A Town on the Move: The narrative-redressive phase of social drama in a contemporary political setting

The setting for our ethnographic research is Padua (Padova) a middle-sized northern Italian town well known for its ancient University and its basilica of Saint Anthony, Il Santo. In 1998 the municipality of Padua counted only 5,600 migrants, primarily from Nigeria, the Philippines and Morocco; by 2008 this number had quadrupled, comprising in large part people from Eastern Europe and the Balkans in search of work in Padua’s lively tertiary and service sectors. In this context, we query whether Turner’s concept of ‘social drama’ is an applicable model for exploring questions such as whether migrants have provoked a crisis that is upsetting the status quo in the region; whether such crisis is recognizable in the public sphere and, if so, how it is manifested and how it may be  overcome. Above all, is Turner’s model capable of unveiling the sense of what is occurring in our towns, in our neighbourhoods, in the tens of public speeches of the actors involved, both migrants and hosts? These are, in sum, the questions around which our work has been revolving in the past years, and to which we have attempted to provide an answer, here and elsewhere. Keywords: migrants, Italian town, city change, Turner’s redressive phas