A town on the move: the social drama's narrative redressive phase in a political contemporary setting

The setting for our ethnographic research is Padova, Padua, a middle-sized 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 coming primarily from Nigeria, the Philippines and Morocco; by 2008 this number has quadrupled, comprising in large part people from Eastern Europe and the Balkans in search of work in the town’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; 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