The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Memory Politics by Stavroula Pipyrou (review)

There are two small corners in Italy where indigenous Greek-speaking communities survive. One is located inland within the heel of Italy (Apulia), and the other, which is slightly smaller but better known, is found just beneath the toe in Calabria. Among a handful of villages there—a century ago there were as many as 12 but now there are 5 at best—live people known as the Grecanici, who still speak a local Greek dialect (Grecanica) and regard it as their mother tongue. As with their counterparts in Apulia, the people of the southern Aspromonte area appear to be a remnant of what centuries ago was a much larger Greek-speaking presence in Southern Italy.

In The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics, anthropologist Stavroula Pipyrou offers a painstakingly researched ethnography. Given Calabria's limited communion with the broader Greek-speaking world further east, the mere existence of the Grecanici is an issue that fascinates many. Thankfully, Pipyrou does not burden the reader with such trite questions as: are the Grecanici Greeks? Are they, as some Greeks believe, "brothers" who have suffered "the suppression of the Italians" (64)? According the book's author, the Grecanici are autochthonous Calabrians, whose faith is Roman Catholicism and whose language, Grecanica, is only used as an everyday language by an ever-shrinking number of elderly people. Grecanica's imminent extinction as a living language, however, is a source of deep concern for a much larger community that includes the descendants of Grecanica speakers, many of whom nowadays live in the regional capital Reggio. Despite the symbolic violence of the state (particularly governments since Berlusconi's time), which has played mere lip service to the interests of minorities, and despite the prejudices of other Calabrians, who have looked down on them as mountain yokels, the Grecanici not only treasure their ancestral language and culture but also value it for its political worth. Pipyrous's ethnography is not about the culture, per se. Instead of treating the reader to an in-depth account of the Grecanica folklore, song, dance, customs, and language, the book interprets the social and political dimensions of their struggle for cultural retention with a view to examining how power is negotiated in everyday life and within voluntary associations. It investigates what the community's struggle reveals about how fellow Grecanici kin and immediate family relate to one another. Relatedness and its functions is one of Pipyrou's key themes, as it is through the utilization of a dense patchwork of social networks that the Grecanici can achieve personal and communal ends that are otherwise unattainable. They were once counted among the poorest people in one of Italy's poorest regions. Although the Grecanici are no longer impoverished, memories of la miseria and discrimination are often invoked in the struggle to preserve their cultural identity. Since the 1960s, however, when Italy formally recognized the status of minorities, Grecanici have inverted their subaltern status to create a place for themselves "in contemporary politics through minority claims" (4).

Associations have sprung up since the 1960s in order to manage the questione Grecanica, primarily to preserve a culture that is regarded as endangered, but also to utilize what has become an asset that has given them access to national and international forums. Here they can voice their concerns, and sometimes their efforts find traction. Pipyrou demonstrates how actors call on relationships (blood, friendships, godparenthood, clientististic friendships, mafia, church, political parties, and global organizations) to assert claims and effect desired outcomes. As such, The Grecanici of Southern Italy is about governance, which Pipyrou distinguishes from government, since it more accurately relates the range of institutions (such as the state, the church, the N' drangheta [the Calabrian mafia], families, and civic associations) and noninstitutional actors that must play a part in decision-making and resource management. The author also notes the agonistic nature of governance, which...