LINGUIST List 26.1085
Wed Feb 25 2015
Review: Anthropological Ling; Socioling: Billings (2013)
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 14-Nov-2014
From: Joseph Comer <jvcomer
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''.
Page Updated: 25-Feb-2015