Linguistic Anthropology Research Articles

Language Use and Professional Discourse as an Important Component of Forensic Anthropology

Communication plays a vital role in the perception of forensic anthropology as a necessary and beneficial component ofsociety, and, as anthropologists, we are responsible for communicating in a way that is considered appropriate by the communities weserve. Consequently, understanding what constitutes “appropriate” and “inappropriate” language is an important component of forensicanthropology. Despite the importance of communication, classroom learning and professional training in forensic anthropology do notalways directly address language use. Using concepts from linguistic anthropology, the aim of this study is to determine what registersexist within forensic anthropology; how they are learned, understood, and communicated; the ways in which they compare to language usein other forensic disciplines; and why it is important to address professional language use in forensic anthropology. The term registerrefers to linguistic repertoire associated with particular persons and social settings, varying culturally with individuals and their socialpractices (Agha 1999). Data collected from an online questionnaire distributed to members of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences(AAFS) were used to analyze individual perceptions of language use in professional settings. Results show that register is affected bydemographic variation among professionals, audience, location, and professional experience. Registers that commonly appear includetechnical jargon, professional, respectful, and humorous language. This study concludes that language competency is vital in maintainingan ethical relationship with both public and professional communities, and that students and early professionals would benefit from a moredirect approach to learning the significance and use of language in forensic settings.

Fat, Black, and Ugly: The Semiotic Production of Prodigious Femininities

AbstractTaking up the trinomial “fat, Black, and ugly” as a discomforting point of departure, this piece explores several ways fatness and Blackness are discursively constructed as social comorbidities for feminine people and examines how this discourse affects lived experience. It considers how the discursive field in which “fat, Black, and ugly” dwells traverses temporal and social scales: from early twentieth‐century science discourse to recent social media discourse, and from state policies to inner voices. Inspired by Gina Athena Ulysse’s rasanblaj approach, the analysis uses a combination of personal narrative/autoethnography and discourse analysis, and draws from sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, Black feminist studies, African feminist studies, and fat studies. I convene these fields and methodologies in an effort to think about a semiotic collusion between fatness and Blackness that expels certain subjects from legible and legitimate humanness and value in an anti‐Black anthroposphere—or, via the illuminations of Hortense Spillers, that renders them prodigious flesh that prevails in the beyond.

“Let’s Go, Baby Forklift!”: Fandom Governance and the Political Power of Cuteness in China

This article describes how the Chinese state borrows from the culture of celebrity fandom to implement a novel strategy of governing that we term “fandom governance.” We illustrate how state-run social media employed fandom governance early in the COVID-19 pandemic when the country was convulsed with anxiety. As the state faced a crisis, state social media responded with a propagandistic display of state efficacy, broadcasting a round-the-clock livestream of a massive emergency hospital construction project. Chinese internet users playfully embellished imagery from the livestream. They unexpectedly transformed the construction vehicles into cute personified memes, with Baby Forklift and Baby Mud Barfer (a cement mixer) among the most popular. In turn, state social media strategically channeled this playful engagement in politically productive directions by resignifying the personified vehicles as celebrity idols. Combining social media studies with cultural and linguistic anthropology, we offer a processual account of the semiotic mediations involved in turning vehicles into memes, memes into idols, and citizens into fans. We show how, by embedding cute memes within modules of fandom management such as celebrity ranking lists, state social media rendered them artificially vulnerable to a fall in status. Fans, in turn, rallied around to “protect” these cute idols with small but significant acts of digital devotion and care, organizing themselves into fan circles and exhorting each other to vote. In elevating the memes to the status of celebrity idols, state social media thereby created a disposable pantheon of virtual avatars for the state, and consolidated state power around citizens’ voluntary response to vulnerability. We analyze fandom governance as a new development in the Chinese state’s long history of governing citizens through the management of emotion.

Towards a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Laughters: Correlating two Contexts

Laughter is a pervasive human behavior that is frequently transcribed into written texts as ‘laughter onomatopoeia’ (LO), to represent the sound of laughter and various emotions within a specific context. Particularly, LO have a rich pragmatic impact on the facilitating of communications (Xia 2021). A such, this study discusses the (LO) of animation in texts in Chinese contexts, and erects a comparison with its translation into Japanese. In particular, the study focuses on the analysis of the interjection and sentence-ending particle as discourse markers in both languages and both cultural contexts. The results of the study suggest that speakers of both Chinese and Japanese employ various LOs to in their pragmatic application of their respective languages, yet these LOs differ between the two languages. For example, in the Chinese context, LOs depicting laughter in social interaction can signify the intention to maintain friendly relations, or to resolve problematic interactions. In the Japanese context, however, speakers largely avoid LO, as such discourse can increase tensions and antagonism between interlocutors.

