Practices of translation and the making of migrant subjectivities in contemporary Italy

In 1998, Italy passed a law (Article 18) granting “victims of human trafficking” temporary residence permits to “escape from situations of violence and abuse.” There were two conditions: the applicant had to agree to pursue criminal action against her exploiter and to participate in a state-funded “rehabilitation” program mostly offered by Catholic groups engaged in combating criminality and foreign prostitution as a form of “modern slavery.” Linking prostitution to female migration and slavery has significant implications for how migrant women are interpellated within the receiving country. When characterized as victims, these women are figured as lacking the dual capacities of desiring migration and appropriating laws that grant legal recognition. This article explores both the willed and imposed multiplicity of subject positions of these women within the fields of charitable and institutional languages. In Italy, qualifying as a “political refugee” or as a “victim of human trafficking” is often the only means of achieving the legal rights necessary to avoid repatriation. [translation, citizenship, migration, subjectivity, ethnopsychiatry, Italy, anthropology of institutions] T his article focuses on several components of the rehabilitation program for “victims of human trafficking.” Taking each component as a different strategy for converting migrants into citizens, it examines the intersections between practices of linguistic and cultural translation and forms of citizenship. Migrants must pass through several institutional settings to obtain legal rights and social services. By analyzing how institutional languages and cultures frame stories about the migrant, I examine the respective assumptions about citizenship. I argue that, in contemporary Italy, the different projects of citizen making are inscribed in complex processes of translation, and that the figure of the migrant has a “mirror function” (Sayad 2004) of illuminating the forgotten history of the receiving country. The analysis that follows therefore questions the receiving society’s practices of inclusion and exclusion of its others. I went to Turin, Italy, in 2002, initially to examine practices of cultural mediation within the setting of ethnopsychiatry and, more broadly, to understand the relationship between emerging therapeutic approaches to migrant patients, practices of translation, and new conceptions of citizenship. I was interested in the new professional class of cultural mediators and in the creation of a discourse within ethnopsychiatry in which identity and mental health become something that can be negotiated between migrants and Italian institutions.1 Soon, I realized that cultural mediation and translation were concerns not only in ethnopsychiatry but also in various institutions such as police stations, Catholic shelters for migrants, schools, and courtrooms. Each institutional setting engages in practices of translation to produce an intelligible account of the migrant. I approached the production of migrant stories as the translation of alterity into the languages of these institutions, and as a means of creating citizens—those who are recognized as members of a community and adhere to its diverse bureaucratic logics.2 For a woman seeking a residency permit under Article 18, the first step of the rehabilitation requires filing criminal charges against her traffickers. Other steps involve living in a shelter (usu. run by Catholic nuns); professional training in Italian language, cooking, and housekeeping AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 588–606, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00100.x Practices of translation American Ethnologist “Italian style”; elderly care; and medical examinations. Women are sometimes referred to the hospital or the ethnopsychiatric clinic for psychological support. Nuns, psychiatrists, ethnopsychiatrists, and cultural mediators collaborate in rehabilitation programs and often share the fragments of women’s stories that each is able to collect in an effort to understand the larger context of their lives. My argument has two main theoretical points. I argue that different conceptions of citizenship are at play in contemporary Italy. When it comes to victims of human trafficking, becoming legal is often figured by legal and religious institutions as emancipation. On the one hand, I suggest that, likewise, redemption and expiation are not only crucial issues for Catholic groups involved in aid programs for migrants but they are also at the core of integration policies promoted by the state through the rehabilitation of migrant prostitutes.3 In this sense, the form of citizenship that I observed emerging from this approach to migrants is what I call “confessional citizenship” because legal recognition is granted on the condition that women file criminal charges against their traffickers and go through a program of reeducation that evokes the experience of expiation. This will grant legal papers and “freedom from slavery.” Being recognized by the state involves the production of a victim narrative (through the act of denuncia, or filing criminal charges), and the commitment to being socialized in what is recognized as the “Italian way of being” of the female citizen. This process takes place through what may seem an act of self-effacement in which women’s stories are rephrased into the juridical language of the state and the religious language of Catholic groups. On the other hand, other institutional settings such as the ethnopsychiatric clinic where I conducted part of my research promote a different model of citizenship. In this context, becoming an emancipated subject has a different valence: rather than converting migrants into “Italians,” ethnopsychiatry is concerned with reactivating connections and forms of belonging with the migrant’s culture of departure. Hence, resorting to one’s own cultural background—or the representation of it that ethnopsychiatry provides—is the condition for healing and for being able to adapt to the receiving society without abdicating one’s own difference. I refer to this second process as “cultural citizenship.” Here, I engage in a debate about emerging notions of citizenship and their relations to biological understandings of human beings, conceptions of the body, illness, and the performative power of categories such as “victim of violence” or “asylum seeker.” “Biological citizenship,” “therapeutic citizenship,” and “genetic citizenship” (Fassin 2001; Nguyen 2005; Petryna 2002; Rose and Novas 2005; Ticktin 2006) are some recent terms coined by anthropologists to describe shifting conceptions and experiences of citizenship within and outside of Europe that encompass the active politics of life and death and provide those who aspire to become citizens with a language with which to access the rights and services provided to members of the community. In the Italian context, Andrea Muehlebach has talked about an emerging “ethical citizenship” under neoliberal conditions that imagines citizens as bound together by moral and affective, rather than social and political, ties, and through duties, rather than rights (Muehlebach 2007). Although expanding understandings of citizenship from its conventional basis in law and political science, these new designations—which assign an adjective to the practices that produce and are produced by people who belong to or make use of the community—risk creating a surplus of characteristics linked to citizenship that may in the end void the term of its explicative power. With this critique in mind, I locate my work at the intersection of this theoretical discussion on citizenship and the narrower legal definition that affects migrants’ lives in very specific ways. Migrant women discussed in this article become legal residents— not full citizens—after completing the rehabilitation program; they therefore attain certain legal rights such as residence, access to health care, and the opportunity to work. I consider the conditions that grant legal residency as the antecedent to full citizenship. The difference between a resident and a citizen is partially of degree of integration within Italian society (ten years of legal residency will grant citizenship), and at the same time of blood and ancestry (children born in Italy to undocumented migrants are themselves undocumented). I make my second but related point by engaging both philosophical and anthropological reflections on translation. I use this term both literally—as the process through which a language is rendered into another language—and as a theoretical metaphor through which to think about difference. In fact, the question of translation is central not only to hermeneutic philosophy but also to anthropology because it questions alterity, and its commensurability or incommensurability: given the multiplicity of languages, what makes them translatable one into the other? Can translation reach and convey the alterity of the other? It is precisely around these questions that various contemporary hermeneutic approaches confront one another, explicitly or implicitly. On the one hand, by privileging communication, relation, and the overcoming of distance among languages, some philosophers emphasize their translatability and the autotransparency of a community of communication (Apel 1980; Gadamer 1975; Habermas 2000). These theories suggest that it is possible to achieve intelligibility and transparency between languages, but they conceive of “community” and “language” as too stable to provide a subtle understanding of the complexity of dialogues (Crapanzano 1992). The process is aimed at coming to a compromise and making translation “clearer and flatter than the original” (Gadamer 1975:348). On the