26.1085, Review: Anthropological Ling; Socioling: Billings (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1085. Wed Feb 25 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1085, Review: Anthropological Ling; Socioling: Billings (2013)

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Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2015 14:08:20
From: Joseph Comer [jvcomer at gmail.com]
Subject: Language, Globalization and the Making of a Tanzanian Beauty Queen

 
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AUTHOR: Sabrina  Billings
TITLE: Language, Globalization and the Making of a Tanzanian Beauty Queen
SERIES TITLE: Encounters
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Joseph V Comer, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University

Review's Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Ashley Parker

SUMMARY

The enduring yet increasingly oft-repeated question of how those living at
linguistic, cultural, geographic and economic peripheries take part in, or are
left out of, the wider world, is explored in this fascinating study of beauty
pageants in Tanzania by Sabrina Billings of the University of Arkansas, USA.
It is important to note, however, prior to further summary of the content,
structure, and value of the book, that in the words of its author, it “is as
much about lives as it is about pageants” (Billings 2014:1). This book is
about the ways in which the average Tanzanians, the young women profiled and
discussed therein, encounter and consider the world and their place in it. As
explored in Billings’ work, the interplay and recurrent renegotiation of
gender roles, cosmopolitan practices, and tradition within Tanzanian and
global society exposes “the manifold ways in which young urban Tanzanian women
tap into and integrate a wide array of locally-sourced and international
resources for aesthetic, practical and identity-making purposes” (Billings
2014:3). It is important to approach this book, however, noting that these
women are “sensitive to their particular place on the global periphery”
(Billings 2014:3). This is a profound and insightful analysis of the nature of
inequality across numerous overlapping and interrelated spectra – gender,
class, rural/urban divides, and the struggle between tradition and the complex
institutions of modernity.

Peripheral contexts such as the beauty pageants Billings discusses act as
crucial sites for truly understanding the current sociolinguistics of
globalisation. I lament the fact that these sites are often neglected in
favour of a focus on central, urban spaces as part of understanding the
linguistic dimensions of contemporary globalisation, and welcome Billings’
contribution to the discourse.  I believe, as many esteemed researchers do,
that the dynamics of centre-periphery relations have a profound role in the
evolution of language practices, and that these practices might, in turn, have
wider resonance beyond the sites under investigation (cf. Kelly-Holmes and
Pietkainen 2013). The dynamics exposed and examined in this book are testament
to this wider resonance – Billings’ work shared insights that are valuable
well beyond the context of beauty pageants, and well beyond the borders of
Tanzania and East Africa. Prior to further evaluation of the book, I will
briefly outline the content of each chapter. 

The book opens with an introduction to Tanzania, its people, its geography,
and the role of pageants across this multilingual, multiethnic, postcolonial
nation-state. Two vignettes regarding the pageant experiences and post-pageant
outcomes of two former contestants are used to outline the structure of
national competitions. As well, aspects of these competitions and their
relation to the imagining of Tanzania as a globally-oriented and cosmopolitan
nation, complete with a thriving national culture, and a feminine archetype –
Miss Tanzania – are introduced. The two vignettes expose a recurrent theme of
Billings’ book: the thoroughly commodifying and commodified nature of beauty
pageants, and the aspiring and enthroned queens that contest them. In the same
way as Coupland (2003:468, following Machin and Van Leeuwin 2003) describes
for “Cosmopolitan” magazine, beauty pageants market “distinctive, idealised
images of women, female appearance and female sexuality, but also complete
lifestyles”, seeking to universalise female experience while simultaneously
accommodating cultural specificities. 

To complete the introduction, Billings also provides valuable and
well-outlined insight into her research methodology and design, outlining the
focus groups and interviews she conducted and pageant proceedings she attended
over time. She also takes care to note the informal, intimate, and irascibly
complex nature of much of the research, the processes of trust-building and
strengthening that take place over time during that research, and the need to
integrate the linguistic and non-linguistic in her analysis. The division of
chapters within the book ably supports that balance of the linguistic and
non-linguistic, of relatively direct communicative behaviours and those that
are more symbolic. 

