Sara Bonfanti | University of Trento (original) (raw)
Papers by Sara Bonfanti
Asian and Pacific Migration Journal
Family labor migration from South Asia to Europe is often framed as proceeding in a predictable p... more Family labor migration from South Asia to Europe is often framed as proceeding in a predictable pattern of “male first-time migrant, ethnic marriage and spouse reunion.” Migration to Northern Italy is no exception. Primary data from recent ethnographic fieldwork reveal a slow rise in mixed South Asian–Italian couples, which might bring into question the quandaries they face in raising children. This article considers the daily struggles in conjugal and parental relations in mixed-culture households formed by spouses, one of whom is from a South Asian background, and the other is an Italian “native.” Applying intersectional analysis to the life stories and aspirations of such cross-cultural new generations allows for revisiting the commonplace view of South Asia–Europe intimate links.
Focaal, 2022
Within transnational labor, the working capital of migrants may recoil as aging and disability oc... more Within transnational labor, the working capital of migrants may recoil as aging and disability occur, crushing people’s everyday life and aspirations. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Indo-Pakistani minorities in Brescia, northern Italy, the author queries “a case for affliction,” seeing the experience of a breadwinner’s stroke disrupting his household. While for decades Punjabi diasporas have settled abroad remitting to the homeland, social attainment oft en remains precarious for first-time movers and their off spring. Aft er 20-year residence in a destination country, a migrant father’s collapse rebounds on his kindred, who regrettably turn to local welfare and public housing but also readjust personal desires toward sustainable family care. Intersectional analysis abets the participants’ narratives in challenging any set “sense of inequality,” embodied, and embedded in run-of-the-mill racialized capitalism.
Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexuality, 2020
Drawing from my research on Panjabi diasporas in Lombardy, I discuss the media hype which followe... more Drawing from my research on Panjabi diasporas in Lombardy, I discuss the media hype which followed the accidental murder of an Italian lady doctor occurred in Bergamo in 2013, during a brawl among Panjabi family clans. An embittered xenophobic and racist imagination tainted the local public opinion, replacing the typecast of Indians as mild laborers with ruthless criminals, enmeshed in feuds of southern Italian memory. Through ethnographic narratives and local chronicles, I contrast the stakes of immigrants and natives, citizens and officials, unraveling how the identity outcomes of that drama affected social interactions and integration of the Panjabi communities long established in the area.
Combining material culture studies and social anthropology, this chapter focuses on the narrative... more Combining material culture studies and social anthropology, this chapter focuses on the narrative travels of salwar-kameez, the iconic Punjabi suit. Placed at the crossroad between homemade and retailed clothing, this versatile three-piece garment (not exclusively but preeminently feminine) is widely worn among South Asians, possibly embodying ethnic pride, religious modesty, overthrown subaltern identity. Based on multisite ethnography, this work considers the “sartorial biographies” of three Hindustani Muslim women settled in as many diverse European countries. Caught in the seams of a globalized regional fashion, these diaspora women drape ambivalent aesthetics and ethics, uneven religious ascriptions and political projections within the textile of Punjabi suits, with which they express and continuously adjust their life designs.
Book review of Simona Taliani, Il tempo della disobbedienza: Per un’antropologia della parentela ... more Book review of Simona Taliani, Il tempo della disobbedienza: Per un’antropologia della parentela nella migrazione, Verona, Ombre Corte, 2019, pp. 207.
Italia, l’articolo discute di matrimoni transnazionali e ricongiungimenti familiari in una diaspo... more Italia, l’articolo discute di matrimoni transnazionali e ricongiungimenti familiari in una diaspora Sikh, intrecciando immaginari culturali, normative istituzionali ed affetti domestici. Si considera lo scarto tra l’esperienza di una madre e della figlia (l’una emigrante indiana pioniera, l’altra quasi italiana di seconda generazione) nell’appellarsi a reti parentali e opportunita migratorie per far fronte a persecuzione politica, ristrettezze economiche e limitazioni di liberta personale. La storia di famiglia che queste donne interpretano rivela aspirazioni e (im)mobilita dove s’intessono genere ed eta, snodandosi attraverso tempi e luoghi in via di trasformazione epocale. Nel saggio, l’etnografa riflette sulla metodologia che ha guidato l’analisi del materiale raccolto: il continuo rimando a spezzoni biografici resi dalle sue informatrici nell’arco di anni, passando dalla condivisione di immaginari domestici, alle confidenze di chi ha messo in moto le proprie intimita.
