The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently "dialogical." No speaker speaks alone, because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves, but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on "the monologic imagination" gives us new insights into languages' political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.

Matt Tomlinson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University. Since the mid-1990s, he has conducted research on culture, language, and ritual in Pacific Islands societies. He is the coeditor of several volumes and the author of two books, In God's Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity (2009) and Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford, 2014).
Julian Millie is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Anthropology at Monash University. He has completed research on Islamic practice in Indonesia and on the genres of Islamic culture in the region. He has published two books: Bidasari: Jewel of Malay Muslim Culture (2004) and Splashed by the Saint: Ritual Reading and Islamic Sanctity in West Java (2009).

Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction - Imagining the Monologic - Matt Tomlinson
Chapter 1
Cultural Replication: The Source of Monological and Dialogical Models of Culture
Greg Urban
Chapter 2
Dialogic Prophecies and Monologic Vision
Jon Bialecki
Chapter 3
Monologue and Dialogism in Highland New Guinea Verbal Art
Alan Rumsey
Discussion
Is It Monologic? Is It Dialogic? What Difference Does It Make?
Don Kulick
Chapter 4
"With Unity We Will Be Victorious!": A Monological Poetics of Political "Conscientization" within the Cuban Revolution.
Kristina Wirtz
Chapter 5
From Neighborhood Talk to Talking for the Neighborhood
Zane Goebel
Chapter 6
Monologue and Authority in Iran: Ethnic and Religious Heteroglossia in the Islamic Republic
James Barry
Discussion
Diving into the Gap: "Words," "Voices," and the Ethnographic Implications of Linguistic Disjuncture.
Krista E. Van Vleet
Chapter 7
Acting with One Voice: Producing Unanimism in Algerian Reformist Theater
Jane E. Goodman
Chapter 8
Creedal Monologism and Theological Articulation in the Mennonite Central Committee
Philip Fountain
Chapter 9
The Public Metaculture of Islamic Preaching
Julian Millie
Discussion
The Monologic Imagination of Social Groups
Courtney Handman
Conclusion
Religious and Political Terrain of the Monologic Imagination