Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia: Traditionalist, Socialist, and Post-Socialist Identities. By Phillip P. Marzluf. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2018. vii, 223 pp. ISBN: 9781498534857 (cloth).

Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia is an exciting new contribution to the field of Inner Asian studies, offering a fascinating account of literacy in Mongolia from the early socialist to the contemporary period. This book will appeal to both Mongolian studies scholars and social scientists interested in literacy and education more broadly. The book offers an original view into the twentieth-century socialist period in Mongolia from the perspective of new literacy studies, providing a detailed glimpse into recent history that is often only cursorily described in contemporary anthropological accounts. Phillip P. Marzluf employs a theory of literacy as social practice, giving detailed attention to unconventional and often undocumented literacies, such as the Buddhist literacies found within rural pastoralist “home school” settings, letter writing, newspapers, and public signs and advertisements. This sensitive and critical approach cuts through dominant paradigms of both literacy and education and succeeds in offering exciting new historical understandings and a fresh perspective from which new forms and formats of literacy beyond the institution of formal schooling can be imagined. Marzluf draws on a range of sources, including oral histories in the University of Cambridge’s public archive, archival materials such as government-sponsored publicfacing media and publications, primary-level socialist-era textbooks, and his own visual field methods, to document urban signage and monuments. For example, Marzluf begins the book with a translation of a short letter written in 1961 by a boy attending a rural boarding school. Addressed to his mother, sister, and brother, he sends updates and asks for money to be sent by post to buy winter boots and clothes. This fascinating use of archival material serves as an entry point to discussing a key goal of the book: “to de-naturalize reading and writing and pay more attention to literacy in our lives and its material, social, cultural, economic and political contexts and consequences” (p. 1). Marzluf’s analysis moves from the specificities of this letter to its institutional and political context to reveal the local impacts of socialist state policy at the time, including the introduction of compulsory state schooling, the development of the boarding school system to accommodate rural children, and the shift in forms of literacy utilizing new communication infrastructure such as postal systems and radio broadcasting. Interestingly, Marzluf explains that this same letter was then republished in a national newspaper in the early 1990s to support claims by democratic reformers about the shortcomings of socialist-era education. These everyday practices of communication and literacy form the rich empirical material of this book, allowing the analysis to capture a longer view of social change in Mongolia from a grounded perspective. Marzluf’s analysis of the “pastoral home school”1 (p. 29) and “grassroots literacies” (p. 33) presents a particularly original contribution to understanding the forms of everyday literacy which preceded the formal government-sponsored school system and continued throughout the twentieth century. For Marzluf, grassroots literacies are the “highly