10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5017
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2239-625X
5017
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urn:nbn:it:unica-28025
Letizia Bonanno
Anuac
Laura Ferrero, Chiara Quagliarello, Ana Cristina Vargas, eds, Embodying borders: A migrant’s right to health, universal right and local policies, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2021, pp. 280
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Book reviews
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285-288
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Letizia Bonanno
2021/12/01
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5017
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University of Kent, Regno Unito
2239-625X
2
288
urn:nbn:it:unica-28025
Laura Ferrero, Chiara Quagliarello, Ana Cristina Vargas, eds, Embodying borders: A migrant’s right to health, universal right and local policies, New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2021, pp. 280
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                                     2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 285-288




                                                                       RECENSIONI
Laura FERRERO, Chiara QUAGLIARELLO , Ana Cristina VARGAS (eds) | Embodying
borders. A migrant’s right to health, universal right and local policies, New York
and Oxford, Berghahn, pp. 280.


   This is an ambitious edited volume that promises an important contribution
to today’s timely issues of migrants’ health and access to local healthcare
resources. As the title itself suggests, the socio-political construction of
borders not only materially impairs migrants’ mobility: borders are also
embodied and experienced as both barriers in accessing healthcare resources
and internalised discourses on citizenship and deservingness. Given the
thematic diversity of the chapters comprising the book, the introduction
does the important job of keeping them together and does so by delineating
an overarching argument, which is theoretical and methodological at the
same time. Through a sustained engagement with the diverse ethnographic
material foregrounded in the chapters, Ferrero, Quagliarello and Vargas’
project addresses “the issue of the health of migrants from a perspective of
an interdisciplinary dialogue between medical anthropology and human
rights, in addition to being effective on a conceptual level, also [it]
represents a political stance” (pp. 2-3).
   The introduction opens with a critical assessment of the effects that
nearly a decade of austerity in Southern Europe have had in socio-economic
and political terms. On the one hand, austerity has coincided with the rise of
far-right parties across Europe; a rather dramatic political shift that has
meant stricter if not openly xenophobic migration policies. On the other
hand, austerity has resulted in the retrenchment of welfare states; a
neoliberal turn that has basically meant a dramatic curtailment of public
healthcare resources and services, for citizens and non-citizens alike. The
editors move on from this issue to introduce and discuss health as a human
right. This is a take that might seem controversial as it implicitly assumes
“rights” as a universal reality rather than a Western political category in

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Letizia Bonanno
2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 285-288.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5017
286                                           LAURA FERRERO ET AL. (EDS) | EMBODYING BORDERS


need of problematisation. Even though an overview, albeit brief, of the
relationship between anthropology and human rights is offered, a
deconstruction (or even the historicization) of “human rights” would have
granted the introduction further analytical strength, while allowing the
authors to better grapple with issues of citizenship and deservingness.
   Del Bono’s afterword “Forced migration, state violence and the right to
health” works as a concise conclusion but, quite interestingly, it also seems
to open up unexpected margins to rethink the contributions through the
analytical and ethnographic categories of care, violence and humanitarianism.
   The volume is divided into two parts. Part 1 “Borders and Inequalities”
looks more closely at issues of citizenship and deservingness in the US,
Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo and South Italy. Relying on media analysis,
Viladrich (Chapter 1) offers interesting insights into today’s debate on the
economic pros and cons of granting migrant youth healthcare insurance
coverage in the US. Thematically and geographically close to Viladrich’s,
Kline’s contribution (Chapter 2) shows how discourses on borders are
internalised: Latinx migrants in US South not only experience the everyday
work of borders impacting on their livelihoods; they appropriate their
political rhetoric to the point of describing themselves as undeserving.
Golberg, Silveira, Barbosa and Martin (Chapter 3) look at Bolivian migrants
in Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo and tease out the correlation between poor
working and housing conditions and the soaring rate of tuberculosis
amongst them. Quagliarello’s contribution (Chapter 4) touches upon the
experience of migrant women and how they experience unwanted
pregnancies in the context of Mediterranean crossing. Quagliarello offers a
powerful account of their arrival to the island of Lampedusa, southern Italy,
where they first encounter the medical personal and experience the spatio-
temporal fragmentation of the local healthcare system and its impact on
their lifeworlds. Each contribution attempts to bring to the fore migrants’
experience and to connect such ethnographic insights to the broader
theoretical debate on the above-mentioned issues.
   The second part of the volume, “From Individual to the Community”,
features four contributions more closely focused on the role of local
healthcare networks in migrants’ search for healthcare. Cingolani (Chapter
5) presents the case of the Roma people in Turin, and highlights the
importance of transnational mobility in contexts of discrimination and
marginalisation. Kerbage and Marranconi (Chapter 6) look at a group of
Syrian refugees in Lebanon, focusing on their experience of local mental
health services; the authors delineate, but do not detail, a promising
analytical framework whereby mental health becomes an urgent political


