This book deals with the culture of Catalan resistance to assimilation, through the maintenance of the Catalan language as an expression of identity. This book argues that the Catalans also developed a series of cultural mechanisms to foster identity through intellectual and recreational pursuits, as well as through an emphasis on language.
"This gracefully written ethnography of two adjacent Catalan towns - one in France and one in Spain - is suffused with the often poignant voices in three languages of people on both sides of the border. Only rarely has an anthropological community study been employed so effectively to shed light on state policies, the politics of language, and macro-level processes of ethnic, regional and national identity formation." - Marc Edelman, Professor of Anthropology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York