Between the individual and the community: Asian itineraries of transnational mobility in Italy.

Abstract (English)

The ethnographic stuff presented in this paper aims to complicate our understanding of migration, displacement and transnational mobility, too often relying upon Western taken-for-granted epistemological and political categories by which social theory and public policies take shape.
In particular, I will deal with itineraries of transnational mobility pursued by social groups of Asian origin (mainly from Sri Lanka and Philippines) who since four decades have been moving to Italy. Such “migration chains” have historically relied on the action of the Catholic Church’s networks that still play an active role of mediation between the increasing demand of work in the domestic/care sectors in Western Europe and the offer of workforce represented by men and (especially) women from South and South Eastern Asia.
Two main lines of reasoning will be proposed in the paper. The first concerns an effort to go beyond narrow community-based approaches when dealing with migrant groups residing for a long time abroad. Privileging rather the lens of transnational movement (connecting Asia, Italy and the other sites of mobility) and the endless tension between home-making processes and disorientation will allow us to overcome too static perspectives on migrants’ cultural work “far from home”. In such a way, it will be possible to grasp the flexible affective and political constellations of tactics, individual stances and collective agency that make diasporic formations crossed by evident as well as less visible lines of communal convergence and rupture, not reducible to sharp dichotomies like those assumed to exist between the poles of structure and agency or seclusion and integration.
A second focus will relate to the moral and political statutes generally attributed to Asian Catholic migrants in the local contexts where they live and work, since they are generally welcomed as “docile” subjects, culturally prepared for “integration”. Even though such rhetorics (built upon racial and paternalistic assumptions concerning Asian people) may seem to blur the prevailing “us/them” binary dichotomies, an in-depth look at the Catholic pastoral interventions will reveal subtle internal lines of differentiation and “alterization” of migrants, stirring local and global projects of the global post-colonial Church.