The Potential Conflict with the Outsider

Sometimes, we tend to remember the great difficulties that previous Italian generations met in the migration experience, whether internal, from the south to the so-called «industrial triangle», or outside the national borders: Germany, Switzerland, America and so on. Remembering is a very important activity. It is even more to the man uprooted from the original context. From that point of view, actually, something worth noting: the great difficulties never run out with the gradual emancipation from the main essentials needs. Rather, when the strict necessity begins to become a memory, the sign of the tension experienced in dealing with the social reality of settlement, i.e. the population already integrated and indigenous peoples, seems to stay alive in the experience of the migrant. And this seems true, even more, when we take into consideration a socio-economically homogenous local context. It should be stressed again: only few times we tend to remember the past and build on those experiences. On the one hand, therefore, it can be argued that the lack of respect for others in interpersonal relationships, as in the case of prejudices and verbal humiliations, always runs the risk of falling into general oblivion, passing through the filter and the images of the «nervous life» (Simmel 1903) and of indeed tenuous, intergenerational narratives. On the other hand, – we repeat – oblivion and erosions of the lessons from the past do not ever involve the masses of people who have lived and continue to live on their own skin, by strangers, the complexity of the relationship with the integrated people in a daily shared environment. The question comes up again, with reversed roles, when my country – Italy – realizes it represents a huge magnet in the service of process of labour market globalization: with all the consequences that the case involves in the common sense. I believe that this brief introductory framework can help to enhance the analysis proposed by Norbert Elias on estrangement, understood as a relationship of interdependence between members of different groups. So, starting from the German sociologist’s contribution, the purpose of this article is to focus on the image of today (individual and group) migrant in a relational key. More specifically, we want to help in the organization of a useful frame to understand the potentially conflicting relationships in which the perception of this strangeness occurs. The goal is to recover stimuli and concepts of primary importance to the toolbox of those who wish to study immigration and ethnic relations, trying to connect the reality experienced by people at the nodes, indeed crucial today than ever, that take shape from the social representations conveyed by the mass media and by the decisions made within the political-institutional sphere.