SOUND ARCHIVES AS RESOURCE FOR THE ANALYSIS OF IDENTITY AND CONFLICT IN TUSCANY

Francesca Biliotti and Silvia Calamai examine Tuscan linguistic identity and the related questions of conflict as experienced by individuals and groups in the Second World War and after. The authors draw on material collected under the auspices of the Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce project, which aims to discover, digitize, catalogue, and partially transcribe oral documents (e.g. oral biographies, ethnotexts, linguistic questionnaires, and oral literature) collected in Tuscany (Calamai, 2012), a region as rich in sound documents (Andreini and Clemente, 2007) as it is in paper ones (Petrucci, 1994). For Biliotti and Calamai, sound archives function as an important (but neglected) resource for understanding the dynamics of identity and conflict in Tuscany, at least from the 1940s on, and their essay focuses on three case studies from the Gra.fo sound archives, each of which casts a different light on the dynamics of identity and conflict in Tuscany, and each of which refers to an archive which is particularly significant for such issues. Thus, the first example illustrates historical conflicts (specifically the relationships between British Prisoners of War and those who helped them in the area around Prato after the Armistice of September 1943), the second examines social conflict (specifically the experience of Aretine migrants to Switzerland, France, Germany, and Belgium in the second half of the twentieth century), while the third concerns linguistic conflict (in particular, the opposition between the Romagnol dialect and the dialect of Florence in the so-called Romagna Toscana).