Milano migrante. Identities and places in an urban migratory context

The present work contributes to the anthropological debate regarding the identity/territory and global/local relationship in the context of migration. The positioning is double: while claiming for the artificiality of any direct correspondence between identity and territory and for the intrinsic processuality of the former, nonetheless I keep at distance from an abstract discourse where identity is polarised/hybridised along the conceptual dyads of global/local and modernity/tradition, without any ethnographic analysis. I construct the thick relationship between places and subjects in urban migratory context without reducing the city to a dumb scenography of the reflection, with the aim of making an ethnography with the city, and not simply in the city. The perspective is microphysical, reflexive and polyphonic, it puts into dialogue the city of Milan, some migrants, the researcher, the hegemonic and resistant discourses, trying to reconstruct the complexity of the topic and of the fieldwork. In addition, the narrative incursion of some moments of encounter with the social actors and of self-reflexivity has the function of diluting the scriptural hegemony of the author and remembering that the anthropology of migrations is characterized for its look from the migrant's point of view.