榎本剛士（著）『学校英語教育のコミュニケーション論 「教室で英語を学ぶ」ことの教育言語人類学試論』大阪大学出版会，2019

榎本剛士（著）『学校英語教育のコミュニケーション論 「教室で英語を学ぶ」ことの教育言語人類学試論』大阪大学出版会，2019

Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women

AbstractWhat do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.

Mathematical poetic structures: The sound shape of collaboration

This paper outlines a new method of mathematical discourse analysis focused on identifying poetic structures in students’ mathematical conversations. Following the linguistic anthropology tradition inspired by Roman Jakobson, poetic structures refer to any conversational repetition of sounds, words or syntax; this repetition draws attention to the form of the message. In mathematical conversations, poetic structures can express patterns, rhythms, similarities or dissimilarities associated with a task. Methodological dilemmas associated with identifying and representing poetic structures and pragmatic responses are highlighted. An analysis of a nine minute algebraic problem-solving conversation revealed eight types of mathematical poetic structures that collectively assisted all of the students’ vital mathematical insights. The paper aims to demonstrate that poetic analysis of mathematical conversations can bridge the illusory distinction between mathematical discourse and mathematical reasoning.

Playable Personas: Using Games and Play to Expand the Repertoire of Learner Personas

This article explores how playing and co-creating games in higher education contexts contributes to expanding learner personas and facilitating a multimodal learning experience. Working from the interdisciplinary perspectives of media/games studies, pedagogy, and linguistic anthropology, we conceptualize in-class learning as the making and playing of games, reporting on game experiments and playful practices targeted at learning key theoretical concepts in our disciplines. Game-based modifications to established educational practices involved: replacing lectures with Educational Live Action Role Play (Bowman 2014) sessions, using acting/performance games (Flanagan 2009) to critically reflect on ideas of community and collective identity, and introducing Twine (Werning 2017; Wilson & Saklofske 2019) to defamiliarize the expected structures and media modalities of academia. Based on evidence from participant reflections and classroom ethnographies, we argue that games can serve as a resource for extending the expressive spectrum of learner personas, for enabling embodied, participatory learning of theory, and for empowering students and educators to reflect on our internalized rules of the game of education.

Intelligible Pitch: A Shared Topos in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ethnomusicology and Anthropological Linguistics

AbstractFocusing on mid-twentieth-century exchanges between ethnomusicology and anthropological linguistics, this essay explores the challenges and special insights that came with the study of pitc...

Living Tongue: The Proposal Speech in West Sulawesi, Indonesia

This article discusses about the marriage proposal speech through the linguistic anthropology perspective. Specifically, it elaborates the characteristics of the marriage proposal speech of Pakkado community in West Sulawesi especially on the aspects of parallelism and metaphor. The rationality of this study is to provide a better understanding of marriage proposal speech which is in line with the cultural aspect of the speakers.This research used participant observation method. The techniques used were recording and field note taking. The result of this study contributes in two factors: ethnography and academic. Ethnographically, the marriage proposal speeches which are dialectically produced by the community are very heterogeneous. Theoretically, the speech is not only referential, but also indexically non-referential. The result showed that the proposal speech displayed varieties of metaphor and parallelism, Keywords: Pakkado proposal speech, metaphor, parallelism DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/11-6-04 Publication date: March 31 st 2021

