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Attraverso un’indagine etnografica, la tesi intende esaminare le rappresentazioni, le pratiche e i vissuti inerenti alle esperienze del dolore e del fine vita in un particolare spazio biomedico, quello di un hospice italiano. Una disanima della letteratura tanatologica, dell’antropologia del dolore e una parziale ricostruzione storica dei processi di ospedalizzazione e medicalizzazione permette di rilevare il costituirsi di una dimensione di rimozione, occultamento e marginalizzazione rispetto al rapporto intrattenuto dalla scienza biomedica con le esperienze del fine vita e della sofferenza cronica. Rileva altresì, la fatica antropologica di lambire e definire gli eventi del dolore e della morte, capaci di mettere in crisi i sistemi rappresentazionali e categoriali dati all’interno di una società e di portare a una frattura nel rapporto intrattenuto con il proprio sé, il corpo vissuto e lo spazio abitato. La domanda principale che guida il testo è quanto e se tali riferimenti siano efficaci per rendere conto delle strategie comunicative, delle pratiche e delle esperienze che accadono e si strutturano all’interno dell’hospice. Nella seconda parte della tesi, analizzo la struttura dell’hospice, come essa è organizzata e vissuta da un lato dai professionisti che ci lavorano, dall’altro dai residenti e dai visitatori che si trovano ad abitarla. Provo a mettere in risalto, a partire dai resoconti dei miei interlocutori, le peculiarità e le specificità dell’hospice rispetto ad altri luoghi in cui è esercitato il sapere biomedico, quali cliniche e ospedali, e la specificità delle cure palliative in esso esercitate. La centralità data alla componente comunicativa e relazionale nel lavoro e nelle esperienze in hospice, suggeriscono di considerare il carattere fortemente multirelazionale e multiprofessionale di questo spazio e le dinamiche di interdipendenza che in esso si costituiscono. La volontà dei professionisti dell’hospice di far conoscere le cure palliativ, Through an ethnographic investigation, this thesis intends to examine the representations, practices and experiences inherent to the experience of pain and the end of life in a particular biomedical field and space: an Italian hospice. An analysis of the thanatological literature, of the anthropology of pain and a partial historical reconstruction of the processes of medicalisation and hospitalisation allows to detect the constitution of a dimension of removal, concealment and marginalisation inherent to the experiences of end of life and chronic suffering in biomedical settings. It also detects the anthropological difficulty of interacting with and defining the events of pain and death. Events which are capable of undermining the categories given within a society and leading to a fracture in the relationship with oneself, the lived body, and the inhabited space. The main question guiding this text is how much and whether such references are effective in accounting for the communicative strategies, practices and experiences that occur within the hospice. In the second part of the text, I analyse the particular space of the hospice, how it is organised and experienced on the one hand by professionals who work there, and on the other by residents and visitors who find themselves living there. I try to highlight, from the accounts of my interlocutors, the peculiarities and specificities of the hospice compared to other places where biomedical knowledge is exercised, such as clinics and hospitals. The centrality given to the communicative and relational component in the work and experiences in the hospice suggests to consider the strongly multi-relational and multi-professional character of the space and the dynamics of interdependence that are constituted in it. The desire of the staff to share with the society the knowledge of palliative care and the relationship with the end-of-life experience promoted by it, has led me, in the last part of this thesis, to draw a com

“Me peins”, “mi ricordo” in dialetto ertano e cassano, è l’assunto da cui partono molti racconti delle persone legate alla storia della Valle del Vajont. Insieme ad altrettanti “non me peins”, i ricordi e i vissuti personali dei miei interlocutori (i superstiti del disastro del Vajont e i loro discendenti) sono alla base di questo lavoro di ricerca, nato da istanze al contempo metodologiche ed epistemologiche. Come si incontrano, intersecano e (talvolta) scontrano i metodi della ricerca etnografica con quelli della ricerca storica? Come metterli in dialogo volendo ricostruire una storia al contempo sociale ed evenemenziale, soggettiva e collettiva, puntuale ma non affannata nella ricerca del vero? Una storia che contribuisca a riflettere sulle traiettorie di vita dei soggetti, delle famiglie e dei territori, ma anche sulle dinamiche di potere che le determinano o che ne sono determinate. A questo scopo, risulta particolarmente adatta la vicenda di una comunità alpina che ricorda e racconta la lunga durata di un evento catastrofico, un “disastro” che è stato punto di cesura radicale, ma che non ha mai interrotto del tutto la continuità di vita., "Me peins" - "I remember", in local dialects - serve as the foundation for many tales of those connected to the history of the Vajont Valley. Alongside numerous "non me peins", the memories and personal experiences of my interlocutors (the Vajont disaster survivors and their descendent) form the basis of this research, arising from both methodological and epistemological considerations. How do the methods of ethnographic research intersect and at times conflict with those of historical research? How can we bring these methods into dialogue in order to construct an history that is about social phenomenon and chronological events, but that is also both subjective and collective, accurate but not overly focused on the pursuit of truth? A history that contributes to reflecting on the life paths of individuals, families and territories, as well as on the power dynamics that shape or are shaped by them. In this regard, the history of an Alpine community that recalls and recounts the prolonged aftermath of a catastrophic event - a "disaster" that represented a drastic turning point yet never fully interrupted the continuity of life - is particularly appropriate.

