God’s gifts: destiny, poverty, and temporality in the mines of Sierra Leone

In Sierra Leone, many artisanal miners share the view that every human act and every event is the realisation of an inscrutable divine plan. Even though notions of fate and destiny are part of the vocabulary of Krio, the country’s lingua franca, miners prefer to use expressions that evoke God and stress His immanent presence and influence in their everyday lives. In order to understand the religious vocabulary of contingency and the cosmology underlying the ways in which miners interpret, reproduce, and imaginatively prepare the conditions to change their lives, this article focuses on the ritual practices connected to artisanal diamond mining. It considers these rituals as attempts to resolve the ever-present temporal and moral tensions between actual conditions of suffering and poverty, and the realisation of the well-being that miners associate with their desired futures

Afterword

We are all connected to multiple Elsewheres: the place(s) where we grew up, the place we would rather be, the places that haunt us, the places where the dead dwell, the sites of empire. Geographical Elsewheres can be a source of fear. In the wake of Europe’s so-called migrant crisis and border-crossing pandemic viruses, a moral and racist panic feeds off the supposed collapse of those ‘other places’ into ‘our society’. But other places can also be sites of fascination and longing. Think of the long history of travel accounts, or the long-standing desire to reach beyond the planetary horizon. The dream of a mission to Mars. Anything but the depressing here and now!</jats:p

Riflessioni in tema di minori stranieri non accompagnati

L'articolo esamina la condizione legale e sociale dei minori stranieri non accompagnati in Italia e, in particolare, nel Veneto, evidenziando alcune carenze normative e di policies che impediscono una adeguata presa in carico social e socio-educativa di questi individui. Sisofferma in particolare sulla necessit\ue0 di rendere generalizzato l'accesso di questi minori ad una effettiva tutela legale da parte di un soggetto indipendente (un tutore legale volontario) e la necessit\ue0 pertanto, da parte dell'autorit\ue0 giudiziaria, delle forze di pubblica sicurezza e dei servizi sociali territoriali, di adattare le proprie prassi operative

Il gioco degli specchi: la ricerca in uno spazio di esclusione

Il capitolo descrive le tecniche impiegate nella ricerca, con particolare attenzione alle pratiche etnografiche e all'analisi documentale