Family Practices in Migration, 2021
Ethnographies of Home and Mobility, 2020
Transnational Social Review, 2017
While India is known for its enduring caste system and mounting racist attitudes, its diasporas r... more While India is known for its enduring caste system and mounting racist attitudes, its diasporas resettled in Western countries are enmeshed in other (anti)racist discourses and practices. Seeing racialization as a process of translation, which is rampant in transnational migrations, this paper considers the racial experiences of Punjabis in northern Italy: a dense immigrant area, haunted by its colonial past, ongoing internal racism and current southern European rightist xenophobia. With a historical gaze, and based on my multisite research conducted between India and Italy in 2012-2014, I address everyday racial dynamics crossing geopolitical borders and other social boundaries (gender, ethnicity, class and religion). Ethnographic work with Italian Punjabis reveals a knot of racialized/racializing relations enacted in a super-diverse milieu: within and between the immigrant communities and the host society. Despite multicultural rhetoric, besides a demotion of African Blacks under a certain white European governance, South Asians embody, perform and resist the ambivalent nuance of "Brownie" shifting on a volatile color line, as they ironically dramatized in a youth educational project. Delegitimized race, grasping the transnationality of mundane racialization, is a step towards targeting the resilience of racism(s) in a world going plural yet nevertheless unequal.
Kultur und soziale Praxis, 2016
Book chapter, in (eds.) I. Goetz, M. Gutekunst, A. Hackl, S. Leoncini, J. Schwarz, "Boun... more Book chapter, in (eds.) I. Goetz, M. Gutekunst, A. Hackl, S. Leoncini, J. Schwarz, "Bounded Mobilities. Ethnographci Perspectives on Social Hierarchy and Global Inequalities", Transcript Verlag. (Forthcoming)
Quaderni Di Donne E Ricerca, Jul 1, 2012
Human Affairs, 2015
The dowry system originated in South Asia and the new patterns of household formation among India... more The dowry system originated in South Asia and the new patterns of household formation among Indian migrant minorities have been debated in the international literature, particularly in the UK. However, less attention has been paid to the pre-marital bargaining strategies used in the most recent Punjabi immigration to Italy (to date the largest Indian Diaspora in Europe) and to how a certain idea of kinship and a cultural code of spousal/parental relations are enacted through gift, exchange and favor. This article explores the “marriage market” among youth of Punjabi descent in Italy (between first and second immigrant generations), investigating the bride-groom selection procedures and the economic transactions which endorse a wedding agreement. Reports of ethnographic research just concluded in the northern rural districts of Bergamo and Brescia indicate that dissonant subjective narratives give voice to family and community conflicts across genders and ages in setting up new domes...
Focaal, 2022
In a world of rampant inequality, when millions seek out better futures elsewhere, this introduct... more In a world of rampant inequality, when millions seek out better futures elsewhere, this introduction situates critical experiences of dwelling within recent debates on home and migration. Seeing vulnerability as an active condition, this theme section records the attempts of individuals and groups on the move in fashioning a home despite adverse socio-cultural, economical, and political situations. Our argumentation considers: the imbrication of structural forces and existential power, the complexity of temporal registers across the life course, and the human capacity for home-making. As asylum-seekers, evicted refugees and deprived migrant families struggle to feel at home in precarious circumstances, our ethnographies reveal the violence inflicted by social systems but also the agency of subjects who strive to make the places they inhabit everyday worth living.
‘Home’, as a special place and a set of practices that separate it from the rest, may ‘scale up’ ... more ‘Home’, as a special place and a set of practices that separate it from the rest, may ‘scale up’ to the public sphere, particularly among immigrant and religious minorities. Following this insight, we investigate the functional equivalences between domestic space and public, religious one, based on a case study of Sikh gurdwaras in Southall, West London. Besides their everyday function as hubs for spiritual and cultural connections with the Sikh home(land), gurdwaras reveal a parallelism with a private home in two respects: vertical domesticity – the forms of spatial and temporal thresholding that turn a house of worship into the home of the guru – and horizontal domesticity – the home-like routines underpinning community life in gurdwaras. This opens up a novel space to see temples as infrastructures for people’s sense of home, and the reproduction of sacredness inside them as a form of homemaking.
Big collaborative projects are today common in social sciences. These projects imply the collecti... more Big collaborative projects are today common in social sciences. These projects imply the collection of large data stored and shared by collaborators and with funders. As increasingly discussed by anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists, however, large collaborative projects, especially when they are based on ethnographic research, entail specific ethical challenges. While funders increasingly expect scholars to share their data to insure transparency and accountability, the nature of qualitative data collected on the basis of trust relationship between researcher and respondent makes sharing and archiving a problematic issue. This article aims to address these issues by drawing from the experiences of the 7 researchers involved in the HOMING project, an investigation of the nexus between home and migration. In particular, we discuss three issues which concern ethnographic and qualitative collective research projects: data collection (the role of serendipity and tru...