La tesi muove da una ricerca etnografica che investigato i modi molteplici in cui la figura del caregiving è riconosciuta da differenti attori locali nel dibattito pubblico e nel sistema di servizi di assistenza agli anziani in Emilia-Romagna. La tesi mostra come le rappresentazioni sociali del caregiving e della fatica della cura riflettano idee e valori sulla vecchiaia, la cura famigliare e la crisi demografica e del welfare. La ricerca contribuisce agli studi sociali sulla cura, mettendo in luce come immaginari sociali sul caregiving influenzano la formazione dei sistemi sanitari. Le pratiche di cura sono un punto privilegiato per lo studio di come categorie sociali fondamentali per la formazione della persona e del ciclo della vita si producano negli incontri fra livello informale e istituzionale., This thesis moves from ethnographic research that has investigated the multiple ways in which the caregiver’s role is recognized by different local actors in the public and institutional debate. and within the assistance services for the elderly in Emilia-Romagna. The thesis highlights how the social representations of caregiving and caring fatigue reflect ideas and values on aging, family care and the demographic and welfare crisis. The research aims to contribute to social studies on caregiving, by showing how social imaginaries of care shape the formation of healthcare systems. Care practices are privileged sites for studying how fundamental social categories for the formation of personhood and life-cycle are produce within the encounters between informal level and institutional one.

In this article, we analyze the public debate on fertility decline and abortion in Italy, focusing on demographic anxieties, fueled by conservative demographers and politicians, about the different reproductive behavior of native Italians and migrants. We argue that vitapolitics, a moral regime that defends “life” and condemns abortion, is one of the main mechanisms of reproductive governance in Italy. Drawing on two studies 1) on pro-life volunteers’ activism and 2) gynecologists’ attitudes to abortion and conscientious objection, we illustrate how vitapolitics shapes the demographic anxieties of these two social actors, who contribute to discipline reproduction on the ground.

