Content area
Full text
Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba.
Joel C. Kuipers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 185 pp.
How do you study something that disappears before your eyes? In his first book, The Power in Performance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), Joel Kuipers presented Sumbanese ritual speech as "arguably one of the most vibrant and integral traditions of parallelistic speech anywhere in the world" (1990:xiii). In this second book, published just eight years later, he argues that it has been transformed and marginalized so thoroughly that it is barely recognizable. Massive conversions have made Sumba, once the last "pagan" island in the Malay archipelago, into a largely Christian community, where large-scale feasts and rituals once dedicated to the ancestors are no longer held, and Indonesian is the main form of communication in nearly all public gatherings.
These changes have forced the author to reexamine his analysis of the traditional authority system, which he now sees as "more circumscribed, fragile and marginal" than he had realized earlier, and to re-think concepts of linguistic ideology and linguistic change. At the same time, they have pushed him to do a much deeper historical and political study of Sumbanese notions of centers and peripheries, traditional forms of language learning and school-based "education," and the relationship of spectator and audience. The result is a courageous, engaging, and lively account of the challenges of modernity at the edges of the Indonesian nation, as well as a major contribution to...