Issues of interaction and integration first emerged in the sociological structuralist and functionalist analysis of the relationship between individuals and the structure of society.
However these general interpretations of motivation and social roles (i.e. Parsons 1951) have not sufficed to explain the further complexities of agency and structure. Even those (e.g. Giddens 1984) who have attempted, through a post-structuralist approach, to explain the role of individual agents, have fallen into the loop of driving the individual into a false agency. They have described the individual as unconsciously reproducing the structural properties of society and interpreted culture only as a shared symbolic language. The initial aim of this research was to find a resolution to this problem through an anthropological study of a specific setting and thereby to go beyond the former holistic approach. The focus was thus cast on practices of negotiation rather than merely re-production. Individual agency has therefore been analysed in the wider political, institutional, historical and cultural context. In the individual's negotiations with wider structural properties of society, identity does not only contain a shared dimension: it becomes a battlefield for contesting and interacting with the surrounding discourses and practices (Baumann 1996).
The process of belonging to a variety of structures with which to come to terms has been described as “transnational lives” with the migrants being “plurinational subjects” (Salih 2003). The multiplicity of structures and the multipositionality of individuals allow this research to further develop the study of the processual formation of identities and the plurality of loyalties. Moreover the nuances and shades of individual engagement with dominant discourses and narratives and the various ways people play their politics of day-to-day life may only be understood through a close look into individual and collective practices and discourses.
Discourse and practice are at the heart of the anthropological question of this thesis.
Discourse is in itself a multi-facet concept intrinsically linked with the linguistic formation
through which people explain their perception of reality. In recent debates, though, discourse has been conceptualised as the production and reproduction of social understandings. The Foucauldian analysis has been widely applied to streams of debates included in the post-modern turn. The ideological concern, prevalent in Marxist analysis, has been further developed through discourse analysis. Ideology with its (Marxist) implicit idea of alienation has been expanded in a theoretical appreciation of individual production and re-production of discourses. While Marxist and Marxian ideology sees some specific levels of society as agents of hierarchical social constructs and top-down power and knowledge relations, such as capitalists for Marx and intellectuals for Gramsci (1996); in Foucault knowledge is something which is produced and re-produced at every level of society and by every individual playing into institutions; Foucault gives simple examples of agents of discourse such as a prison guard. Foucault’s analysis is not focused on a highly centralised idea of society but on a result of a set of practices looked from a bottom-up perspective.
Discourse is a concept used to explain those topical linguistic formations of reality in which every individual is involved. The formation of discursive explanations, though, is not constrained solely to a linguistic reality; in Foucault’s analysis discourse is a regime of truth which pervades practice as well as language. In many ways discourse is like an ideology, but it is not produced by the powerful elite who alienates the working class to keep the means of production. Discourse is not something over which someone has the power of manipulation (Foucault 1980). Every individual is in fact subjected to it and at the same time empowers it by re-producing it. It is a snake with no head and no tail.
Practice has instead been the focus of the phenomenological trend (starting from Bourdieu 1977, and continuing through M. Jackson 1989, Moore 1999, and Taussig 1987, 2009), privileging an attention to performance rather than linguistic exegesis. In this approach there is a conceptualisation of praxis as something that comprehends the dialectics occurring between structure and agency, and between the material and symbolic domains, away from linguistic interpretations. Experience becomes the concern through which the relation
between the self and the other is understood. The attention to practical engagement moreover shifts the structuralist concern onto the individual’s act of following predefined social rules and norms. The phenomenological and experiential focus also reduces the importance of the social structure by explaining symbolic and ritual practices as concrete bodily engagements rather than as abstractions depending on the social structures themselves.
In the same way as Foucauldian analyses do, phenomenological approaches have developed a theory in which the individual participates in social processes rather than being passively adapted to a-priori rules and meanings. What thus links the two trends is the fact that the individual is not a passive or alienated being who reproduces something while residing outside. Neither does the involvement of the individual imply that s/he is independent and therefore may completely detach her/himself from shared meanings. Moreover the concept that links but at the same time differentiates the two trends is that of embodiment. In Foucault’s analysis of institutions such as the clinic (1973) and the prison (1977), language and categorisation shape the body of individuals. The gaze, through which discourse is imprinted, is an embodiment of the linguistic formation of reality; but at the same time, by applying categories on the body, it produces embodiment. There is therefore a relation between language and practice in Foucault but it is the former which shapes the latter. In the analysis by Bourdieu (1977) the experience of the body itself is the motor for embodiment. In his analysis, cognition is not a state of the mind, but a process occurring in the body; he is thus not talking about knowledge but about embodiment. Social incorporation is not simply a sterile reproduction of symbolic frameworks but a process of acquisition. Bourdieu identifies embodiment through communication; the learning of how to act is achieved through the body and it creates memory, posture and feelings. Thus social incorporation is achieved through experience. Most of the time linguistic exegesis does not achieve logical explanations of action; it is action itself that shows the meanings. Action therefore is the meaning itself. These two stances differ in their focuses. In the first, it is
discourse that produces and reproduces regimes of truth, and in the latter it is practice that shows social incorporations. The two stances leaning, one to language the other to practice, are asking different questions.
Foucauldian discourse analysis has in fact opened the path towards an understanding of the force that linguistic explanations have on reality. I apply this perspective to understand Italian and Eritrean policies and their discursive influence on people’s ideas of the self and the other. Moreover, this view leads to questions on the implications of discursive formations on individuals. I thus looked for the ways in which the categories formed by the Italian and Eritrean mainstream affect the ways Eritreans act, embodying the gaze which is defining them. At the same time I am interested in the ways in which discourses of identity are produced and reproduced among the Eritrean communities in Milan. The work by Povrzanovic (2002) has shown how people may be reproducing symbologies and sharing unified ideologies, while in their day-to-day practices and in their dreams they interpret discourses in different ways through their personal experiences and their specific positions in society.
Practice and experience are very useful conceptual tools to understand what I call the
“politics of little things”. The phenomenological approach thus becomes a methodology for research itself. It is regarded as a methodological process in which the research brings into play a phenomenological “encounter” to enlighten the field. The experiential scope is needed to understand the field in its humanity, through the eyes of a human being. Moore (1999) and Jackson (1989) have explained that it is important to look not only into the particularities of the field of study and its local exegesis but also into the link that the peculiarities of every social field have with each other. The general focus on human experience is important to go beyond the relativistic approach which would arise out of the sole attention to specificity and difference. Nevertheless the phenomenological approach in this thesis does not lead into its theorisation; it does not follow through its analytical
implications. On the other hand, the existing Foucauldian discourses and power dynamics force the anthropological gaze to be aware of its impacts and interpretations.
Both approaches have therefore been useful for the research, for instance in finding distinctive categories based both on shared experiences and on dominant discourses (Baumann 1996). The exemplifier found throughout the thesis is that of generations of cohorts, where their differential abilities to create narratives represent their experiences.
The first generation’s response to the experiences of transit are either silent, as in the case of the young newly arrived, or silencing, as in that of those of the first arrived who settled and reproduce specific dominant discourses. These silences make the phenomenological analysis difficult to carry out, but highlight the necessity of finding their meanings through the approach itself. Those among the second generation of age, the young Eritrean-Milanese, are able to articulate representations of their personal experiences, an example which completes the phenomenological method of enquiry. The ability or inability to represent themselves in terms of shared experiences is thus manifest in the structure of the thesis. The differential modes of representation are drawn together and confronted, starting from their relative silence in Chapter two and concluded with verbatim and experiential representation in Chapter six which marks the greatest difference between the first and second generation.