Kuipers' book is based on ethnographic fieldwork
carried out in the Weyewa Highlands of western Sumba, an
island in eastern Indonesia. His initial fieldwork in 1978
resulted in his work Power in performance (1990),
about Weyewa “ritual speech” (tenda)
– a set of political, religious, and personal verbal
genres utilizing a large stock of traditional couplets,
in which the two lines are parallel in both rhythm and
meaning. Returning to the field in 1989, 1990, and 1994,
Kuipers discovered that the obvious loci of change –
new schools, roads, economic activities, and religious
ideas – could not by themselves account for the direction
of change in Weyewa language practices. Stimulated by a
recent body of literature in linguistic anthropology dealing
with “linguistic ideology,” Kuipers attempts
in the present volume to show that changes in ritual speech
genres – reinterpretations, erasures, refunctionalizations,
and condensations – cannot be explained without taking
into account local and imported beliefs about the nature
of language.