EtnoAntropologia

Rifugiati congolesi in Sudafrica: fra mutuo aiuto e rivendicazioni identitarie

Stefano Allovio — 2023-01-20

At the end of the last century, post-apartheid South Africa opens up to the world and international law on political asylum. At the same time, Mobutu's Zaire collapses. This historical conjuncture is at the origin of a major migration flow of Congolese to southern Africa that has marked the last decades. The essay focuses on the community of Congolese in Cape Town showing their great creativity in establishing mutual aid associations. Some of these associations are geared toward imagining and achieving, at least in the diaspora, that unity of the Congo that remains a utopia in the homeland.

Assertività femminili transculturali delle seconde generazioni nell’Italia multietnica tra intraprendenza imprenditoriale e creatività artistiche

Annalisa Di Nuzzo — 2023-01-20

Italy’s society, which has witnessed significant migratory flows for several decades, has been experiencing profound socio-cultural transformations. In particular, migratory flows have reshaped Italian culture and new identities belonging to multiple worlds, cultures, and languages have emerged. In this multi-ethnic Italy, an increasing number of immigrant women have become entrepreneurs, while others stand out as experimenters of new musical languages by proposing their diversity. This essay aims to analyse their significant role in Italy, and above all how these young second-generation women live and interpret their Italianness and how they express and assert themselves.

La mediazione culturale

Alessia Fiorillo — 2023-01-20

The main question of this essay concerns the role of cultural mediation in hosting practices for migrants. The analysis of mediators’ interviews aims to underline the State approach to management of international flows of people. Despite the institutional preference for control practices, the study of the host system for refugees and asylum seekers shows the key role of third sector and civil society in promoting inclusion projects: building cultural ties is actually desire, project, stubborn determination of social workers and researchers.

Black Hole, It Follows e lo Spirito Cannibale. Adolescenza e riti di passaggio

Accursio Graffeo — 2023-03-04

This essay analyzes the passage to adulthood in three different art and culture contexts. In the graphic novel Black Hole a sexually transmitted disease turns the characters into lonely mutants. In the movie It Follows some teenagers with ‘no-future’ lives are threatened by disturbing figures trying to kill them. Both these works show the lack of adults and youth isolation from the society. Among the Kwakiutl, the Cannibal Spirit kidnaps young boys and take them to the forest where they experience a liminal condition: the rite involves the whole society and the adults play a key role. These social dramas will be used to analyze the weakening of the ritualization related to the transition to adult age in the contemporary world.

Il lato quotidiano dell’islamofobia

Fabio Vicini — 2023-02-09

The paper explores everyday forms of racism toward sons and daughters of Muslim migrants born or raised in Italy since the late 1990s and early 2000s by shedding light on recent debates on Islamophobia in Italy and Europe. Based on my interlocutors’ narratives about their experiences of racism at different levels of education, the paper shows how these experiences significantly impacted their identity paths. The case is initially read through the lens of anthropological literature on cultural racism to introduce the discussion of another way of marking difference that seems particularly apt to describe long-standing forms of discrimination against ethnic-religious minorities in Europe: spiritual racism. Then, the paper introduces the notion of “micro-racism” to shed light on how Islamophobia is reproduced in an elusive and almost imperceptible way in daily interactions with teachers and peers, especially since middle school. Defining these forms of racism as “micro” is not meant to belittle the phenomenon but to point to its specificity. It is useful to highlight the particular ways in which ethnoreligious difference is marked in a context like Italy where minorities are relatively less visible than in other European countries. Finally, the paper refers to recent academic discussions on femonationalism, yet by moving the analysis from the level of public discourse to that of daily interactions between female teachers and students especially.

Derelict land. Una riflessione sulle fabbriche abbandonate nel territorio biellese.

Manuela Vinai — 2023-01-20

The marks left on the ground by the industrial history are a distinctive feature of the Biella landscape. The nineteenth-century origins of the first wool entrepreneurial adventures produced obsolete structures already in the last century, triggering an initial interest in the recovery and enhancement of “historic factories”. Starting from studies about deindustrialization and the effects of the subsequent process of abandonment, the article examines the need to reflect on the presence of abandoned areas, taking into account not only their heritage but also the repercussions on the lives of the inhabitants. Through the meanings that can be found in artistic productions such as movies or novels, and from the description of the “social ruins” caused by the loss of work, an anthropological research path is traced to give voice to the community and to the “cultural drama” caused by a long period of transition [Dudley 1997].

Editoriale n.2 2022

Alberto Baldi — 2023-01-20