It would be a mistake though to treat all Grecanici relations as one and the same thing. Forced or voluntary migration, as well as dense kinship and mafia networks, suggests that Grecanici political claims were emphasized or suppressed in different historical and political periods. Minority interests are developed in accordance with opportunities provided by political fluctuations in Calabria, Italy, Greece, and the EU. Paying close attention to multilayered forms of relatedness facilitates a deeper understanding of minority politics and how actors may seek to empower themselves. It also sheds light on the techne, episteme, and ethos of governance that underlies minority politics.11 While power relations “are unequal and hierarchical, they are not ‘zero-sum games’ in which only certain actors have power at the expense of others” (Dean 1999:69–70). Grecanici governance is an example in contemporary political anthropology where a minority has become successful in appropriating multiple channels of representation that have paradoxically transformed a poverty-stricken, subordinate population into a politically prosperous piece of living history.
Chapter 2
Meet the Grecanici
A prolific number of studies on minorities have shed light on the historical and political genealogies of what is meant by minority status in Europe (see Cowan 2000, 2010). Scholars such as Jennifer Jackson Preece (1997), Mark Mazower (2004), and Jane Cowan (2010) examine the historical predicament of developing a comprehensive UN framework toward the protection of minority populations after 1918. Looking at the issue of the minorities from a top-down perspective, these studies delve deeply into the logics of treaties and the thorny position of minority recognition on a pan-European level. Subsequently, nation-state recognition of minorities was a criterion of identification and UN membership to accord with a vision of a multicultural Europe (Prato 2009; Cowan 2010). From a bottom-up perspective, other studies in Europe have highlighted the precariousness of the term “minority” for the inclusion of alloglot populations as meaningful constitutives of the national fabric (Karakasidou 1997; Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2001; Ballinger 2003; Zografou and Pipyrou 2011). Language as a semantic web of collective identification is interlinked with xenophobic evocations of “second-class” citizenship, violence, fear, inclusion and exclusion (Herzfeld 2011b; Knight 2013a; De Munck and Risteski 2013).
With twelve languages officially recognized by the state, Italy can boast the greatest diversity of regional and minority languages in Western Europe (Dal Negro and Guerini 2011). The legal framework concerning the governance and protection of linguistic rights is drawn directly from the EU and the Council of Europe. Moreover, under the auspices of UNESCO and other international bodies the debate over the preservation of endangered minority languages has gained momentum in the last two decades. With an ever increasing engagement in recording endangered languages and promoting linguistic rights of minority populations all over the world there is a fundamental need for anthropological research to investigate the links between purely linguistic research, the social and political interests of linguistic minorities and the various scales of governance where minority politics are realized. We can no longer deny that the complex web of views of minority populations themselves, local and national government, as well as European Union guidelines, synthesize a picture that introduces practical and theoretical incommensurabilities into minority studies (Fishman 2002; Pipyrou 2012). The Grecanici find themselves in a paradoxical position; from the outside they are viewed as a vulnerable minority on the verge of extinction, yet they simultaneously exercise fearless governance of their own language and culture.
Speaking Grecanico, a language categorized by UNESCO as “severely endangered,” the Greek linguistic minority of Calabria is one of two Greek speaking populations in South Italy.1 A considerable number of national associations for the protection of endangered and minority status languages in Italy, such as the Lega per le Lingue delle Nazionalità Minoritarie (LeLiNaMi) and the Comitato Nazionale Federativo Minoranze Linguistiche d’Italia (CoNFeMiLI), talk of the Greek linguistic minority of South Italy as occupying an isola (island). The metaphor of an island existing within inland Italy is a strong cognitive sign that captures notions of marginalization, economic, and social isolation and victimhood. The metaphor of the “island” not only echoes the closed and static communities, prevalent in the anthropology of the 1960s with all the inherent problems of contextualization and analysis, but somehow reinforces stereotypes of the subjugated, hegemonic, and marginal.2 At the beginning of the new millennium, governmental structures such as the sportelli linguistici (linguistic helpdesks) connect the interests of linguistic minorities to regional, provincial, and municipal schemes, where once they were solely the concern of local civil society. The sportelli are excellent examples of where layers of governance coexist in a creative manner and require more critical and holistic anthropological attention.
The Grecanici, the protagonists of this study, are Italian subjects, devoted Catholics, citizens of Reggio Calabria, and primarily originate from the area Grecanica in the villages of Aspromonte, Calabria. Of outstanding natural splendor, Aspromonte is believed to be the home of the naradeGO, mythological nymph-like creatures. Such cultural capital, as poetically portrayed in Franco Mosino’s preface to Angelo Romeo’s Naràde d’Aspromonte (1991), may be of service to Grecanici in their quest to save the ancient language of Magna Graecia. Romeo captures a fascinating dual perspective by placing the future of the minority in the hands of Modern Europe and Grecanici folklore. The region known as area Grecanica coincides with the regional autonomous institution Comunità Montana “Area Grecanica” (Già “Versante Jonico Meridionale Capo Sud”) and includes the comuni (municipalities) of Melito, San Lorenzo, Bagaladi, Roghudi, Roccaforte del Greco, Condofuri (with the frazioni [wards] of Amendolea and Galliciano), Bova, Bova Marina, Staiti, and Brancaleone (see Figure 1).
Grecanici are multilingual. They speak Grecanico (also termed Griko and Greco), which is comprised of archaic Doric, Hellenistic, Byzantine as well as local Romanic and Italian linguistic elements (Karanastasis 1984; Caracausi 1990; Petropoulou 2000). They also speak the local Calabrian dialect and the official Italian language. The Greek presence in Calabria commences with the colonization of South Italy and Sicily between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE and with the foundation of the first cities of Magna Graecia (Greater Greece): Reggio Calabria, Sibari, and Croton. Consecutive relocations from Greece during the Byzantine and Norman eras enriched the Calabrian populations with Greek linguistic elements and provoked a positive economic and social effervescence. For instance, in 1148 a considerable number of the population living in the Byzantine areas of Corfu, Cephalonia, Negroponte, Corinth, Thebes, and Athens were ravaged by the Norman king Roger of Sicily and