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CAREY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW 2006-07
Maurizio Albahari
University of California - Irvine
Charitable Borders: Pastoral Power at the Southern Edges of Europe
This study focuses on overlapping religious, legal, and spatial-political mechanisms through which the Italian state, the European Union (EU), and the Catholic Church manage undocumented migration and legal and cultural identities of citizens and non-citizens. It analyzes practices and discourses of charity, border militarization, national construction and Europeanization, which result in pervasive moral geographies and moral economies. The Italian case begs a number of questions stemming from the function of Italy as an external maritime frontier of the EU; the role of Catholicism in the Italian nation-state and in migrants’ care; and Italy’s relative recency as a country of immigration. Moreover, Italy features an ongoing history of domestic and intra-European migration, racialization, and exploitation.
This work is supported by one year of ethnographic fieldwork in southeastern Italy. Data collection methods included participant observation in local communities and in the apparatus of border control, migrant processing, and institutional knowledge production about migration and religion. I conducted in-depth interviews with clergy members and parishioners; non-EU migrants; immigration activists; border patrollers; volunteers; and policymakers.
This research builds an understanding of modern law as necessarily implemented through improvisation and fictional presumptions; and of the state and the EU as networks that form and maintain their sovereignty through performative practices, crucially including border practices of maritime rescue and humanitarian assistance. The Italian state, it is also argued, appropriates materially and discursively Catholic symbols, charitable activities and techniques of pastorship. In this way, it establishes the sacred nature of its territory and constituencies, and consequently legitimizes its own large-scale, costly, and often lethal project of border and human mobility regulation. Finally, the dissertation tackles the scholarly and policy discussion on the place of migration and religion—both Islam and Christianity—in the interlocking formation of Italian nationhood and of a supranational, European society. Thus, it also critically interrogates normative assumptions, including scholarly ones, about contemporary modes of liberal-democratic governance and knowledge production, challenging the boundedness of concepts such as “religious” and “secular,” “European” and “Mediterranean,” “migrant” and “citizen.”
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