B a o K R E SPEAKING IN OTHER VOICES: An Ethnography 0./ WaLLoon Puppet Theaterd by Joan Gross 337 pp. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001. $162. In Speaking ill Other \!cJices, anthropologist Joan Gross offers a detailed ethnographic study of puppetry in Wallonia (the southern part of Belgium bordering France) with a particular focus on the function of voice. As local puppeteers manipulate their puppets, Gross argues, they similarly manipulate the deeply historical and social construction of the Walloon language and culture. Delv- ing into the history of rod puppetry in Liege, the easternmost province of the Walloon region, Gross analyzes language thropologists) because they determine the voices of the others usage in terms of social power and cultural capital. Her so- Introducing her project in Chapter One, Gross focuses Chapter Two on the historical relationship between the French and the ciolinguistic analysis of the voices used by urban working Walloon as compared to the Flemish and the Dutch. class puppeteers finds contextualization within 19 th century Gross hits her stride in Chapter Three, 'entitled "Class medieval texts, puppetry tradition, and contemporary Belgian speech patterns and customs. Analyzing the linguistic and and Culture in 19 th Century Liege and the Rise of the Puppet Theater," in which she examines the political economy of tonal choices made by the puppeteer voicing an entire cast the early rOd-puppet tradition. Through lenses of symbol- of characters, Gross untangles a web of meaning steeped in ism, nationalism, and regionalism, Gross considers political a rich history of identity struggles, class conflict and impe- manipulation and historical conditions of material production rial tension. and audience generation from 1830 to World War 1. Heavy in theoretical discourse, Gross's book is not geared With a hearty nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, Gross links popular toward the casual reader; instead, it provides rich fodder for culture to dominant culture as she examines the evolution scholars of anthropology, linguistics, and sociology. In many ways, Gross uses the puppet theatre of Liege to critically of the puppet theatre following the adoption of the form by examine issues fundamental to linguistic anthropology. Early the bourgeoisie. She discusses the role of the servant both in daily life and in the puppet plays as mediator both between in the book she explains, the bourgeois society and the working class, and between An investigation of Liege puppet theaters allows us to the puppeteer and the audience. Gross describes the endur- ing popularity of the puppet character Tchantches, a servant clearly see heteroglossia [the use of different voices] as who was seen to "speak the minds" of the Walloon people the nature of language and mimesis I the imitation of as- in the face of Flemish oppression. While Gross situates the pects of the sensible world I as the cornerstone of cultural adoption of the puppet's name as a pseudonym employed by transmission. [n daily life outside of performance frames, the satirical press in relation to Punch and Guignol in the mid heteroglossia and mimesis are more subtle and dispersed, 19 th century, she neglects to reference even earlier servant but in the puppet theater of Liege, they are condensed ancestors who performed similar functions in the commedia de//'urte or even Greek and Roman comedies. and exaggerated and show their devices to the world. In Chapter Four, "Manipulations and Transformations," Gross describes the increasing commodification of the puppet Building upon post-structural discourse, Gross explains her project as the examination of "how metadiscursive en- theatre in the hands of the middle class between World Wars. She paints vivid pictures ofthe experiences and influences of lc:mwlization of 'the tradition' establishes the authority of Joseph Maurice Remouchamps, who relentlessly preserved pLlppeteers_" Thc book is divided into ten chapters, each presented puppetry documentation and practice as head of the Museum of Walloon Life; Rodolphe de Warsage, puppetry ambassador ieli (, ilorough foundation in linguistic theory and anthro- for Liege; and Thomas Talbot, champion of the form's work- : ;ross acknowledges the potential pitfalls involved . linking her scholarship with the form at hand: ing-class roots. Gross then presents qualitative research con- in her· "Whuk: ':1' ,nude) one follows," she writes, "representation cerning the work of contemporary practitioners Gaston Engels confers power lind control on representers (puppeteers or an- and Adrien Dufour as it relates folklore and Walloon history. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by DigitalCommons@CalPoly