Sing Me Back Home: Ethnographic Songwriting and Sardinian Language Politics

Set on the Italian island of Sardinia, Sing Me Back Home explores language and culture through songwriting as an ethnographic method. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork writing songs with Sardinian musicians, artisans, shepherds, poets, and language activists, Kristina Jacobsen asks, how are Sardinian lives and language ideologies narrated against the backdrop of American music?

The book shows how Sardinian musicians sing their own history between the lines, in songs, in stories about songs, in the recording studio, and in the ＂stage patter＂ performed between songs during performances. It reveals how Sardinian songs become a site of transduction where, through the process of songwriting, recording, and performance, the energy from one genre of music and lingua-culture is harnessed to signal another one much closer to home.

Sing Me Back Home is accompanied by an album of original songs written and recorded in the field, with links to songs in each chapter. It includes songwriting prompts and lyrics, a glossary of key terms, tables to break down theoretical concepts, and photographs from the field. Drawing on work from critical collaborative research, auto-ethnography, public anthropology, arts-based research, and ethnographic poetry, this sensory ethnography offers new ways for us to hear culture through stories and songs.

Kristina Jacobsen is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology at the University of New Mexico.