Espaces et sociétés, 2019
Comment etudier aujourd’hui la mobilite, en pratique ? Les nombreux plaidoyers en faveur des ethn... more Comment etudier aujourd’hui la mobilite, en pratique ? Les nombreux plaidoyers en faveur des ethnographies multi-situees ont favorise la multiplication des enquetes qualitatives internationales ; mais la transnationalisation de methodes ethnographiques, developpees a l’echelle locale, suscite de nouveaux defis. Dans cet article, les membres du projet erc homing partagent les difficultes rencontrees, et solutions developpees, pour mener une enquete qualitative, a travers dix pays. Les auteurs reviennent plus precisement sur les strategies mises en œuvre, dans le cadre de leurs recherches ethnographiques transfrontalieres, pour (1) revisiter le pacte ethnographique entre enqueteurs et enquetes ; (2) mutualiser les donnees entre sites, et entre chercheurs ; (3) alterner phases de terrain individuelles et analyses collectives afin de favoriser des processus de cognition distribuee. Ce faisant, cet article pose des jalons pour stimuler la production de connaissances qualitatives nouvelles sur les mobilites contemporaines.
This article discusses how a process of ethnographic comparison has taken place in a project deal... more This article discusses how a process of ethnographic comparison has taken place in a project dealing with home and migration, with a particular focus on the social qualities of smell. This project highlights comparative ethnography across case studies with different social groups of reference and country settings. We have covered five European countries (Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Sweden), focusing on urban neighbourhoods and engaging with economic and forced transnational migrants from South America, South Asia and the Horn of Africa. We centre on smell as a form of homemaking in migratory contexts, analysing the tension between the affective dimension of food smell in domestic environments, as well as the normative dimension of smell in public spaces. In laying three empirical cases side by side, we reflect on the evocative and divisive qualities of smell to illustrate how our collaboration impelled a comparative analysis of peculiar ethnographic results that yielded overarching interpretations. Keywords: Collaborative Ethnography; Comparison; Migration; Home; Smell.
Asian and Pacific Migration Journal
Family labor migration from South Asia to Europe is often framed as proceeding in a predictable p... more Family labor migration from South Asia to Europe is often framed as proceeding in a predictable pattern of “male first-time migrant, ethnic marriage and spouse reunion.” Migration to Northern Italy is no exception. Primary data from recent ethnographic fieldwork reveal a slow rise in mixed South Asian–Italian couples, which might bring into question the quandaries they face in raising children. This article considers the daily struggles in conjugal and parental relations in mixed-culture households formed by spouses, one of whom is from a South Asian background, and the other is an Italian “native.” Applying intersectional analysis to the life stories and aspirations of such cross-cultural new generations allows for revisiting the commonplace view of South Asia–Europe intimate links.
Focaal, 2022
Within transnational labor, the working capital of migrants may recoil as aging and disability oc... more Within transnational labor, the working capital of migrants may recoil as aging and disability occur, crushing people’s everyday life and aspirations. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Indo-Pakistani minorities in Brescia, northern Italy, the author queries “a case for affliction,” seeing the experience of a breadwinner’s stroke disrupting his household. While for decades Punjabi diasporas have settled abroad remitting to the homeland, social attainment oft en remains precarious for first-time movers and their off spring. Aft er 20-year residence in a destination country, a migrant father’s collapse rebounds on his kindred, who regrettably turn to local welfare and public housing but also readjust personal desires toward sustainable family care. Intersectional analysis abets the participants’ narratives in challenging any set “sense of inequality,” embodied, and embedded in run-of-the-mill racialized capitalism.
Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexuality, 2020
Drawing from my research on Panjabi diasporas in Lombardy, I discuss the media hype which followe... more Drawing from my research on Panjabi diasporas in Lombardy, I discuss the media hype which followed the accidental murder of an Italian lady doctor occurred in Bergamo in 2013, during a brawl among Panjabi family clans. An embittered xenophobic and racist imagination tainted the local public opinion, replacing the typecast of Indians as mild laborers with ruthless criminals, enmeshed in feuds of southern Italian memory. Through ethnographic narratives and local chronicles, I contrast the stakes of immigrants and natives, citizens and officials, unraveling how the identity outcomes of that drama affected social interactions and integration of the Panjabi communities long established in the area.
