“Inside the home it’s Morocco, outside it’s Italy”: Essentialization and processuality in the migrant experience

Abstract

Starting from a sentence recorded during an interview, the article is meant to analyze how cultural processuality and reification coexist in the narration of its own migrant experience from a migrant family originally from Morocco, resident in north Sardinia. The creation of a border between multiple cultural and identity components, coinciding with the threshold of their own private habitat, doesn’t seem to grant the empirical evidence that shows how, in the context of migration, mutation of relational horizon consists in a consequent cultural change. The dichotomy essence/process turns out to be inadequate in understanding the cultural sphere, orientated towards the "dual discursive competence", proposed by Gerd Baumann, with which social actors move in daily practice.