La tesi esplora il ruolo che i saperi e le pratiche del corpo riproduttivo femminile hanno nel processo di ginecopoiesi. In che modo la produzione, la riproduzione, la trasformazione e la contestazione dei saperi sulla riproduzione influenzano il modo in cui le donne vivono il proprio corpo? Che implicazioni ha questo processo sulla costruzione e l’esperienza del genere? La tesi si basa su una ricerca etnografica condotta con trenta donne che abitano nella città di Bhuj nello stato del Gujarat, in India. Questo studio mi ha permesso di indagare in che modo sono percepiti e vissuti i diversi processi riproduttivi (es. mestruazione, gravidanza, parto, allattamento, menopausa etc.), prestando particolare attenzione al linguaggio e alle metafore utilizzate per descriverli. La ricerca ha un approccio che integra una metodologia visiva e narrativa, proponendo la tecnica della cartografia corporea come strumento di analisi delle rappresentazioni del corpo. Infine, lo studio prende in considerazione la costruzione della salute riproduttiva da parte delle donne e come questa si riconfiguri nell’incontro con la bio-medicalizzazione del corpo femminile. Il testo è organizzato in tre parti, ognuna delle quali presenta un diverso angolo di analisi: la rappresentazione, la fabbricazione e la cura del corpo riproduttivo femminile. La prima parte, strutturata attorno alle cartografie del corpo, si focalizza sull’articolazione dei saperi anatomici e fisiologici. Il corpo è indagato nella sua materialità e nelle sue manifestazioni somatiche, investigando l’articolazione semantica e simbolica delle diverse sostanze e fluidi corporei. La seconda parte considera i diversi saperi e pratiche corporee che accompagnano il processo di soggettivizzazione femminile attraverso un progetto di plasmazione intenzionale. L’autorità di questo disegno è fissata in un modello di femminilità che trascende le diverse correnti religiose, castali o sociali e che è applicato e perpetuato dalle sing, This thesis explores the knowledge and practices of the female reproductive body in the process of gynecopoiesis. How do the production, reproduction, transformation and contestation of knowledge about reproduction influence the way women live their bodies? What are the implications of this process on the gender construction and experience? This thesis is based on ethnographic research conducted with thirty women who lived in the city of Bhuj in the state of Gujarat in India. I tried to explore the way in which the different reproductive processes are seen and experienced (ex. menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, etc.), paying particular attention to the language and metaphors used to describe them. The research has an approach that integrates a visual and narrative methodology, proposing the technique of body mapping as a tool for analysing body representations. Finally, the research considers how women construct their reproductive health and how reproductive health is reconfigured in the encounter with bio-medicalization of the female body, which is becoming increasingly widespread in the region. The text is organized in three parts. Each part presents with a different angle of analysis: representation, production and care of the female reproductive body. The first part, which is structured around the body maps, focuses on the articulation of anatomical and physiological knowledge. The body is investigated in its materiality and in its somatic manifestations, by the semantic and symbolic articulation of the different bodily substances and fluids. The second part considers the knowledge about the body and different practices that accompany the process of female subjectivation through a project of intentional shaping. The authority of this discourse is set in a model of femininity that transcends the different religious, castal or social groups. This discourse is applied and perpetuated by individual women, through a feminine transmission. In the last

La tesi si inserisce negli studi sulle nuove mobilità Italiane, in modo particolare in quelle nord-sud, analizzando la presenza italiana in Marocco. A partire da una riflessione su quella dei primi del Novecento, adotta la prospettiva degli studi postcoloniali per comprendere le connessioni simboliche fra l'esperienza storica e contemporanea, oltre che le connessioni fra Marocco e Italia dal punto di vista degli immaginari e delle costruzioni identitarie. Dopo una descrizione del fenomeno utilizzando gli strumenti epistemologici e le categorie messi a disposizione dall'ampia letteratura sulle migrazioni si concentra su come scelte di mobilità e di famiglia si intreccino nella quotidianità di donne e famiglie italiane in Marocco oggi. Attraverso l'analisi del caso specifico intende aggiungere una ulteriore prospettiva etnografica alla più ampia discussione sulle diverse forme che le migrazioni assumono oggi., The thesis takes part in the discussion on the new Italian mobilities, particularly in the north-south migration studies. It analyzes the Italian presence in Morocco. Starting from a reflection on the early twentieth century Italian emigration in north Africa the research aims to understand the symbolic connections between historical and contemporary experiences adopting a post colonial studies perspective. So doing it tries to re-entagle the connections between Moroccan and Italian migrations from the point of view of imaginaries and identities representations. After a description of the phenomenon using the epistemological tools and the categories from the migrations and mobilities literature, it focuses how mobility shapes the daily lives of women and Italian families in Morocco today. Through the analysis of the specific case it intends to add another ethnographical perspective to the wider discussion on the characteristics assumed by the migrations today.

Starting from the analysis of the so-called of Gezi Park movement that in June 2013 has reshaped the youth-scape in Istanbul, the thesis reconstructs the public and the private forms of memory transmission of the 1980 - 1983 military coup in former revolutionary fighters families. The military coup can be considered as a historical watershed that radically changed the cultural, economic and generational features of the country. The coup provoked a radical de-politicization of age cohorts, grown after this date that have been represented in public space as apathetic, apolitical and consumerist by previous generations. The text is based on a two years fieldwork research and focuses on the plurality of shapes and uses of memory, the weight political experience of the seventies and the painful memory of the coup have in the relationship between generations, and the continuity and the discontinuity that young generations establish with memory frameworks conveyed by previous ones. These frames are characterized by the moral economy of the fighter and by the martyr code and can be seen as agonistic memory in a memory field that is characterized by huge hierarchies of power, where official history still represents the militants as internal enemies or terrorists. The protests of 2013 appear as a biographical and political breaking point that redefined the political space through new public languages. By involving a heterogeneous group of people as leftist militants, anti-capitalist Muslims, nationalists, ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTT organizations and the so-called apolitical youth it can be also understood as a cultural creativity area that reshaped the processes of construction and dismantling of social and symbolic boundaries among groups. Objects of analysis are also the construction of generational bounds in the young protagonists of the movement protest and in the so-called seventy-eight generation. Finally, I worked on the processes of memorialization of Gezi

