Festa, spazio, territorio: Risonanze territoriali e immaginazione dell’abitare in una festa “paradigmatica”

Which is the relationship we can see between festive phenomena and contemporary processes of locality making? And how do festive phenomena speak to us today about the territories they belong to and define forms of inhabiting? In order to answer these questions, the essay seeks to explore the festivity-territory-inhabitation relation through the spatial analysis of a specific ethnographic case, the feast of the Madonna del Monte di Marta (Viterbo, Lazio), broadening the gaze from the inhabited space of the town-city, where the feast is often (but not always) produced in its ceremonial moments, to the entire territory that the feast encompasses and helps to define, both in the construction of a ‘sense of place’ and in the experience and practical action of the same

Rifugio e genere: il ruolo della credibilità nella narrazione delle donne richiedenti asilo

This research aims to critically examine the correlation between asylum and gender relations, with a focus on the crucial role of credibility in asylum seekers’ narratives, concentrating the analysis on a feminist and gender anthropological perspective. In addition to the forms of persecution recognised by the 1951 Geneva Convention, women seeking asylum often face specific gender-based violence, including forced marriages, rape used as a weapon of war, and female genital mutilation. The complexity of expressing such traumatic experiences is intrinsic to the difficulty of retrieving memories in a coherent and orderly manner, a challenge further accentuated when this recollection occurs in a cultural and symbolic context foreign to one’s own.Women asylum seekers are frequently unable to provide material evidence to justify their well-founded fear of persecution based on gender. Consequently, credibility emerges as the main criterion through which international protection can be obtained, constituting the only means to validate their experiences of persecution. Starting from fieldwork carried out in Madrid (Spain) between 2015 and 2023, the results of ethnographic analysis of the relevance of credibility in the possibilities of accessing or not international protection from a feminist perspective are presented

Il clima delle frontiere: per un’etnografia ambientale dei corpi

Contemporary environmental crises, the migration dynamics related to them, current forms of border management, and all the resulting body phenomena are areas that need a gaze capable of grasping their intersections and interactions. In recent years, anthropology has extensively inquired into these issues. What we need today is the development of an ethnographic practice capable of capturing the interactions between these domains. In this direction, we outline the contours of an environmental ethnography of the body at the borders. It is a perspective that, moving from a focus on the reconceptualizations offered by recent studies on these issues, is based on the idea that analyzing the environmental crisis and its bodily dimensions from the perspective of borders emerges as an effective revealer of issues that go far beyond what is at stake in the border areas themselves. This article describes this approach through a dual perspective: on the one hand, a state of the art in anthropological and social science studies about these issues; and, on the other, a programmatic reflection for an ongoing research program

“Corpi indocili”, “storie eccedenti”: Violenza, genere, asilo tra processi di assoggettamento, ri-appropriazione e resistenza

The proposed analysis thoroughly explores the experiences of violence endured by women seeking asylum and refugees within the asylum system, focusing particularly on their interactions with the institutional actors responsible for their care and management. Through a detailed examination of a specific case study, the objective is to scrutinize the perpetuation of violence in arrival contexts, shedding light on the mechanisms of body governance, control, and acculturation practices utilized in these settings. These mechanisms perpetuate a preconceived, genderized, and racialized notion of the “true female refugee,” consistently portraying them as foreign, victimized, passive, and lacking agency. This reinforces narratives that emphasize their perceived need for rescue and protection. Furthermore, the study seeks to elucidate how women asylum seekers and refugees resist such violence by reclaiming agency and asserting their own narratives, bodies, and identities, thereby revealing distinct forms of resistance

How and why to study mountains: topics and types of research between limits and opportunities

Field practice in a neighbouring ethnographic context – both culturally and geographically –, of which the researcher is a part, entails specific difficulties, epistemological and practical problems quite different from those faced by classical anthropology. Based on the experience gained in three different projects involving the western Alpine arc over the last decade, we intend to highlight the fact that in some contexts it is appropriate to prefer ‘peripheral’ anthropological research, less localised and based on shorter stays. The research conducted in the Piedmontese highlands, despite their differences in terms of assumptions and concretisation, in fact highlights the predominant thematic strands through which mountains are studied in this area

Corpi in fuga tra pratiche di accoglienza, questioni di genere e percorsi di soggettivazione

The article introduces a monographic section on to the theme of the complex intertwining of wars, gender and health in the experience of asylum seekers and refugees, starting from some ideas that emerged in a dedicated thematic session carried out as part of the 4th National Congress of the Italian Society of Medical Anthropology (SIAM). In the text, after having underlined the importance of an anthropological analysis of contemporary wars, the author focuses, according to a critical and gender perspective, and starting from the discussion on the ethnographies that make up the monograph, on the problems, including those of health, of people fleeing war conflicts and violence, wounded in the body and traumatized, on which global welfare policies are exercised, with a specific focus on women