Introduction

Introduction Douglas R. Parks This special issue of Anthropological Linguistics contains ten articles on personal names in Native languages of North America. All but one of these articles are revised versions of papers originally presented at the special session "American Indian Personal Names: A Neglected Lexical Genre" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in Portland, Oregon, on 7 January 2012.1 There is no modern, comprehensive linguistic description of American Indian naming systems. Published sources of names are primarily lists compiled by anthropologists, linguists, and historians. Even though personal names are an integral part of the languages and cultures of Native peoples, linguists usually do not document names for the languages they study: they do not utilize names as data for their grammars, and they generally do not include names in their dictionaries. The purpose of the special session was to bring together a group of Americanist linguists who have an interest in personal names in the languages they study; contributions were selected to represent the diversity of naming systems found in Native North American language families and to enable the participants to identify major issues in the study of names. The resulting articles describe the salient linguistic and semantic features of the names in these languages, illustrating how names are important semantic and grammatical domains in Native American languages, forming systems within the larger linguistic context, and why their study is essential for language documentation—for morphological and syntactic analysis, and for the compilation of richer dictionaries. They also illustrate how for most North American groups, rich archival corpora of names are available that have rarely been utilized by linguists and exemplify the methods and challenges of studying them. Even though personal names are a relatively neglected subject in North American linguistics and anthropology, significant work has been done over the years; some of the more noteworthy contributions may be mentioned here. The earliest linguist to give notable attention to personal names on the Plains was James Owen Dorsey, who beginning in 1871 devoted more than twenty years to documenting the Dhegiha and other Siouan languages. He recorded hundreds of personal names for each, but he published only one article, "Indian Personal Names" (1890). Although he planned to write a monograph on Siouan personal names, he died before completing it. Today his manuscripts are archived primarily in the National Anthropological Archives. [End Page 1] Other early linguists working on the Plains included C. C. Uhlenbeck; he published "Geslachts- en Persoonsnamen der Peigans" (1912), in which he cites the names of Piegan bands and a representative number of individuals' personal names, and discusses the historical incidents upon which the names were based. Edward Sapir (1924) compiled a list of ninety-four Sarsi names that he published in phonetic transcription, together with literal and free English translations, and then grouped into seven semantic categories: geographical references, tribal names, war names, names referring to horses and riding, names based on incidents or objects, and names referring to personal characteristics. Later in the century, James A. Goss (1973) reported on his attempt to develop a model for the naming practices of the Southern Ute Indians of Colorado that would enable him to predict, on the basis of a set of binary features, the sex, age, kin affiliations, and shamanistic powers from a name itself. Throughout the early twentieth century a small number of linguists and anthropologists who engaged in fieldwork with particular groups recorded lists of names, some of which were published, while others remain unpublished. For example, in the Southwest, the Franciscan Fathers at St. Michael's Mission on the Navajo Reservation documented various aspects of the language. In 1910, they published An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language, an innovative linguistic work in which the entries have English head words arranged according to a vast array of cultural topics and activities as well as natural phenomena. Among them is a long entry entitled "Personal Names" that identifies seven categories of names: for boys, for girls, and for women; for men; for distinguished chiefs, treaty signers, and American residents; and tribal names. N. H. Winchell published in The Aborigines of...

An open letter to the editors of the Journal of Language and Sexuality

Abstract In this open letter, I ask the editors of the Journal and its readers, to reflect on the Journal’s relationship to studies of language and Black sexuality, and consider new ways to reach scholars of Black life, culture, and language. Studies of Black language practices rarely deal with the ways that Black language practices are often complicated by gender/sexuality. And yet, there are scholars doing this work, but like Queer Linguistics, it often doesn’t “look” that way that typical studies of language are supposed to look. This is because linguistics and linguistic anthropology as disciplines have often failed to capture the imagination and attention of these scholars; it is not because studies of Black sexuality and language do not exist. I encourage the Journal then to seek out these studies and to do so with a sense of urgency.

Discovering Unwritten Stories—A Modular Case Study in Promoting Landscape Education

Landscapes have been and are an important aspect of any society, culture, economy and environment. Besides the role of landscape and Landscape Sciences in these arenas, there have been increasingly greater calls to incorporate landscape into the curriculum. Moreover, Landscape Education is beneficial in developing important foundations in students, particularly that of active citizenry. While the benefits of Landscape Education are evident, current research remains focused on Western, especially European, contexts. This article discusses how a leading Singapore public University incorporates Landscape Education within a relatively new module on Toponymy offered in the Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Programme. While the links between Linguistics and a course in Toponymy or even the links between Toponymy and Landscape may not be immediately apparent, an analysis of the content covered in the module demonstrates congruence to existing frameworks and principles in teaching Landscape Education and, at the same time, provides a case in point in interdisciplinarity, drawing from diverse disciplines such as Language, Linguistics, History, Geography, Landscape Sciences, Anthropological Linguistics, among many others. This study provides useful references for educational institutions in incorporating Landscape Education into their curriculum.

