I am new to the list and I would like to introduce myself. I am currently enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Torino, Italy, Dipartimento di Scienze Antropologiche, Archeologiche e Storico-Territoriali where I work with Prof. Vanessa Maher (U. of Salerno) and Prof. Antonio Marazzi (U. of Padova) who are my two advisers.
I have a degree in psychology from the University of Padova (1990), but as I have done a research thesis in Cultural Anthropology on The Variety of Ethnic Experience: Italian-Americans in Northern California I then decided to continue on this path and got a fellowship for a PhD program in Cultural Anthropology. I have also spent a year at UCLA (1987-88) and a Summer at Stanford University while I was doing my fieldwork in Northern California in 1988-9. From my fieldwork in Northern California I published an article: "Stereotypes as Cultural Constructs: A Caleidoscopic Picture of Italian Americans in Northern California" in Luisa Del Giudice Studies in Italian American Folklore, Utah State University Press, Logan 1993 and presented a couple of papers at international meetings.
After looking at the ways in which Italians abroad have come to terms with their past experiences of migration, and after being exposed to the centrality of female-networks in the migration process, I realized, when I came back from the States, that Italy had become a country of immigration itself. Of course I knew it, but suddently it had become an issue, TV and mass media were reporting on these extracomunitari, sometimes called marocchini as a general, inclusive and derogatory term for all immigrants. Immigration was represented as a problem. It was 1989 and the Senegalese young men were selling their stuff in front of Uffizi in Florence, in piazza Duomo in Milan etc. A first circumscribed research I did was a case study on an Egyptian entrepreneur in a research sponsored by IBM Foundation and Cariplo Foundation for the Study of Multiethnicity (I.S.MU.), which I published in a book entitled Immigrazione, Lavoro, Tecnologia, Failla A. e Lombardi M. (eds), Etaslibri, Milano 1993. This year I published with others a book entitled L'Europa delle Culture, Fondazione Cariplo-I.S.MU., Milan which is meant for students reaching the last year of their secondary school curriculum. I wrote two chapters: "Oltre il mosaico di culture" (Beyond the mosaic of cultures) and "Tempo di migrare" (Time to migrate).
This interest on Italy as a country of emigration first, of internal migration during the golden 60s and finally of immigration since the mid70s, is particularly compelling for me, being of mixed origins myself. I think there is always a little (some say fairly big) part of our biographies in the research topics we choose and here is mine. I am a third generation Swiss (on my father's line: my grandfather came to Italy in the early 20s and married an Italian protestant woman). On my mother's side I am of Waldenses origin, and this means that in a Catholic country we are in a way at the margins. Waldenses have a past of persecutions and have developed a strong sense of their "community" with links to the protestant Northern European countries. In a way I have experienced myself both advanteges and disadvanteges of being raised in a context that stresses endogamy, a strong sense of identity, and a minority status. Also, as an adolescent I remember discussions on heritage and identity as being something imposed on us and rarely chosen. At that time I presented myself as Italian first of all, and Switzerland for me was a place to spend Winter vacations, not much more.
This being at the margins has become for me a productive theoretical stance, if we are to look at anthropology as a critical enterprise.
One of the main reasons why I decided to concentrate on the topic of migration in Italy is because it has become an issue in this country, an issue which is not considered as such by public institutions (migrants are thought to be temporaily in this country), an issue that has been mainly treated with regard to the social integration of ethnic communities and the ethnicity question. Rarely studies have concetrated on migration from a cultural perspective from the point of view of the experience of those who migrate.
My hope is to add a little something to the huge debate on race relations and migration in Europe.
I therefore will concentrate my PhD research on non-Eec migrants with particular reference to Egyptians in Milan. I happened to do some pre-research both in Milan and in Egypt, where I also studied arabic, and I am now in the process to try to narrow down my focus on some aspects in particular.
So far, I have been involved in the functioning of "transnational families" and the exchanges of goods, ideas, messages through social networks that have women at their center, as P. Werbner in The Migration Process has so well described for Pakistanis in Manchester.
Egyptians in Milan have been integrated into the local economy through family firms (mainly restaurants and shops). They are relatively old as a group of migrants (the first migrants came to Italy in the 60s as students, then after 1974, in the mid-80s and after 1990 through family reunions), it is varied in the sense that it is composed of both Muslim and Copts, it is socially stratified, even if when migrants come to Italy they become in a way "all equal". Since 1990 women have started to arrive and a second generation is now growing up in Italy.
A first point is the definition of an ethnic community. I would like to show that the concept of community itself is a cultural construction. What are the boundaries of ethnic communities? If we look at the communication processes and at the multiple interactions that people have in their everyday lives, we come to realize that the concept of an ethnic community is constructed, it is a fiction, it is invented. Also, formal ethnic associations in Italy never survived the first attempts, a situation which is so different from Uk or the Us.
Another interesting aspect I would like to explore are the various meanings that Islamic people attach to migration, and here I draw from hints from A. Sayad who studied extensively Algerians in France and from C. Delaney who did research among Turks in Belgium. Classical models have always explained migration as the consequence of push-pull factors, of world demographic, economic and social inbalances. I am not arguing that these explanations are worthless, rather I would like to complement those with a cultural and symbolic analysis of the migratory experience. Movement-haraka- in the Middle East is a broad category that extends from pilgrimage to minor pilgrimages, to the visits to relatives, to migration, return migration, voyages and so on, as Eickelman and Piscatori have so well showed in their Muslim Travellers. How is this category constructed among migrants and how this is a gendered construct? This, which seems to be a wide category, has implications on the way in which a sense of belonging is constructed (both historically and in the life cycle of households and individuals): this affects and it is affected by the notion of the person and of "agency", concepts that I woud like to explore among migrants. A "true Egyptian is a ibn al-balad, literally son of the country and in a way all migrants represent themselves as returning to their home land. Is this a gendered category? How it has been changing over the years? Is it a dominant definition of Egyptian ethnic identity?
A third point of interest concerns social networks and the continuous exchanges (including return migration, temporarily for the Summer or definitive) between the country of origin and the country/ies of destination, experienced by the single actors as exchanges among different family members, friends, quasi-relatives and so on. How do these networks work? How does the migration experience affect the position women have in these networks? How are gender and kinship relation therefore restructured? How is communication reorganized around high-tech media such as satellite-TVs, home videos, etc. For example, arranged marriages, which are still important to Egyptians, are being affected by both the migratory experience and by the process of selecting a bride which can happen through videos. Or ethnic identity is negotiated through generations and within the host society where processes of naturalization affect the identity formation of individuals and groups. Here I draw from Yanagisako S. and Delaney C.'s Naturalizing Power. If we are to look at migration as a complex phenomenon, simple dychotomies such as here vs there, past vs present, emigration vs immigration, internal vs external, we vs others, and the like (the list may indeed be very long) need careful articulation. Finally, I would like to contextualize the migratory experience in Italy. I would like to look at how discorurses on migration and race in Italy are constructed by different agencies (media, common sense, institutions, etc.) and how this in turn affects discourses on the national identity in an arena where "Europe" is a construct which is becoming more and more familiar in everyday experience and in the political debate which invades each night the kitchens of millions of Italians who eat dinner in front of TV.
Issues of globalization and local identities are therefore at stake.
Since I am in an initial stage, my plans may change in the near future (after the Summer) when I will start actual fieldwork. Is there anyone in the list who has comments/suggestions/readings/hints to provide?
Thank you so much for your attention.
p.schellenbaum@agora.stm.it
via Menabrea 29, I-20159 Milano
tel.: (+39)-2-6081279