Language, Globalization and the Making of a Tanzanian Beauty Queen

Sophisticated social theory and the tools of linguistic anthropology join together in this book, a fascinating study of beauty contests in Tanzania that reveals their complex and anxious importance to Tanzanian society. This exploration of the role that language plays in negotiations over the meaning of cosmopolitanism and the morality of gender is linguistic ethnography at its best. Niko Besnier, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Sabrina Billings' book speaks beautifully to young Tanzanian women's aspirations for cosmopolitan ascent through the global beauty pageant pyramid, contrasting their specifically gendered lot in national sociolinguistic hierarchies. Beauty pageants thus provide the lens through which we can clearly see the enabling and constraining effects of local varieties of English, of Swahili, and of Tanzania's numerous ethnic languages. Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago, USA