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 public-facing 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”Footnote 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 decentralized, local, isolated, unstable, ephemeral and temporary” engagements that flourished in rural home settings, such as poems, songs, riddles, finger games, divination charts, and other forms of oral folk genres, as well as Buddhist sutras and block prints (p. 30). Marzluf cautions against romanticizing grassroots literacies and instead emphasizes the importance of analyzing them in their particular historical contexts, such as the efforts by the socialist administration to establish a clear ideological wedge between this so-called feudal past and Soviet-inspired society.

Marzluf traces the development of socialist-era identities and subjectivities through extensive political efforts to create an “enlightened” polity based on ideas of progress and modernity. Marzluf argues that the idea of illiteracy emerged from socialist depictions, including continual references to the presocialist period as “intellectually dark, uncultured and backward” (p. 61). This argument is well supported by the primary-level textbook materials and pedagogic styles that he analyzes in depth across the three chapters exploring socialist-era literacy practices. David Sneath also highlights the symbolic association between light and development in his article on Lenin's electrification project.Footnote ² Here, the trope of enlightenment—in the literal sense of electrification, but also drawing on Buddhist values—is associated with progress and was a key part of state modernization efforts during the socialist period.

Marzluf draws interesting parallels with Peter K. Marsh's work,Footnote ³ which focuses on the period of “cultural revolution,” musical performances, and the building of cultural centers across rural Mongolia throughout the socialist period from the 1930s to the late 1980s. These centers emphasized this link between development and socialist culture and knowledge (as distinct from “feudal” or presocialist society), which is embodied in the Soviet Young Pioneers that Marzluf focuses on. Throughout his analysis of socialist-era literacy campaigns in the first half of the book, he productively engages with literacy as a “technology of power” (p. 95) that touches on a wide range of behaviors cultivated through socialist ideologies. These include moral ideas related to hygiene, productivity, morality, and political participation that embodied “the modern values of socialist order and demonstrate a new socialist identity” (p. 91). Marzluf illustrates these notions with a range of fascinating and original archival materials.

Marzluf's final three chapters explore the shift from the centralized narratives that were at the core of socialist literacy campaigns and subjecthood to the more diverse actors involved in postsocialist literacy. In these chapters, Marzluf conducts an analysis of urban signage in Ulaanbaatar and Sukhbaatar cities, paying attention to the growing use and influence of English and various literary sponsors in central government institutions and beyond. There are many gems in the analysis, including the fieldwork undertaken in Ulaanbaatar and Sukhbaatar to “read the urban linguistic landscapes.” Having started the book with a letter written from a rural boarding school in 1961, it seems only apt to end the book with reference to the diversity of linguistic forms Marzluf found in public urban centers. Here is where another of Marzluf's important yet more subtle contributions comes to the fore. His attention to the intersection between identity, literary practices and the Soviet past showcases an abundance of new forms of expression while also keeping in sight the ongoing forms of power that have informed these literary trajectories.