Language in Society 42 (2013) doi:10.1017/S0047404513000481 MICHAEL LEMPERT, Discipline and debate: The language of violence in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. xx, 216. Pb. $26.95. Reviewed by CHARLENE MAKLEY Anthropology, Reed College Portland, OR 97202, USA makleyc@reed.edu Michael Lempert’s study of discipline and debate practices in a southern Indian Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the late 1990s and early 2000s is a highly original analysis. In it, he brings the methodological insights of linguistic anthropology to the often rarefied world of Tibetan Buddhist studies, which as he says, has long tended to emulate the tradition’s own highly valorized “textualism” and neglect the semiotics and pragmatics of “face-to-face interaction” in Buddhist communities (xvii). By contrast, Lempert conducted several years of fieldwork in Tibetan mon- astic communities established in India after the Chinese Communist takeover of Tibet (late 1950s). Working (and living as the student of a lama) largely in the Geluk-sect Sera monastery in India’s far south, Lempert collected hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings of monastic assemblies, debate practices, and interviews. Though he is careful to say that he does not take transcriptions as unmediated records of events (xviii), that data grounds his analyses in the book’s five main chapters. Throughout, he argues convincingly that this inductive focus on the specificities and dynamics of semiotic forms-in-use allows him to delve further than both earlier Durkheimian functionalist approaches to ritual and the more recent critical focus on “practice” in Tibetan Buddhist studies. In this, Lempert joins other recent ambassadors of linguistic anthropology in religion and ritual studies (e.g. Engelke 2007; Keane 2007; Makley 2007; Stasch 2009), arguing that linguistic anthropology provides better analytic tools for getting at the risks and “work” of making types of persons or “subjects,” thereby pro- viding ways to link particular rituals and practices with broader scale issues and stakes (39). “Scale” here is not to be assumed as a set of a priori “bounded domains” (xvii), linked or conflated metaphorically by resemblances imposed by the analyst. Instead, Lempert directs our attention to scaling processes as the contingent outcome of per- formances of “mimetic sympathy” (8, 38). In this view, Tibetan monks are not just purveyors of doctrine or debaters of “ethnologics” (49). Taken instead as interactants in particular ritualized events, we see that monks in fact deploy a range of iconic and indexical signs to emulate and make manifest types of subjects and contexts, all to convince and cultivate interlocutors both within interactions (debate opponents, monk students, deities, Lempert himself) and outside them (competing monastic col- leges, the Dalai Lama, “the West”). Language in Society 42:4 (2013) 457 BOOK REVIEWS