Paper short abstract:

In this paper I would like to compare my ethnography in New Zealand and South Italy focusing on the construction of a new identity space, where indigenous and migrants women can stay in-betweeness living and moving between different cultures and worlds.

Paper long abstract:

Mobility is a term used to explain the ability to move or to be moved. We can also refer this word to the social mobility or to the ability to move between different levels in society or employment. But the real meaning is not just spatial, temporal or social, often a deep conceptualization of mobility helps the ethnographer to understand how this dynamic concept works and drives identities into different cultural belongings.

The poetics of "Roots and routes" are in the same frame for those women who migrate and left their country of origin and for those women who reconstruct their indigenous identity in a post colonial society. In this paper I would like to compare the construction of different poetics of belonging related to the reshaping of the women identity in two contexts: Italy and New Zealand.

I would like to focus on my field research in New Zealand and in South Italy, exploring how Maori women and African women migrated to South Italy reconfigure a new space - a place in betweeness, where they live and experience different cultures and belongings, using their agency to build a new cultural identity… always on the move.