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In 1978, Italy passed a law establishing the abolition of the mental hospital. Up to that time, the traditional asylums were still governed by the 1904 law that positioned psychiatry within the criminal justice system by assigning it the function of custodia (control, custody) rather than of cura (care). In the 1960s and 1970s, Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia initiated a movement of de-institutionalization of the mentally ill that revolutionized psychiatric care in Italy. It also had a deep impact on restructuring the psychiatric system in other European and Latin American countries. In this article, I discuss the different psychiatric practices and imaginaries that resulted from the movement of democratic psychiatry and Basaglia's visions for a community-based and diagnosis-free care of the mentally ill. I ethnographically trace what I call the "Basaglia effect" in today's psychiatric practices, and focus on ethnopsychiatry as a counter clinic that emerged from Basaglia's legacy. I reflect on the frictions between care and cure that ethnopsychiatry re-articulates and works with in the context of contemporary migrations to Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze the practices of a group of Catholic nuns who run shelters for ‘victims of human trafficking’ in Italy, and are thus involved in state-funded rehabilitation programs for former foreign prostitutes. This case shows how the state and the Church are deeply implicated in each other’s projects of redemption and the creation of new forms of life. In Italy, the legal model for rehabilitating foreign prostitutes is avowedly secular yet also deeply shaped by a Catholic impetus to purify sinners. At the same time, however, the nuns themselves develop an understanding of redemption as a secular life-saving project in line with the state’s project of recognition, and thus inscribe their practices within the biopolitical effort to transform lives. Ultimately, I argue, leading by example becomes a specific Catholic instantiation of biopolitics that characterizes both the state’s and the Church’s approach to foreigners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]