Glossolalia and the Problem of Language. NicholasHarkness. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. ix + 231pp.

What is the problem of language, and how does glossolalia (i.e., speaking in tongues) help us address it? These are two questions readers of Nicholas Harkness’s new monograph are likely to ask upon seeing the title of this short yet ambitious and thoughtful book. The problem of language, at least as the author approaches it with ethnographic material from South Korean Christians, becomes a means to explore glossolalia’s “problematic relation to language” and rests on deciphering “how and why an experience of language is produced through processes of its own negation” (p. 2). This is one of several paradoxes to which Harkness returns throughout the text: viz., how a phenomenon that lies at the “limits of language”—in its seeming lack of denotation, in its posturing as a communicative medium that occludes communication—is nonetheless deeply productive of a Christian language ideology. With careful attention to the elements of narrative, phonology, pitch, cadence, and even the physicality of breath, Harkness offers a multilayered picture of the semiotic significance of language, not just glossolalia, for the Christians with whom he worked. He shifts attention away from asking the perennial questions of whether glossolalia is linguistically or theologically legitimate to consider its intersection with broader language ideologies. In other words, why are people so invested in what counts as language in the first place? Following a clearly pitched introduction, Harkness presents six chapters arranged in three dyads. The first pair offers an ethnographic foray into the trajectories that bring Christians, both Pentecostals and those from denominations less often associated with charismatic gifts, into glossolalic practices (pangŏn in Korean). These are among the book’s most well-developed chapters, as they examine in rich detail how Christians approach the Holy Spirit, at times beginning with trepidation yet evolving in unexpected ways into an ambiguous relationship of trust and uncertainty. Harkness’s portrait of Hyejin, a Presbyterian woman, is exemplary in this regard; his description of her grappling with tongues—along with contrapuntal examples from her family members, each of whom develops a different relationship with the practice— reveals the interaction of social class, generational interests, the cultural value of novelty, and anxieties about syncretic residues from shamanic traditions. Chapter two transitions from the narrative of one Korean family to an institutional study of the Yoido Full Gospel Church, a well-known megachurch that serves as one of the author’s primary field sites and a “ritual center” (p. 37) for the production of glossolalia and related linguistic genres (like t’ongsŏng kido, or cacophonic group prayer). Here the contours of Harkness’s main argument take shape. He draws on phonological, prosodic, and even tonal/musical analysis (a methodological callback to Harkness’s 2014 study of vocal quality in Korean church choirs, Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea, University of California Press) to demonstrate the qualities of glossolalia that belie its full identification as language yet still offer unique communicative access to God. The second set of chapters, although conceptually productive, disrupts the argument’s “flow” (h ur um), to use an evangelical term (p. 91). Here Harkness puts sermonic analysis in the service of teasing out how pastors ideologically justify a sense of shared feeling (chapter three) and the deployment of speech as a conduit for the Word of God and thus as a vehicle for global evangelism (chapter four). These points broaden the scope beyond glossolalia proper, and the author takes care to defend such an interlude by highlighting the parallel processes operating in other linguistic genres, some of which likewise operate at the “limits of language.” While a robust study of any “anthropological object” (p. 5) can and ought to extend beyond its formal