Ecological validity in the study of language

Having its seat in both realms, the subjective and the intersubjective, as a product of human mind, society and culture, language appears to be the most complex phenomenon in the known Universe. It displays multiple layers of organization in its spoken and written manifestations, none of which can be ignored at the expense of any other, in communication, ideation and information processing. Therefore language, being an organic system of utmost complexity, requires holistic and organic methodology. Such methodology requires meeting the criterion of ecological validity. In the realm of psychological research, Gilliam Cohen, a cognitive psychologist, advocates “a return to real-life situations”, such as “remembering real faces, shopping lists, scenes, etc.” She demonstrated a reaction against “rigorous and artificial” psychological experiments, based on “nonsense syllables or words out of context”.[1] Similarly, ‘ecological validity’ in linguistics requires a naturalistic treatment of linguistic data, real usage instances stemming from field work and/or the study of discourse/texts. Both observation and experimentation in linguistic research require naturalistic methods, where the so-called ‘simplicity should not be sought at the expense of factuality’. In this sense, explorations into real texts within the Systemic-Functional Grammar framework, field work in the Anthropological Linguistics tradition, or the usage-based model proposed in Cognitive Grammar, all meet the criterion of ecological validity. This paper is bound to grasp some of the questions inherent within multiple spectra organically resting among the constellations that reflect philosophical, psychological and linguistic points of reference. These points of reference also emerged organically and naturally throughout the history of their evolution, in their own terms, as they evolved in their ‘ecosystems’ of ideas. In this way we hope to provide a broad realm for reflection on language and linguistic methodology, allowing to see unity through diversity, thus creating mutual affiliations of a parallel, convergent and complementary character, in the vein of an organic whole. First, we shall take a bird’s eye view on ontological and epistemological questions regarding any kind of exploration within the Universe of natural phenomena. Next, we shall take a general view on linguistic enquiry in the 20th century. Finally, we shall survey key approaches to language articulating overall aspects of structural, functional, generative and cognitive orientations.[1] Cohen, 1977:6

Defending borders and crossing boundaries: ideologies of polylanguaging in interviews with bilingual Ukrainian youth

ABSTRACT This paper analyses adolescent Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals’ stances towards polylanguaging as evidenced in their talk about and use of suržyk, a stigmatised polylingual practice that combines features from Ukrainian and Russian. Drawing from group interviews with 39 Ukrainian young people (aged 14–15), it uses Bakhtin’s (The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans). University of Texas Press; 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. and Trans). University of Minnesota Press) concept of voice and Agha’s (Voice, footing, and enregisterment, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15(1), 8–59) work on registers as social voices to explore the alignments that these young people take up vis-a-vis the ideologically-mediated voices that suržyk has traditionally indexed. Through a micro-level discourse analysis of both metadiscourses in which ideologies of linguistic boundary maintenance were explicitly articulated and intervieees’ crossing of these boundaries during the interviews, the analysis shows how these young people appropriated, resisted, or creatively exploited prevailing purist ideologies and considers implications for a possible re-evauation of suržyk as a normative practice.

From my parents’ language to my language: understanding language ideologies of young Australian Korean heritage language learners at the primary and secondary school level

ABSTRACT The increasing influx into Australia of (im)migrants whose first language is not English has made Australia linguistically more diverse than ever. Despite this, Australia remains a strongly Anglocentric nation, and migrants, in response, tend to abandon their heritage languages (HL) and shift to English relatively quickly. Korean migrants in Australia buck this trend, as they show a relatively high level of language maintenance. The Australian Korean community, nevertheless, experiences a language shift to English among different generations, and a sharp decline in the rate of high school students enrolled in Korean community language schools. The present study expands existing accounts of HL maintenance in Australia. Specifically, drawing on interviews with six Korean-speaking children, it compares the views about the HL of primary and secondary school students. In line with language ideologies (Kroskrity [2004]. “Language Ideologies.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by A. Duranti, 496–517. Malden, MA: Blackwell.; Woolard [1998]. “Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard, and P. V. Kroskrity, 20–86. New York: Oxford University Press.), data analysis and interpretation employ positioning theory (Davies and Harré [1990]. “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1): 43–63.). A key finding is that their ideologies around the HL vary by school age. The comparison also suggests that their language ideologies are associated with the domains where they practise their HL, and the ways they position themselves. The study contributes to a dynamic understanding of multilingualism and HL education in a multicultural society.

