LA RISPOSTA UMANITARIA AL FENOMENO MIGRATORIO. STUDIO ETNOGRAFICO DI UN CAMPO NEL NORD D'ITALIA

This research investigates the camp for migrants as a political-humanitarian device to face immigration. It is claimed that humanitarianism, a theoretical approach and a set of interventions to face the other’s suffering, has expanded its domain of action from war context to everyday political life, though without losing its nature: it is an immediate, temporary, and exceptional reaction to face an emergency. In this respect, Italian migration policies offer a fertile field of study, where humanitarianism proposes a way to manage and, at the same time, to understand (a certain kind of) immigration. In the local and actual context, as it used to happen in conflict times, the primary instrument of humanitarian intervention is the camp. It is a space of protection of real or assumed victims (of war or of forced migration) and, yet, of their limitation, not only from a geographical point of view. In this research, the literature on humanitarianism, its development, action and rhetoric, meets with theoretical and empirical studies on present migrant camps in Europe and in particular in Italy, dealing with them from a main socio-legal perspective, but considering them also in philosophical, anthropological, and geographical terms. Theoretical considerations over humanitarian reaction to migration find support in an ethnographic study the author conducted from November 2016 to October 2017 in a Red Cross migrant camp in the town of Como (North of Italy). Spaces within this camp are analysed through the concept of the “service”, i.e. the performance of rituals to assist migrants, which embodies the essence of humanitarianism. The observed place represents a model of migrant “humanitarian camp”, a conceptual tool to understand and criticize a growing number of alike spaces in Europe.