Pacific Affairs: Volume 93, No. 4 – December 2020
land rights movements in that its claim is not based on notions of origin
or indigeneity” (4). The specifics of this ethic of staying are not collected
together at any point for the reader to reflect upon. What precisely does theethic of staying entail? What role does staying play in this ethic? Why is it anethic of staying and not of subsistence? The rich detail that Rizvi brings tothe fore in this book could have been complemented with a more ambitious
concluding chapter to tie some of these loose ends. That said, the detailed
and nuanced engagement with an immensely important movement is thereal strength here, and readers are left with a convincing picture of claims
that exceed legal property rights.

Copyright (c) Pacific Affairs. All rights reserved.
Delivered by Ingenta to IP: 142.103.160.110 on: Tue, 22 Dec 2020 02:12:49

King’s College London, London

Humeira Iqtidar

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE CONTACT IN THE HIMALAYA.
Edited by Selma K. Sonntag and Mark Turin. Cambridge, UK: Open Book
Publishers, 2019. xiii, 181 pp. (Tables, figures, map.) US$27.46, paper. ISBN
978-1-78374-704-7.
As Mark Turin concludes in the final essay of this original and usefuledited volume, “It’s complicated.” The five main chapters and the editors’
introductory and closing essays of The Politics of Language Contact in theHimalaya demonstrate that the history, present, and future of language
contact and politics in the Himalayan region are complicated, nuanced,and changing. Each chapter provides a detailed empirical case study, whileengaging with and building on theoretical concepts.
Selma K. Sonntag’s introductory essay positions the interdisciplinary
contribution of this volume, which is novel for its focus on the politics oflanguage contact, rather than language politics in general. Sonntag helpfully
introduces themes that unify the book’s wide-ranging chapters, such as
enduring power hierarchies, standardization and writing, and relationships
between language, ethnicity, and nations. Turin’s concluding chapter focuseson language shift, a phenomenon that underlies each chapter. The final essay
also addresses potential gaps in the volume, such as the absence of studies
focusing on stateless and refugee populations.
The first chapter, by Tunzhi (Sonam Lhundrop), Hiroyuki Suzuki, andGerald Roche, examines “Language Contact and the Politics of Recognition
amongst Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China.” Far from a simplistic
narrative of Chinese overwhelming the Tibetan language, the authors
demonstrate how speakers of the rTa’u language are harmed by several layersof misrecognition. Through examination of historical, scholarly, and presentday accounts of the rTa’u language and its speakers, the authors show that
despite rTa’u speakers’ hopes of being recognized as Tibetan people who848

Copyright (c) Pacific Affairs. All rights reserved.
Delivered by Ingenta to IP: 142.103.160.110 on: Tue, 22 Dec 2020 02:12:49

