[Linganth] Aurora Donzelli's book

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Aurora Donzelli discusses her book, *One or Two Words: Language and
Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia *on the blog today,
responding to questions posed by Nicco La Mattina.

https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: The Toraja highlanders of Indonesia use the expression “one or
two words” to refer euphemistically to their highly elaborate form of
political speechmaking. Taking off from this understatement, which signals
the meaningfulness of transient acts of speech, *One or Two Words* offers
an analysis of the shifting power relations between centers and peripheries
in one of the world’s most linguistically diverse countries. Drawing on
long-term fieldwork, Aurora Donzelli explores how people forge forms of
collective belonging to a distinctive locality through the exchange of
spoken words, WhatsApp messages, ritual gifts of pigs and buffaloes, and
the performance of elaborate political speeches and ritual chants. Donzelli
describes the complex forms of cosmopolitan indigeneity that have emerged
in the Toraja highlands during several decades of encounters with a variety
of local and international interlocutors, and by engaging wider debates on
the dynamics of cultural and linguistic change in relationship to
globalizing influences, the book sheds light on a neglected dimension of
post-Suharto Indonesia: the recalibration of power relations between
national and local languages. *One or Two Words* will be of interest to
scholars of language, politics, power relationships, identity, social
change, and local responses to globalizing influences.
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