Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
request help from an organization outside his community; he would rely on the
community to support him:
let's take an italian boy of 20 with his mother and father here; he's 20 years
old, doesn't work and doesn't care a bit. because he's got a home, he's got food,
he has no expenses, mum and Dad give him everything. but a bengali who ar-
rives here can't relax, he has to pay the rent every month, then he owes money
for his journey here, he has to eat, he needs a minimum of 500 euro to support
himself. he even has to remit money to his family, he has to work like a high-
speed train, not a slow one. Now this 18-year-old bengali will have 10,000 euro
in his pocket by the time he is 30. No bengali would seek help from Caritas,
he would turn to his own community, he wouldn't go to Caritas because he
would feel uneasy at the prospect. but an italian graduate of 30 is still looking
for work. (15 may 2009)
Counterhegemonic Regeneration, essentialism, and
Cultural hybridization
men such as asraf, Rony, babu, mukhtar, and many others are pioneers who
are perhaps unaware of a counterhegemonic process of cultural settlement, but
they are also representatives who are conscious of a diasporic community that, in
activating settlement politics in a national and local territory, redefines itself in
essentialist and nationalist forms. The positions of those who act as spokesmen
prompt a series of questions that relate to what we may call, from urban planning
and social perspectives, a form of “regeneration” of Rome's suburbs: a process
that as well as generating change, bypasses dominant and hegemonic values such
as urban regeneration, usually attributed to the middle and upper segments of
the original inhabitants.
even though the percentage of bangladeshis in torpignattara is no high-
er than that of “original” inhabitants or other migrants, the area is in fact well
known as banglatown. some of the media have noticed this, and television dra-
mas have already been shot in the “Via della banglanella”; it is predictable that
other media products, documentaries, and reportages about this area will soon
be produced, reinforcing the district's multicultural image. The consequence of
this will probably be that groups of young people will be attracted to the area, to
the annoyance of the original low-income families and the elderly working class
who at present are not happy to live side by side with economically successful
migrant groups.
it is perhaps not the task of the anthropologist to establish whether or not a
settlement process falls into a category borrowed from town planning (upgrad-
ing, regeneration, renewal, etc.), nor to identify objective parameters that do or
do not relate to the improvement of quality of life. our purpose as anthropolo-
gists is rather to analyze these dynamics in the context of cultural identity-build-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search