Paper short abstract:

Through the ethnographic case of homeless migrants/refugees in the urban area of Termini Station in Rome (Italy), this paper aims to complexify the image of the margin, together with the anthropological concept of liminality, understood as a paradoxical space-time of risk and possibility.

Paper long abstract:

In the contemporary context, in relation to sharp logics of social and economic differentiation, the borders and the margins multiply and 'fractalize' (Tulumello-Bertoni 2019), reproducing themselves in pervasive, interstitial, less recognizable forms 'at the centre' of states and cities.

The form of the margin shatters to the point of being embodied by bodies themselves and by the practices implemented by certain subjects within the urban area.

This is particularly noticeable in Italy: stuck in a condition of 'in-betweenness', the homeless, the migrants in the centre of the cities, represent the limits through which the definitions of citizenship, city – and 'decoro' – acquire substance.

Through the ethnographic case of the homeless migrants in the area of Termini station in Rome, the aim is to expose the intersection of structural violences and perpetuating mechanisms of marginalization. Simultaneously, by virtue of the intrinsic paradoxicality that qualifies the image of the margin, outline creational processes of 'eccentric' subjectivities (de Lauretis 1999) - beginning from the assumption of the interstitial space being less defined and less captured by the dominant discourse that produces it (Brighenti-Mattiucci 2019).

For what concerns the migratory (/existential) path of many of the subjects encountered, that of Termini may be called an 'inner border zone of suspension'. In this sense, some socio-symbolic practices are interpretable as 'vital tactics' aimed at 'domesticating' a highly dangerous 'liminal space-time', projecting it in a shared horizon of sense to go back to 'occupying a position in the centre of the world' (Basaglia 1961).