Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia - (Contemporary Central Asia: Societies, Politics, and Cultures) by Phillip P Marzluf (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book argues that literacy functions as a means of tracking social change in modern Mongolia. Its leaders have used literacy to promote new ways of living and socialist identities. In post-socialist Mongolia, literacy expresses the anxieties that Mongolians feel as they na...

Book Synopsis

This book argues that literacy functions as a means of tracking social change in modern Mongolia. Its leaders have used literacy to promote new ways of living and socialist identities. In post-socialist Mongolia, literacy expresses the anxieties that Mongolians feel as they navigate globalism and express conflicting identities.

Review Quotes

Ethnographies of writing are a rare genre, and this book is an extraordinary instance of it. In this exceptionally rich and broadly contextualized study, Phillip P. Marzluf takes us to from the history of writing in Mongolia and the politics of literacy to the heart of writing as lived experience.

Offering a different perspective on Mongolian life from twentieth-century socialism to twenty-first century democratic capitalism, Phillip P. Marzluf's exposition on changing ideology and policy toward literacy weaves together literacy studies, anthropology, history, and current events. The result is a fascinating and highly readable account of the challenges Mongolians have overcome as they contended with different governments and outside pressures.

Phillip P. Marzluf provides a balanced and valuable analysis of the Mongolian socialist government's policies and efforts to increase the rate of literacy, which had gradually begun to rise during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He shows that the government not only employed schools but also poster and street signs, posters, the oral tradition of poetry, and music in its literacy campaigns. Public health officials and the military were recruited to foster literacy. Although the government's statistics were somewhat exaggerated, the increase in the numbers of Mongolians who could read and write was impressive. Marzluf then surveys the difficulties in promoting literacy in post-socialist Mongolia and describes the links between language and ethnic identity in modern Mongolia.

About the Author

Phillip P. Marzluf is associate professor in the English Department at Kansas State University, where he teaches classes on literacy, professional writing, pedagogy, and world literature.