In this episode, Dr. Kathryn (Kate) Graber and doctoral student Ariana Gunderson interview linguistic anthropologist Jillian Cavanaugh about all things language and value. Much of Dr. Cavanaugh’s research in Bergamo, Italy, summarized here, has been on the political economy of code choice–that is, why people choose the ways of speaking they do, whether to access economic opportunities or to have a language of regional belonging, intimacy, and home. Turning to questions of authenticity and materiality, Dr. Cavanaugh discusses how to approach language not only as an expressive system but also as an embodied, material practice. We talk about how food gains value through the different kinds of linguistic labor that are undertaken in its production and ask whether language and food are analogous semiotic systems (spoiler alert: not quite). Thinking about her current work with small-scale, hyper-local sausage producers, Jillian discusses the roles of individual choice and consumption, and/versus the role of production in the construction of value. At the end, we talk about intersections between linguistic and economic anthropology in Jillian’s role as President-Elect of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA).

Jillian R. Cavanaugh is a linguistic anthropologist whose research, centered in northern Italy, has considered language shift and social transformation, value, language ideologies, materiality, gender, and heritage food. Her current research focuses on heritage food producers and the labor they undertake to make good, safe, and valuable food. She is interested in how people use the semiotic and material resources available to them to make sense of their pasts in order to live in the present and envision their futures. Her publications include Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) and Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (Cambridge University Press 2017, co-edited with Shalini Shankar). Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Ethnos, among other venues. She received her PhD in anthropology at New York University and is Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center CUNY.

Co-hosted by Dr. Kathryn Graber [Link] and Ariana Gunderson [Link]. Edited and mixed by Richard Nance.


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References from our conversation with Jillian Cavanaugh:

Cavanaugh, Jillian. 2009. Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town. Chichester, U.K: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. "The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges." In Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gal, Susan. 1988. The Political Economy of Code Choice. In Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Monica Heller, ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 245–264.

Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2023. “Authenticity and Its Perils: Who Is Left Out When Food Is ‘Authentic’?” Gastronomica 23 (1): 28–37.