Book review: Aurora Donzelli, One or Two Words: Language and Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia

Abstract

officer’s non-reciprocal response to it as illustrative of an interprofessional competition between police and academic researchers (p. 87). The assumption behind the research is that bodily conduct does not merely serve as an additional feature to verbal conduct but in fact imposes particular meaning and significance to selective descriptions. Although this is certainly visible in other contexts (such as episodes of police violence, which can later be assessed in court), it does not strike me as an entirely convincing reading of some extracts presented throughout the book. Notable exceptions are the ones presented in chapter 6 and 7, which are powerful examples of how the use of multimodal resources change the perception of participants about the actions being accomplished. One of the limitations of the book is that no matter of how precise the authors’ descriptions are, the absence of video clips hampered this reader’s understanding of some of the analytical points involving the combination of the different modalities (see for example their analysis on gesture and lexical choice, which involves movement pace, p. 76). Some multimodal studies journals have been recently encouraging authors to include video clips or animations of the extracts in their papers. Although the difficulty or impossibility of including these resources in a written analysis is certainly not the authors’ fault, I believe it is important to recognize that readers, especially those not yet familiar with multimodal analysis, would benefit tremendously from the addition of such extra material. Multimodal Performance and Interaction in Focus Group is an insightful reading and offers an original take on how to analyse focus groups, considering them as deeply moral events that have practical implications to participants. In the context of community policing, it helps us to take a step back; before evaluating policing training, we should understand participants’ sense of community and how they achieve this by bringing different kinds of meaning-making resources together. Even though the authors do not explicitly mention a particular audience, the book will certainly benefit discourse scholars in a broader sense as well as those interested in conducting focus groups as part of their research. Additionally, the discussions generated about community and tensions involving police expertise and jurisdiction may appeal to researchers studying police settings and practices, particularly those working closely with law enforcement.