“Sarita, I'm helpless….” Laura Ahearn begins her ethnography with a love letter, 21-year-old Bir Bahadur's first to Sarita, “whose long, black hair, fashionable Punjabi outfits, and demure giggles had caught his eye” (p. 3). Ahearn ponders the increasing use of such letters amid changes in literacy and marriage practices, understandings and expressions of emotions, and efforts of the Nepali state and other organizations to develop places like Junigau, the village in which most of the book's action takes place. By the book's conclusion, Ahearn has provided the means to understand the subtle paradox in Bir Bahadur's letter – that he asserts that he is “helpless” at the same time that he initiates an invitation. Ahearn demonstrates in exquisite detail that such expressions must be considered within the wider, shifting context of practices through which they emerge: that which instantiates the expression, literacy in all of its guises, and that which makes the expression meaningful, the emergence of a discourse of development that characterizes people, places, and activities.

Part 1, “Arrivals, introductions, and theoretical frameworks,” lays the ethnographic and conceptual groundwork upon which later analyses rest. Chap. 1 provides an overview of the book and introduces the village of Junigau as an ethnographic site. Ahearn recounts her own desire to choose Junigau to begin her Peace Corps service in 1982 because most of the village's approximately 1,250 residents are Magars, a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group who, according to the agency's descriptions, are less concerned than higher-caste Hindus with purity restrictions and are generally friendly. Ahearn quickly learns that Magar identity is complex and that residents of Junigau have been increasingly, if differently, involved in political, social, and economic changes gripping Nepal. Most generally, the ability of the People's Movement to restore party democracy in 1990 has sparked new ways in which the residents of Junigau understand themselves to be citizens of Nepal. Local notions of what democratic citizenship entails include the “ability to act according to one's own wishes,” which dovetails with development discourse emphasizing “individual choice, ‘progress,’ and ‘success’,” and contrasts with the idea that one's circumstances can be explained by “fate” (16). Such understandings are mediated by radical change in local practices, including the monetization of the local economy, the departure of young men for foreign military service or manual labor, an increase in female schooling, and an escalation of elopements.

Chap. 2 is a self-reflexive introduction to Ahearn's research methods. Particularly nice is the chapter's discussion of the inherent indeterminacy in implied meaning in written communication. Ahearn deals with indeterminacy by noting that letters engage in pragmatic activity that, to be understood, requires some narrowing of all meanings possible. Likely interpretations can be identified as one learns more about the typical contexts from which they emerge. Ahearn here and elsewhere (1998, 2001) calls this a “practice theory of meaning constraint,” making explicit in the description her debt to Pierre Bourdieu.

Chap. 3 provides what Ahearn, borrowing from Williams 1993, calls a “glossary” of five terms used in the book. “Literacy,” “love,” “gender,” “social change,” and “agency” come loaded with connotations inherited from countless past uses, and Ahearn makes explicit what she intends them to mean. This chapter was a boon to my students in an advanced course in linguistic anthropology. They expressed great appreciation for the clarity of Ahearn's explanations of concepts that many of the students had encountered in other work but had found opaque. We especially appreciated the clarity of Ahearn's treatment of agency, “the culturally constrained capacity to act” (54), and her conceptualization of its relationship with resistance, a concept frequently invoked recently in anthropology. Ahearn concludes the chapter with ethnographic examples that demonstrate the ambivalent relationship between agency and resistance and the contingent nature of social practices. For example, Pema Kumari, an educated young woman, writes a threatening letter to her father, an unprecedented addition to the usual practice of secluding oneself in the attic upon learning of one's impending marriage. The act fails to prevent the marriage, but nevertheless signals a shift in links between literacy, other social practices, and ideas about autonomous action fostered by discourses of development.

