralization (Chapter 6).
Alongside its rich historical and ethnographic accounts of relevance to Indonesianists – for example, of Toraja landholding disputes and post-Suharto regional autonomy reforms – One or Two Words is a valuable contribution to the linguistic anthropological study of sociality constituted through a politics of representation. Here, Donzelli unpacks how Toraja ways of being in the world are enacted, debated, lived, hierarchized, formalized and projected towards the future as political possibilities through the everyday use and representation of language. This conjunction of political transformation, patterns of language use and sociality is effectively captured in the title by ‘one or two words’ (Toraja: sang buku duang buku kada), a self-effacing preamble to and circumlocution for political oration, which Toraja insist is not translatable by the Indonesian pidato (‘oration’) – a self-reflexive construal that foregrounds ‘how apparently trivial fragments of actual communicative interactions may enclose important social and political meanings’ (p. 7). Researchers will find in this book insightful descriptions of relevance to Indonesianists, such as of colonial- and Suharto-era administrative classification and the coincidence of structural adjustment advocates with indigenous regionalists on Sulawesi. Linguistic anthropologists will also find that this book provides a nuanced ethnopragmatic account of metapragmatic discourse, figures of identity, stance-taking and enregisterment as these figure concretely in social life.