Book Reviews
speak a non-Tibetan language, they are excluded through academic andeveryday discourses that position rTa’u speakers as others.
Recognition has been critiqued by other scholars as a concept with thepotential to maintain existing power hierarchies; the politics of refusal, or
the rejection of existing authorities’ legitimacy to provide recognition, rights,
or social services, has been proposed as a more transformative concept.
The authors argue that rTa’u speakers are a group which “is facing misrecognition from a dominant, mainstream group which with it identifies
and which it does not wish to refuse” (41, emphasis original). Tunzhi, Suzuki,
and Roche argue that refusal has been proposed by scholars working in“Western, settler-colonial, liberal-democratic, multicultural societies” (41).
For rTa’u speakers, recognition is still a desired political goal. This discussion
demonstrates the importance of including a diverse set of contexts whendeveloping theoretical concepts, especially those dealing with subalterngroups. The authors additionally take on recent sociolinguistic skepticism
toward bounded, named languages, arguing that approaches “that viewlanguage as a fundamentally dynamic, fluid, fuzzy set of resources” (41) may
not account for the views of speakers themselves, who seek recognition of
their language as a bounded whole.
In the second chapter, Sonntag asks, “What happened to the Ahomlanguage?” Drawing largely from secondary and historiographical sources,
she traces changes in Assamese language regimes, “the institutionalizedpractices of language governance” (50), across three polities: the Ahom
kingdom, British India, and independent India. The account clearly
illustrates her conclusion that “colonial and postcolonial language regimes
are palimpsests, imposed not on blank slates but in complex political andcultural environments marked by historically dynamic language contact”(74), a statement that could frame the entire volume. Sonntag’s chapter
also provides helpful historical examples of language regimes beyond theidealized monolingualism of nation-states.
Uma Pradhan’s chapter, “Transforming language to script: Constructing
linguistic authority through language contact in schools in Nepal” is an
ethnographic study of the reconfiguration of languages, both linguisticallyas they are sanitized for official purposes, and socially, as languages recently
introduced in schooling take new positions in the linguistic hierarchy. The
examples of linguistic sanitization provided in the chapter take the formof writing Tharu and Awadhi languages in ways that more closely resemble
Nepali, leaving the reader wondering whether there were other forms ofsanitization, and also, given the volume’s emphasis on language contact,whether similar processes might be occurring in spoken language as a resultof prolonged contact and unequal power relations between these languages.
Given that the seal of a missionary organization is visible on the multilingual
textbook discussed in the chapter, alongside seals of the government of Nepal
and of the school, the central role of Protestant missionary organizations’849

Copyright (c) Pacific Affairs. All rights reserved.
Delivered by Ingenta to IP: 142.103.160.110 on: Tue, 22 Dec 2020 02:12:49

Pacific Affairs: Volume 93, No. 4 – December 2020
participation in the production of language regimes and linguistic forms
seems worthy of greater attention.
In the following chapter, “The significance of place in ethnolinguistic
vitality,” Maya Daurio depicts a complicated set of overlapping places,languages, and ethnic affiliations. In her account, several layers of migrationand contact shape linguistic affiliations and language use. Daurio’s
contribution offers many empirical details, but she provides limitedtheoretical engagement compared to other chapters in the volume.
Returning to the complexity of language contact in Tibet, Bendi Tso andMark Turin’s chapter “Speaking Chone, speaking ‘shallow’: Dual linguistic
hegemonies in China’s Tibetan frontier” employs the concept of hegemony tounderstand the interaction of Chinese language policy and Chone Tibetans’language ideologies. The discussion, organized around the twin concepts ofcoercion and consent that make up hegemony, illustrates the practices anddiscourses that establish a hierarchy that positions Chinese, Amdo Tibetan,and Chone Tibetan in a descending hierarchy.
This volume is well worth reading, both for the individual chapters andfor the ways they comment on each other. The editors’ choice to publish it asan open access volume, available to read for free on the publisher’s website,
ensures that it will be accessible to readers. This would be an obvious choice
for area studies courses’ syllabi, but would also be appropriate for courses insociolinguistics, language policy, and language contact and change. Turinconcludes by wondering whether the “historic multilingualism” of the region“will endure and outlive the narrow ruptures of nationalism” (174). The
deep-seated, complex multilingual history, present, and hopefully future(as Turin points out) of the Himalayan region makes it a region not only
important for empirical study but also for contributions to theory building
and imagining plurilingual linguistic futures.
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore

Miranda Weinberg

ARC OF CONTAINMENT: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism
in Southeast Asia. The United States in the World; Studies of the Weatherhead
East Asian Institute, Columbia University. By Wen-Qing Ngoei. Ithaca;
London: Cornell University Press, 2019. x, 254 pp. (Map, B&W photos.)
US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-5017-1640-9.
Scholars of Southeast Asia are familiar with the “common-sense” stories
that the United States and Britain tell about their own involvement in theregion. Southeast Asia looms large in British history books as a site of colonial
competition and conquest—a backdrop for their wartime struggles against
Japanese imperialism and the post-war incubator for foundational modelsof anti-communist counterinsurgency. For Americans, Southeast Asia was850