Part 2, “Transformation in gender and marriage,” focuses on recent changes in marriage practices and expressions of love. Chap. 4 charts shifts in marriage practices in Junigau by delineating three types of marriage – arranged marriage, capture marriage, and elopement – and recording the occurrence of the three types over time. In 1993, Ahearn collected data from 161 people in Junigau's central ward who had ever married. She followed with another census in the central ward in 1998 in which she included 33 people who had married since the first census. The results were striking. Sixteen of eighteen marriages between censuses were elopements (a fourfold increase from elopements in 1993), and none were capture marriages. Finally, Ahearn uses the shifts to demonstrate that the young in Junigau have increasingly violated prohibitions against marrying one's father's sister's daughter or one's mother's brother's son. Such marriages severely disrupt postmarital kin relationships, and their increasing occurrence marks massive social change.

Chap. 5 departs from the quantitative base of the previous chapter to provide numerous ethnographic descriptions of marital histories. In addition, people reflect on their own and others' marriages in the chapter's liberal quotations. Several trends emerge, including the possibility that talk about one's capture marriage might cause embarrassment, and the increasing possibility that elopement can indicate a forward and developed disposition. Such trends illustrate the subtle ways in which new “structures of feeling” – the nexus of action and potential reflections on agency – unlike those presupposed by the ideologically dominant arranged marriage, are evident across particular circumstances of elopements (as well as particular reflections on capture or arranged marriages). But Ahearn is careful to point out that the parts agency and gender play in such changing possibilities are multiplex and often ambivalent. For example, the narration of most elopements includes coercion, usually pointing beyond the groom to family pressures. At the same time, women can deny their agency just as they point to its expanding limits.

Chap. 6 focuses on the role of letters in courtship. Ahearn draws upon 66 letters passed between Shila Devi and Vajra Bahadur in order to accomplish a number of ethnographic tasks. Expressions of love in the letters reveal the complexity of the concept itself, the importance of rumor and community knowledge, the salience of the relationship between the youths' future plans and their changing economic circumstances, and ways that each youth reflects on her or his own agency (and that of the other) in the context of a future life together.

Part 3, “Love, literacy, and development,” further explores changing structures of feeling through literacy practices fostered by the Nepali state or engaged in locally. Chap. 7 probes a vast array of literate materials, including textbooks, magazines, novels, and guidebooks to writing love letters, in an effort to understand how Junigau residents encounter connections among nationalism, gender, and development formulated elsewhere. Though such texts espouse the virtues of autonomy, the efficacy of individual initiative, and capitalist enterprise, Ahearn is especially careful to point to equivocal messages in the texts concerning gender.

Chap. 8 explores the ways that literacy practices are socially and institutionally embedded in Junigau, again with an emphasis on gendered interpolations through social change. Ahearn quantifies the rates at which women are increasingly involved in literacy practices via schooling, but notes that a social club built by Junigau youth is predominantly used by young men. Finally, she shifts the focus to Tansen, a town in which some of her subjects attend university, to explore other spaces in which literacy practices occur, including bookstores, teashops, and the cinema. In the last context, Ahearn notes gendered inconsistencies in the ways that film characters and their actions convey ideals of development framing the film's plot.

Chap. 9 complements chap. 6. Ahearn follows a couple's courtship through letters and foregrounds both the gendered risks involved in love-letter exchange and the complexities involved in the establishment of trust between the letters' authors. Ahearn is particularly adept at demonstrating the complexity involved in each author's negotiation of the evolving relationship. Shaping such negotiations are changing life circumstances and interpersonal relationships, on the one hand, and different assertions of agency possible in discourses of fate and discourses of development, on the other. Hard and fast dichotomies are absent: People use fate and autonomy variably in relation to their own changing circumstances.

Chap. 10 revisits the book's major themes and expands its discussion of the complex and, ultimately, unpredictable interplay between agency and social change.

The ethnography's contributions are numerous. To the established and growing interest in ways that literacy is mediated by local and more widespread sociocultural understandings and practices (see Collins & Blot 2003 and Street 1985 for critical reviews), Ahearn brings the study of a community in the midst of radical change. To the interest in ways that discourses of development – initiated from afar – shape and are shaped by local sociocultural practices, she brings the notion of the self and its multiple, shifting representations. And to studies of gender, she brings an ethnography that richly illustrates the ambivalent ways in which discourses of development facilitate new possibilities for gendered practices.