The thesis presents a study of family planning policies in Mexico, Merida, in the state of Yucatan. The family planning policies are analyzed from two major perspectives: on population intended as fertility control of the population and that of the sexual and reprodcutive right. Starting from the analysis of the "field of contraception," the thesis will be a critical study on the ways in which sexuality and reproduction are defined, negotiated and lived. Reproduction appears to be involved in a dynamic process, influenced by cultural mechanisms, social, political and material inscribed into "local moral worlds" (Kleinman, 1999; Das, 1998 e 1999), and at the same time, influenced by relationship, strategies and global models (Biehl – Petryna, 2013). The agents of the field examined during the research are varied: institutionals, economics, socials, and the individual subjects with their lives. This field of action, however, is not only expressed in the dynamics of power relations in which the effects of domain are total but never completely stable (Foucault, 1984). The field is also expressed in the production of a discourse that legitimizes and supports models, visions and individual choices. Reproduction and sexuality within my work are not considered only as intimate spheres of human inscribed in the order of social, but are analyzed in their public and institutional aspects. These categories are investigated, in the thesis, starting from the form in which they are physically held and processed on the level of discourse in state hospitals and other social spaces (Pro-Life and Pro-Choice movement).

In this chapter, I analyse the strategies and discourses used in pro- life activism to challenge abortion, based on ethnographic research conducted in Northern Italy between 2009 and 2013. In the first part, I reconstruct the emergence of the Italian pro-life movement in the years when abortion was legalised, and briefly describe its practices and protest logics. In the second part, I focus on the two dominant discourses of contemporary pro-life activism: one that centres on the embryos/foetuses as ‘unborn children’ and another that centres on women (and men) as ‘victims of abortion’. I therefore take into consideration the burial of abortion remains and post-abortion healing as practices based, respectively, on the first and the second discourse. Both are carried out by organisations that, despite being close to the pro-life movement, are not part of it. I will argue that such practices, which both stem from Catholicism, are based on specific cultural constructions of subjectivity, guilt and pain associated with abortion. The burial of embryo and foetal remains and the paths for healing are not only aimed at the ‘salvation’ of maternal and foetal subjects, but are also strategies to oppose the law. For pro-lifers, the funerals for ‘unborn children’ and the testimonies of women and men wounded by abortion serve as moral injunctions to influence social policies and individual behaviours, contesting the idea that abortion is a right.

Il mio lavoro riconduce la dinamica adottiva dentro le case delle famiglie indagando in che modo coloro che sono diventati parenti attraverso l’adozione, soprattutto transnazionale, fabbricano le loro relazioni familiari più intime nell’ambito dell’intersoggettività domestica, in particolare come trasformano l’estraneità iniziale nella familiarità del legame tra genitori e figlio, ma anche nella connessione tra nonni e nipote, aspetti fondamentali per la comprensione di questa forma di parentela tra “estranei” ancora scarsamente indagata dalla ricerca etno-antropologica. La particolarità di cui sono portatrici molte delle famiglie, essere costruite per mezzo di figli già grandi (4-10 anni), e lo sforzo comparativo sugli stili familiari regionali aggiungono ulteriore specificità a questa ricerca, rivelando uno scenario di parentela molto più ricco di quanto altrove tratteggiato.

Compared to the abortion act (194/1978), the law that regulates medically assisted procreation (40/2004) marked an important change in the status of the unborn under Italian law. Furthermore, the opinions and motions issued by the National Bioethics Committee on the status of the human embryo (1996), the fate of residual embryos resulting from medically assisted reproduction (2005) and the appropriate treatment of embryos that are unsuitable for transfer (2007) show an equally significant change in the field of ethics. By analyzing these laws and opinions from the point of view of cultural anthropology, my paper describes a shift in the symbolic construction of the unborn in contemporary Italy. The different positions in these documents, together with the proposals put forward but never realized, are witness to the tensions between opposing and competing morals and the ambiguities embedded in the very notion of the unborn.