Combining material culture studies and social anthropology, this chapter focuses on the narrative... more Combining material culture studies and social anthropology, this chapter focuses on the narrative travels of salwar-kameez, the iconic Punjabi suit. Placed at the crossroad between homemade and retailed clothing, this versatile three-piece garment (not exclusively but preeminently feminine) is widely worn among South Asians, possibly embodying ethnic pride, religious modesty, overthrown subaltern identity. Based on multisite ethnography, this work considers the “sartorial biographies” of three Hindustani Muslim women settled in as many diverse European countries. Caught in the seams of a globalized regional fashion, these diaspora women drape ambivalent aesthetics and ethics, uneven religious ascriptions and political projections within the textile of Punjabi suits, with which they express and continuously adjust their life designs.
Book review of Simona Taliani, Il tempo della disobbedienza: Per un’antropologia della parentela ... more Book review of Simona Taliani, Il tempo della disobbedienza: Per un’antropologia della parentela nella migrazione, Verona, Ombre Corte, 2019, pp. 207.
Italia, l’articolo discute di matrimoni transnazionali e ricongiungimenti familiari in una diaspo... more Italia, l’articolo discute di matrimoni transnazionali e ricongiungimenti familiari in una diaspora Sikh, intrecciando immaginari culturali, normative istituzionali ed affetti domestici. Si considera lo scarto tra l’esperienza di una madre e della figlia (l’una emigrante indiana pioniera, l’altra quasi italiana di seconda generazione) nell’appellarsi a reti parentali e opportunita migratorie per far fronte a persecuzione politica, ristrettezze economiche e limitazioni di liberta personale. La storia di famiglia che queste donne interpretano rivela aspirazioni e (im)mobilita dove s’intessono genere ed eta, snodandosi attraverso tempi e luoghi in via di trasformazione epocale. Nel saggio, l’etnografa riflette sulla metodologia che ha guidato l’analisi del materiale raccolto: il continuo rimando a spezzoni biografici resi dalle sue informatrici nell’arco di anni, passando dalla condivisione di immaginari domestici, alle confidenze di chi ha messo in moto le proprie intimita.
Family Practices in Migration, 2021
Ethnographies of Home and Mobility, 2020
Transnational Social Review, 2017
While India is known for its enduring caste system and mounting racist attitudes, its diasporas r... more While India is known for its enduring caste system and mounting racist attitudes, its diasporas resettled in Western countries are enmeshed in other (anti)racist discourses and practices. Seeing racialization as a process of translation, which is rampant in transnational migrations, this paper considers the racial experiences of Punjabis in northern Italy: a dense immigrant area, haunted by its colonial past, ongoing internal racism and current southern European rightist xenophobia. With a historical gaze, and based on my multisite research conducted between India and Italy in 2012-2014, I address everyday racial dynamics crossing geopolitical borders and other social boundaries (gender, ethnicity, class and religion). Ethnographic work with Italian Punjabis reveals a knot of racialized/racializing relations enacted in a super-diverse milieu: within and between the immigrant communities and the host society. Despite multicultural rhetoric, besides a demotion of African Blacks under a certain white European governance, South Asians embody, perform and resist the ambivalent nuance of "Brownie" shifting on a volatile color line, as they ironically dramatized in a youth educational project. Delegitimized race, grasping the transnationality of mundane racialization, is a step towards targeting the resilience of racism(s) in a world going plural yet nevertheless unequal.
Kultur und soziale Praxis, 2016
Book chapter, in (eds.) I. Goetz, M. Gutekunst, A. Hackl, S. Leoncini, J. Schwarz, "Boun... more Book chapter, in (eds.) I. Goetz, M. Gutekunst, A. Hackl, S. Leoncini, J. Schwarz, "Bounded Mobilities. Ethnographci Perspectives on Social Hierarchy and Global Inequalities", Transcript Verlag. (Forthcoming)
Quaderni Di Donne E Ricerca, Jul 1, 2012
Human Affairs, 2015
The dowry system originated in South Asia and the new patterns of household formation among India... more The dowry system originated in South Asia and the new patterns of household formation among Indian migrant minorities have been debated in the international literature, particularly in the UK. However, less attention has been paid to the pre-marital bargaining strategies used in the most recent Punjabi immigration to Italy (to date the largest Indian Diaspora in Europe) and to how a certain idea of kinship and a cultural code of spousal/parental relations are enacted through gift, exchange and favor. This article explores the “marriage market” among youth of Punjabi descent in Italy (between first and second immigrant generations), investigating the bride-groom selection procedures and the economic transactions which endorse a wedding agreement. Reports of ethnographic research just concluded in the northern rural districts of Bergamo and Brescia indicate that dissonant subjective narratives give voice to family and community conflicts across genders and ages in setting up new domes...
