Non esistono culture innocenti.

Gli antropologi, le famiglie spossessate e i bambini adottabili

Abstract

Although anthropology has been slow to take children into account, these small subjects are at long last being located in a space that is theirs by right: at the crossroads between public and private, the political and the personal, between the State and the “maternal instinct”. When considering adoption of immigrant children, aesthetics and techniques of the body cannot be ignored – the “excess of melanin” (in Frantz Fanon’s words) or differences in “body odour” (as many Nigerian mothers say). But a depthless use of the notion of culture at work in public institutions involved in the protection and care of children also must be considered and the aim of this article is to analyse this latter. In my research I seek to reveal the social assumptions of a bourgeois state buried within policies on childhood with reference to technologies of citizenship and parenting imposed upon various subaltern groups (minorities and immigrants). This happens, I argue, in striking continuity with conditions found in European colonies, and with conditions observed during the origin and consolidation of modern states and postcolonial families. How do you make an adoptable child from the offspring of immigrant parents? A form of “democratic” incorporation of these children into the Italian state, and into its “good families” seems to emerge here. This is done after purposefully constructing their Otherness (in terms of national, social and cultural development) from their parents (construed as not good enough). The culture of these parents – whatever that may mean – is stereotyped through a pseudo-scientific discourse into biomedical and socio-juridical categories. This article interrogates the disciplinary field of anthropology, to understand whether it is possible to promote a new awareness of these Others (among professionals, social workers, lawyers and judges). As anthropologists, how can we use our cultural capital for the consolidation of an embedded anthropology?