The second chapter, for example, offers a direct, historical, and suitably
critical examination of the sociolinguistic landscape of Tanzania, and
specifically the relationship between Swahili and English, the co-official
languages of the country. Language in education is a hotly debated topic in
Tanzania, given the varying ideological associations of both Swahili and
English, and Billings (2014:34) notes that “ideologies about language are
regularly projected onto non-linguistic actions and thus they can, and often
do, have important effects on individual’s lived worlds.” Billings introduces
the concept of a ‘dearth-or-glut’ dichotomy for language in Africa discussed
by Fardon and Furniss (1994) and Fabian (1986), in which language(s) are
characterised by either a ‘dearth’ (lack of grammatical, conceptual,
orthographic or other necessary components), or ‘glut’ (the opposite - that
is, too much ethnolinguistic difference, too much diversity, too many people).
Billings seeks to present language use in Tanzania as it is, rather than as it
is easily conceptualised or dichotomised, and also as it easily co-opted to
articulate ideological and political ends. The construction of the Tanzanian
nation-state over time has been characterised by ongoing complex
conceptualisations of class, social status, and political structure, and the
language ideologies that inform and constitute those conceptualisations. One
result of this is that today, as Billings (2014:38) notes, “Swahili has become
so widely distributed in Tanzania that, in contrast to many African nations,
the country operates publicly, to a great degree, in this one indigenous
language”. However, the ongoing roles of Swahili, English, and other
indigenous languages are more contingent and complex than this. 

The third chapter discusses the role of the feminine in Tanzanian society, and
the reflection and contestation of Tanzanian national identity alongside and
within contested ideals of the feminine in beauty pageant contexts. Billings
describes the intrinsic linkages between the performance of pageantry and a
performance of nationhood, noting that “the 'banal' ways in which what it
means to be Tanzanian are performed, critiqued and questioned in and around
beauty pageants shed light on the long-term struggles around Tanzanian
national culture” (Billings 2014:58). These long-term contestations involve
and interweave the use of Swahili and the use of English, the idealised female
form, the battles between tradition and modernity, and of course the role of
the women of Tanzania in its embrace of cosmopolitan, Western values. The
questions asked during pageants reflect what Hannerz (2005) calls “the worried
face of cosmopolitanism”, or “cosmopolitics”, an awareness of and engagement
with the wider world and society, specifically its scourges, struggles and the
solutions to them, and in this way, young women are presented as a 'hope for
the future', or in Billings' words, “shepherds of future generations, towards
a 'modern' sensibility” (Billings 2014:88). This is in spite of their
involvement in pageantry marking them out for abuse as MALAYA 'prostitutes,'
'loose' women, and for their alleged UTOVU WA NIDHAMU 'lack of good
behaviour'. Women frame themselves and are framed by their participation in
the pageants as representatives of the nation, and reflective of a bright
tomorrow, in a way that is problematic, at odds with the traditional. A
remarkable amount of faith is placed in Tanzanian beauty queens to effect
change, and represent all Tanzanian citizens, even if they are dissimilar to
most Tanzanians in their orientation to the world, sensibilities, and quest
for independent lives.

The fourth and fifth chapters of Billings' book elaborate upon the discourses
and language use of Tanzanian pageantry, and specifically the inequalities
thereof, informed by spatial and class-based hierarchies which validate the
use of English while casting Swahili as  inferior. Pageant contestant's
language use exemplifies attempts to index a high level of education and a
belonging to the Tanzanian elite – those whose linguistic norms and practices
are closest to that of the wealthiest parts of Dar Es Salaam. As purported
representatives of Tanzanian identity, contestants' idealised, indexed, and
valorised use of English works to further peripheralise and exclude minority
language use, as well as the use of Swahili in certain elite contexts, and
reveal the language ideologies at play in Tanzanian society. It exposes as
well as further constitutes the well-documented postcolonial standing of
English as a language of education, success, style and opportunity. Billings
provides numerous examples of English use vis-á-vis Swahili, using them to
illustrate, in her words, how “the place of English in Tanzania facilitates
the reproduction of dramatic inequalities that cut across geographic as well
as social space” (Billings 2014:122). 

Later, in framing the contestants as schoolgirls (accurately, given not just
their age but also the nature of pageants as a means to enhance and capitalise
upon one's education and therefore one's entire well-being, Billings seeks to
expose a social-constructedness to discourses of education within the pageant
context, as well as outside of it. Pageant participants are generally seen and
understood as educated women, as independent members of a rising middle-class,
with sometimes far more formal education than the majority of Tanzanians.
However, the practical realities of what school can offer girls and young
women, because of their class, locality, as well as because of their gender,
interfere with and contradict the idealised discourses of what pageants are
and what they too can offer, in profound ways. 

