Turin-Dakar: goods in transit: ethnography of a comercial circuit

• Grant number: 15/15698-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): October 29, 2015
• Effective date (End): July 28, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Omar Ribeiro Thomaz
• Grantee: Vanessa Elisa Margherita Maria Durando
• Supervisor: Pier Paolo Viazzo
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Università degli Studi di Torino (UNITO), Italy
• Associated to the scholarship: 12/13354-2 - Turin-Dakar: goods in transit: ethnography of a comercial circuit, BP.DR

Abstract

Since the middle of the 1980s Italy has hosted immigrants of diverse origins that came especially in search of new work opportunities. Amongst this diverse group, Senegalese immigration is known for development of autonomous and entrepreneurial work. Amongst the activities developed by these migrants, commerce is the most prominent, both as a source of revenue and for its symbolic meanings. Considered a "way of being" (Castagnone et al., 2005), commerce, and especially pedler commerce, represented throughout time an alternative that, through the remittances of money, guaranteed the sustenance of families in the country of origin. If traditionally Senegalese venders in Italy commercialized artisan objects from their home country (such as wooden sculptures, clothes, necklaces, shoes, etc), today they integrate this practice with the sale, to Senegal (in the opposite direction), of used and obsolete objects in the Italian market. The buying and selling of used goods, a result of the surplus in the European market to extra-European countries, is a relatively new occurrence (since the 90s) practiced by diverse groups of immigrants (especially of African origin). Our proposal is to perform an ethnographic study of one of these commercial routes that goes from Turin to Dakar. This will be the first study about this commercial practice in the Italian context.