Focaal, 2022
In a world of rampant inequality, when millions seek out better futures elsewhere, this introduct... more In a world of rampant inequality, when millions seek out better futures elsewhere, this introduction situates critical experiences of dwelling within recent debates on home and migration. Seeing vulnerability as an active condition, this theme section records the attempts of individuals and groups on the move in fashioning a home despite adverse socio-cultural, economical, and political situations. Our argumentation considers: the imbrication of structural forces and existential power, the complexity of temporal registers across the life course, and the human capacity for home-making. As asylum-seekers, evicted refugees and deprived migrant families struggle to feel at home in precarious circumstances, our ethnographies reveal the violence inflicted by social systems but also the agency of subjects who strive to make the places they inhabit everyday worth living.
‘Home’, as a special place and a set of practices that separate it from the rest, may ‘scale up’ ... more ‘Home’, as a special place and a set of practices that separate it from the rest, may ‘scale up’ to the public sphere, particularly among immigrant and religious minorities. Following this insight, we investigate the functional equivalences between domestic space and public, religious one, based on a case study of Sikh gurdwaras in Southall, West London. Besides their everyday function as hubs for spiritual and cultural connections with the Sikh home(land), gurdwaras reveal a parallelism with a private home in two respects: vertical domesticity – the forms of spatial and temporal thresholding that turn a house of worship into the home of the guru – and horizontal domesticity – the home-like routines underpinning community life in gurdwaras. This opens up a novel space to see temples as infrastructures for people’s sense of home, and the reproduction of sacredness inside them as a form of homemaking.
Big collaborative projects are today common in social sciences. These projects imply the collecti... more Big collaborative projects are today common in social sciences. These projects imply the collection of large data stored and shared by collaborators and with funders. As increasingly discussed by anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists, however, large collaborative projects, especially when they are based on ethnographic research, entail specific ethical challenges. While funders increasingly expect scholars to share their data to insure transparency and accountability, the nature of qualitative data collected on the basis of trust relationship between researcher and respondent makes sharing and archiving a problematic issue. This article aims to address these issues by drawing from the experiences of the 7 researchers involved in the HOMING project, an investigation of the nexus between home and migration. In particular, we discuss three issues which concern ethnographic and qualitative collective research projects: data collection (the role of serendipity and tru...
Espaces et sociétés, 2019
Comment etudier aujourd’hui la mobilite, en pratique ? Les nombreux plaidoyers en faveur des ethn... more Comment etudier aujourd’hui la mobilite, en pratique ? Les nombreux plaidoyers en faveur des ethnographies multi-situees ont favorise la multiplication des enquetes qualitatives internationales ; mais la transnationalisation de methodes ethnographiques, developpees a l’echelle locale, suscite de nouveaux defis. Dans cet article, les membres du projet erc homing partagent les difficultes rencontrees, et solutions developpees, pour mener une enquete qualitative, a travers dix pays. Les auteurs reviennent plus precisement sur les strategies mises en œuvre, dans le cadre de leurs recherches ethnographiques transfrontalieres, pour (1) revisiter le pacte ethnographique entre enqueteurs et enquetes ; (2) mutualiser les donnees entre sites, et entre chercheurs ; (3) alterner phases de terrain individuelles et analyses collectives afin de favoriser des processus de cognition distribuee. Ce faisant, cet article pose des jalons pour stimuler la production de connaissances qualitatives nouvelles sur les mobilites contemporaines.
This article discusses how a process of ethnographic comparison has taken place in a project deal... more This article discusses how a process of ethnographic comparison has taken place in a project dealing with home and migration, with a particular focus on the social qualities of smell. This project highlights comparative ethnography across case studies with different social groups of reference and country settings. We have covered five European countries (Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Sweden), focusing on urban neighbourhoods and engaging with economic and forced transnational migrants from South America, South Asia and the Horn of Africa. We centre on smell as a form of homemaking in migratory contexts, analysing the tension between the affective dimension of food smell in domestic environments, as well as the normative dimension of smell in public spaces. In laying three empirical cases side by side, we reflect on the evocative and divisive qualities of smell to illustrate how our collaboration impelled a comparative analysis of peculiar ethnographic results that yielded overarching interpretations. Keywords: Collaborative Ethnography; Comparison; Migration; Home; Smell.