POR UMA LINGUÍSTICA APLICADA ANTIRRACISTA, DESCOLONIAL E MILITANTE: Racismo e branquitude e seus efeitos sociais

: In the field of Brazilian Applied Linguistics there are some researches (XXX, 2016b; FERREIRA, 2015; MUNIZ, 2016, 2020; NASCIMENTO, 2019, 2020; SOUZA, 2011, 2020) that mobilize the categories of language, identity and race in a nested way. In addition, in our area, we have had an increasingly decolonial turn (XXX, 2016a) that has sought “alternatives, without the purisms or fundamentalisms characteristic of coloniality, for the construction of decolonialities in the understanding of the world and social life” ( GUIMARAES; VESZ, 2019, p. 7-8). In this sense, this article argues in favor of an antirracist, decolonial and militant Applied Linguistics. To this end, I conduct a discursive-pragmatic analysis of the textual trajectory of speech acts related to black and white racial identities on Facebook in order to demonstrate the relationships between language, coloniality, whiteness and racism as well as the need for a decolonial perspective of language in LA . As theoretical-methodological contributions, I have based on linguistic research in the applied field that has focused on the relationships between language, racism and (un) colonialities (PINTO, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014a, 2018; MUNIZ; 2016; NASCIMENTO, 2019), the authors / authors of contemporary decolonial criticism (FANON, 2008; KILOMBA, 2019; MIGNOLO, 2006; QUIJANO, 2010) as well as in analytical categories from linguistic anthropology (BAUMAN & BRIGGS, 1990). I concluded that our linguistic practices are racialized and therefore language cannot do without being analyzed in its articulation with colonial processes and with the forms of subjectivity that participate (r) am in the construction of racial bodies and identities throughout the world-system -patriarcal-capitalist-colonial-modern (GROSFOGUEL, 2010). Keywords: Applied Linguistics Antirracist; Whiteness; decoloniality.

Edward Sapir’s Legacy in Canadian Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology

Edward Sapir’s Legacy in Canadian Linguistics and Linguistic Anthropology

Multimodal conduct in the law: Language, gesture and materiality in legal interaction by Gregory Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert

Reviewed by: Multimodal conduct in the law: Language, gesture and materiality in legal interaction by Gregory Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert Elizabeth Mertz Multimodal conduct in the law: Language, gesture and materiality in legal interaction. By Gregory Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 262. ISBN 9781108402866. $33.99. In this impressive volume, Gregory Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert provide the field of law-and-language studies with an important set of analytic tools, insisting that systematic study of multimodal conduct be integrated into research on legal communication. In particular, M&G focus on modes of communication such as gesture, gaze, posture, movement, and speakers' interactions with physical objects—modes that have not received as much attention within language-and-law research as has legal language in a more traditional conception. For scholars who are unfamiliar with studies of multimodal conduct, the book offers a rigorous but accessible introduction to the field, along with sophisticated analyses of legal interactions demonstrating the value of the authors' approach. For linguists, sociolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists more generally, the volume offers an inventive entry in the growing literature integrating multimodal analysis into microanalysis of linguistic exchanges—and the macroanalysis of language within institutions. For those interested in research on legal language, this study advances the field through its comprehensive vision of how we can incorporate multimodal analysis into existing paradigms. One of the big problems with incorporating multimodal conduct into our studies of linguistic exchanges in general—and courtroom discourse in particular—is the sheer volume of that kind of conduct. As M&G amply demonstrate, every second of our interactions with each other contains multitudes. It was already challenging enough to perform detailed analyses of language in legal [End Page 425] and other settings, without adding this avalanche of additional data. It has been common in sociolinguistic, linguistic anthropological, conversation-analytic, and other forms of detailed language research to include in our transcripts a smattering of audible features (see e.g. Hirsch 1998, Matoesian 2001, Richland 2008). Examples include notations for pauses, sound prolongation, emphasis, loudness, overlapping or cut-off speech, and so on. In that tradition, analyses of short sequences of talk can take whole chapters. Now imagine adding to those analyses and transcripts the dense thicket of gesture, gaze, shifts in body position, movement, and more! In this volume, to give one small example, the authors introduce a series of symbols just to capture aspects of one kind of gesture ('beat gestures'; see p. xii). In addition, they use pictures and descriptions to fill in details of the multimodal conduct under scrutiny. So in light of the fact that dissecting a brief interaction in this way can occupy entire chapters, readers could understandably worry about the book moving randomly all over the map as it dives into small bits of much longer interactions. Instead, M&G offer a set of analyses organized around an exacting theoretical framework as they highlight particular instances of multimodal conduct in a single trial. The selection of examples is methodical and systematic. This is an exciting development for law-and-language analysts who seek to integrate unquestionably important multimodal aspects of communication into their research. As the authors note, there is a significant literature in the field of gesture studies, in addition to growing bodies of research in other areas pertinent to multimodal analysis. However, 'the study of gesture (as it integrates other modal forms) is conspicuously absent in language and law research', and 'the study of legal interaction is largely absent in the field of gesture studies' (xi). Their welcome intervention seeks to remedy those notable gaps. The book is divided into three sections. Part I uses studies of multimodal conduct to uncover microlevel processes through which participants negotiate identity in court. This turns out to be very important in everything from establishing expert witnesses' authority to battles over gender inequality—and, one suspects, other forms of social hierarchy—within legal settings. Part II turns to issues of motivation, control, and credibility as they play out in trial practice within a dense thicket of multimodal interchanges. These are layered over the...

Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls' Magazine Fiction by Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase

Reviewed by: Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls' Magazine Fiction by Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase Sarah Frederick (bio) Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls' Magazine Fiction. By Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase. SUNY Press, Albany NY, 2019. xx, 203 pages. $95.00, cloth; $32.95, paper. This ambitious book provides a clear and readable narrative of the shōjo or "girl" in modern Japan, with a focus on her place in literature and print culture. Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase covers the core illustrators and authors associated with the beginnings of the shōjo around 1900 and broadens the scope of this category by providing examples that "stray outside the stereotype" (p. xiii) and show "diversity in the genre of girls' fiction" (p. xvi). Dollase reveals the agency of young women who strategically took "advantage of the social marginality of shōjo" (p. xv) to acquire "soft power" by invoking their "shōjo mentality" (p. xiv). The book exhibits excellent primary research and should be highly accessible, including for an undergraduate audience. There is extensive work in English on the shōjo, but anyone seeking a full account of the major research on shōjo cultural history and literature would do very well to start with this book by Dollase, who explores the richness of this topic. In her introduction, with concision and clarity, she sets out the various arguments from past research and gives exceptionally clear accounts of the types of definitions of shōjo that have been developed in both Japanese and English, before moving on to her own original research which offers detailed examples and analysis of girls' fiction writers. She portrays the print, cultural, and lived contexts that made space for "scribbling girls" from the 1910s and their influence across the twentieth century. Research on shōjo writing has long had an interdisciplinary quality, with scholars of literature, sociology, anthropology, visual culture, and history weighing in and usually working across multiple disciplines, while bringing their own focus to the subject. Among the many examples, we see that anthropologist Jennifer S. Prough's book on shōjo manga takes an ethnographic approach and considers elements of gender studies and manga studies; linguistic anthropologist Laura Miller considers diverse forms of girls' writing such as altering photographs and forms of script using ethnography, media analysis, and linguistics.1 In addition, coauthored pieces have [End Page 250] productively brought multiple disciplines together.2 In this book, Dollase foregrounds her training in literature but considers also the perspectives of other disciplines. Her literary studies background finds expression in her choice of subject matter, a focus on writers of girls' fiction, rather than manga, anime, or popular culture consumption. While Dollase covers a great deal of historical ground in the book, she also takes care to zoom in closely on the details of her texts. For example, along with providing in broad strokes information about the history of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women in Japan, in a fascinating section she closely compares the earliest translation (which is more of an adaptation) into Japanese with the original text (pp. 10–16). In the original, Jo March is often described in ways such as "shooting up into a woman" that focus on her development into an adult woman, in tension with her aspirations and boyish qualities. In the first Japanese translation, the equivalent character is described as not having "any maiden-like qualities" and as "like a man," with no sense that growing up will make her more compliant to gender norms. Her language such as "iya de, iya de" and "daikirai" is forcefully used to show her resistance to feminine gender qualities and expectations. Through these sorts of details, Dollase highlights the different relationships between gender and development in 1910s Japan without resorting to reductive contrasts about whether the United States or Japan is more progressive. This is one of the many places where Dollase uses careful research and attention to the texts to show the complexity of the topic and the special qualities of shōjo culture in Japan—such as how it pushed against value systems, including feminist ones, that emphasized shōjo...