The final chapter of this book is an extended examination of the trope of
KUTAFUTA MAISHA, or 'looking for life,' the search for mobility, opportunity
and the cosmopolitan in the Tanzanian context to which Billings' pageant
research is testament. Billings highlights the ways in which English indexes
poise, desirability, intelligence, confidence, 'Western knowledge' and
enlightenment for pageant participants. However, that indexicality is
complicated by the peripherality of Tanzania on a global scale, and the fewer
resources available for even its pageant winners and successes. Tanzania has
never won Miss World, and Miss Tanzania remains a peripheral figure in the
global marketplace which constitutes and is constitutive of global pageantry.
In Billings' (2014:190) words, pageant participants' “orientation towards the
global, as at once pleasurable, potentially profitable and life-changing,
gives real shape to their lives … [but] it is also an orientation that puts
into high relief the inequalities that are nearly escapable strictures of
their lives on the global periphery”. In returning to the subject of one of
the earlier vignettes in the introduction, Justina, Billings underlines that
this is a book about lives, and individuals, as much as it is a book about the
larger architecture and process of pageant participation. Justina's life, like
that of so many others, is defined by her desires and those of her community,
the many crossroads at which she stands, and the competing pressures she must
withstand as she, like so many others, attempts to forge a future for herself
outside of but in relation to the geographic, economic and social centre of a
globalised world.

EVALUATION

This evaluation of Billings’ work should note one early element of the book
that is a true highlight, and which I believe is fundamental to its strength
as a whole. It is an excellent book, a coherent and well structured
ethnography punctuated with many outstanding arguments, with reach across and
between several disciplines. In a very simple way, though, it is the
‘accessibility’ and ‘clarity’ of this book that is its greatest strength, and
the expert balance between the professional, or the academic, and the
personal. In the introduction, Billings’ integration of explicit commentary on
the nature of pageantry, elicited by those involved, and implicit evidence
gleaned from her own careful analysis, is extremely capably achieved and
enriches the experience of reading the book a great deal. Understanding the
methodological and meta-pragmatic considerations of Billings’ research is
fundamental to appreciating the value of this book, and her success in
recording this kind of metadata, and information about her
information-gathering, is clearly one of the reasons it succeeds.  Apart from
that, however, Billings’ book is an enjoyable and extremely informative and
provocative work simply because of how well it supports emergent understanding
of how “the traditional concept of ‘language’ is dislodged and destabilised by
globalisation” (Blommaert 2010:2), and how the interrelated processes and
patterns [of globalisation] are, “even if not new in substance … new in
intensity, scope and scale” (Blommaert 2010:1). 

The potential for future research for this work to be informed by is massive.
One can only hope that it finds a large audience of researchers, present and
future, to digest its nuanced characterisation of language, globalisation,
gender, and the ongoing socio-economic development of the global
periphery/global South, and engage in complex ethnographic research in future.
This book has no significant shortcomings, but of course, that does not mean
there aren't much deeper questions or different lenses with which to broach
its subject(s).

Overall, this book is an excellent micro-analysis of language in and around
Tanzanian beauty pageants, revealing the links and conflicts between
discourses of structural inequality, education, urbanisation and urbanity,
gender relations, and the divides between cosmopolitan centres and the global
periphery. It is a pleasure to read, both for its content and for the quality
of the writing, and should be read and enjoyed by many.

REFERENCES

Billings, S. (2014), Language, Globalization and the Making of a Tanzanian
Beauty Queen, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Blommaert J. (2010), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Coupland, N. (2003), 'Introduction: A Sociolinguistics of Globalization',
Journal of Sociolinguistics, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 465-472.

Fardon, R. and Furniss, G. (1994), 'Introduction: Frontiers and Boundaries –
African Languages as Political Environment', in Fardon, R. and Furniss, G.
(eds.), African Languages, Development and the State, New York: Routledge, pp.
1-29.

Hannerz, U. (2005), 'Two Faces of Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics',
Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift Vol. 107, No.3, pp. 199-213.

Kelly-Holmes, H. and Pietkanen, S. (eds.)(2013), Multilingualism and the
Periphery, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Machin, D. and Van Leeuwin, T. (2003), 'Global Schemas and Local Discourses in
Cosmopolitan', Journal of Sociolinguistics, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 493-512.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I consider myself an anthropological linguist with deep-held interests at the
locus of theories of language, culture and cognition, international
development (particularly participatory approaches to community development),
globalisation, global mobility and migration, the characterisation of ''the
global South'', urbanisation, and post-colonial and post-structuralist
perspectives on society and ''development''.





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