Antropologie dell’infanzia e della famiglia immigrata

The aim of the paper is to analyse the production of adoptable migrant children (or children born from migrant parents) and the consequences of these kind of “dispossessed kinships”, to understand what parenthood is becoming in Europe today. “Bureocraft” shows there all its socio-political magic power: these parents are in fact constructed as affected by medical or psychiatric disorders, and their children too are exposed to the diagnosis of mental disease or to the moral discourse of sauvagerie. This process “breaks” some family ties to “make” new ones. Adoption represents for these children a quick path to Italian citizenship, so much so that it may become (if it has not already become) an instrument of social repression of the entire genealogy of their immigrant parents. This happens in striking continuity with colonialism; and even before that period, with the conditions observed during the origin and consolidation of modern States. Starting from this point, the paper is also an opportunity to rethink the politics of ethnopsychiatry and how “cultural matter” works in social and health care services, whose aims is to protect and support migrant families in trouble.