Resource Spotlight | “One or Two Words: Language and Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia” by Aurora Donzelli
ONE OR TWO WORDS
Language and Politics in the
Toraja Highlands of Indonesia
by Aurora Donzelli
Published by National University of Singapore Press.
The expression “one or two words” is used by the Toraja highlanders of Indonesia to refer euphemistically to their highly elaborate form of political speechmaking. Moving from this understatement, which denotes 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, this book 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.
Aurora 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. By engaging wider debates on the dynamics of cultural and linguistic change vis-à-vis globalizing influences, the book sheds light onto a hitherto neglected dimension of post-Suharto Indonesia: the recalibration of power relations between national and local languages. This will be of interest to other scholars of language, politics, power relationships, identity, social change, and local responses to globalizing influences.
"One or Two Words is a refreshingly original ethnography by an author trained in both anthropology and linguistics. Donzelli has combined her skills in these disciplines to produce a striking portrait of Toraja people and culture in the 21st century, illuminating the ever-shifting relationships between language, politics and identity in one region of today’s rapidly-changing Indonesia."
— Roxana Waterson, National University of Singapore
Aurora Donzelli
Aurora Donzelli is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist with an expertise in Southeast Asia. Her first book—Methods of Desire (University of Hawaii Press, 2019)—examines the intersection between language and capitalism among the inhabitants of the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, in Indonesia and discusses how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank is transforming the ways in which people desire, voice their entitlements, and imagine the future.
Her second book—One or Two Words (NUS Press, 2020)—analyzes the transformations in political talk ensuing from Indonesia’s administrative restructuring and describes the emerging forms of cosmopolitan indigeneity and the novel ways of imagining the nation-state in the Indonesian peripheries. She is a Recipient of research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and she is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bologna, in Italy and at Sarah Lawrence College, New York.
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