Living Memory

Reviews / Votes

"An engaging study of the kinds of tensions and paradoxes that makeso many minority language situations such nail biters: willconscious effort to revalorize a flagging vernacular strengthen itor kill it? Does highlighting the language's culturalheritage revitalize it or turn it into an attractive but irrelevantmuseum piece? 'Living Memory' beautifully documents thecomplex and delicate situation of a stubborn Italian dialect. Indoing so, it helps us understand the role language plays incontemporary debates about identity, belonging, citizenship andrapid social change." -Don Kulick, author of Language Shift and CulturalReproduction "Living Memory is a very solid piece of academic work onlanguage maintenance, shift, linguistic ideologies and culturaldynamics in an Italian region and town. It makes a significantcontribution to linguistic anthropology." -Lukas D Tsitsipis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki "With empathetic eye and ear, Cavanaugh places Bergamo'scommitted "locophonophiles," lovers of speaking -- as well aseating -- locally, in the relevant contexts of the wider culturalpolitics of European and Italian regionalism at theturn-of-the-21st-century." -Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago