Excessive Presences: An Ethnography of Experiences of Crisis in the Italian Asylum System

The debate around forced migration and mental health focuses mainly on the effect of stressful experiences on the wellbeing of migrants. Although there is a large body of anthropological literature criticizing the medicalisation of trauma and emphasizing the correlations between restrictive migration policies and migrants’ mental distress, research rarely goes beyond the categories of suffering, illness and health. The assumption that a psychic life falling outside the ordinary is fundamentally a predicament is rarely questioned. The aim of this thesis is to fill this gap in research, by considering “divergent,” non-ordinary experiences as possible other ways of being in the world. Therefore, this study examines alternative, idiosyncratic, ways of perceiving, sensing and making sense of the world, understanding them as unconventional narratives – and sometimes even as counternarratives – about their social, political and historical background. The research draws on information collected from refugees during eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Torino, Italy. The main research findings are twofold. Firstly, this thesis offers a new angle on the link between the social and the psychological. The research analyses the effects of asylum policies and practices on migrants’ sense of self and of belonging, arguing not only that mental distress happens at the conjuncture between subject and macro forces, but also that mental disorders can provide a privileged perspective on the work of ordering mechanisms – namely, migration policies restricting citizenship’s rights, and interventions reproducing precarity. Also, this thesis considers the relationality of mental distress, arguing that even the most idiosyncratic experience of crisis is always situated in a space of social, political and historical relationships. Therefore, crisis entails a disruptive potential, for it creates a disturbance into the social world. By arguing for the need to include divergent memories in academic and policy discourses, this research contributes to the debate surrounding the politics of “refugee voices” in forced migration and refugee studies. Secondly, this thesis contributes to the debate around ethnographical methods in anthropology. In employing mental disorder as an ethnographic object, this research makes use of the idiosyncratic as a device to unfold the opaqueness and the implicit in the collective. Also, this research provides a new understanding of the researcher’s positionality, and, specifically, of the effects of being open and vulnerable to the field. By being simultaneously exposed and responsive to others, ethnographers are witnesses for they bear the marks left by field encounters.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• Morra, Francesca

Contributors dc:contributor

• Clack, Beverley
• Cochran, Molly
• MacClancy, Jeremy

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/w5zr-s024

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:8fdbd620-8e00-4d74-98a1-852627144ee9:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1