Etnicitá e Linguaggio tra i Toraja di Sulawesi (Indonesia)

This paper presents an overview of the different approaches to the study of ethnicity. It highlights how the adoption of a discourse and interaction centered approach to the study of ethnicity can help to overcome some of the theoretical and empirical limits of more traditional para- digms developed by socio-cultural anthropologists. Thanks to a series of ethno-linguistic examples drawn from my long-term fieldwork in Toraja, a highland region located in the island of Sulawesi (Northeast Indonesia), the aim is to show the ambiguities and the multiple possibilities underlying the representations of people’s collective identities. The analysis of code-switching practices between standard Indonesian and Toraja language provides important insights on the contemporary articula- tions of the relation between language and ethnicity in Toraja. This fact problematizes the existence of a binary correspondence between language choice and identity display.