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LAURA FERRERO ET AL. (EDS) | EMBODYING BORDERS                                          287


issue. Vargas and Ferraro’s contributions (Chapter 7 and Chapter 8,
respectively) tease out the shortcomings of the Italian public healthcare
system; Vargas offers an insightful explanation of the role of intercultural
mediation, especially focusing on the work of Centro Fanon in Turin, a
healthcare facility whose organisation draws on from the rather
controversial legacy of the French ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan. Ferrero’s
chapter thematically aligns with Vargas’, but more closely focuses on the
role of long-term migrants in “becoming” the local healthcare
infrastructures, in fact providing information and support to newly arrived
migrants to map and access available healthcare resources.
   The book represents an important contribution to rethink issues of
migration and healthcare and, more crucially, it has the merit to bring to the
attention of the international academic audience the work of several Italian
scholars (some of the contributors are themselves either Italian or based in
Italian universities) whose contributions to the discipline are likely to go
unnoticed, given the linguistic and disciplinary hegemony of the Anglo-
Saxon tradition. While I appreciate such efforts for reasons that are personal
and academic at the same time, reading the book I could not help but
consider that each contribution could have benefitted from a more thorough
dialogue with the contemporary literature on migrations and healthcare
(quite notably, references to Ticktin and Fassin are almost absent), rights,
deservingness and citizenship but also on borders and migration.
Anthropological scholarship on such matter has been burgeoning especially
in the last decade, therefore a more sustained engagement with such
literature would have further opened up interesting analytical and
ethnographic possibilities to assess issues of migration, borders and
healthcare on a comparative ground, across diverse scales and in terms of
local configurations of social marginalisation, political discrimination and
structural violence. In this context, the lack of sustained engagement, either
ethnographic or theoretical, with the anthropology of the state feels rather
striking despite the declared intent of the editors to hold “local policies” as
ethnographic entry points to discuss migrants’ access to local healthcare
services. Similarly, the authors frequently mention bureaucracy and legal
documents yet do not seem to adequately problematise how bureaucracy is a
mode of governmentality and, at the same time, a terrain of contentions
upon which migrants try to negotiate their access to healthcare resources
and put claims on the state.
   I have found occasionally confusing the many theoretical approaches that
the introduction especially, but to an extent all the contributions foreground
in often contradictory ways: for instance, the concept of structural violence


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(as in Farmer) is used to complement more phenomenologically grounded
approaches such as embodiment (as in Csordas). Overall, a more accurate
problematisation of the concept of social suffering might have helped not
only broaden the debate on medicalisation. It would also have allowed the
authors to break free from Kleinman’s conceptualisation of illness
narratives.
   Besides some perplexities relative to the theories each author relies on
and attempts to dialogue with, what I have found somewhat puzzling is the
use – often unproblematic, in fact barely problematised – of the (word)
ethnography and its relation to the broader theoretical framework which
undergirds the volume. We might indeed depart from a very basic question,
“What counts as ethnography?” but this would not probably lead us to any
clearer answer or understanding. I thus want to pose the same question but
in different terms. I wonder how the contributors have thought of ethnography:
does ethnography serve the purpose of confirming existing theories or is
ethnography a means to expand on them further? Do the authors hold on to
the idea that ethnography is just a method to collect “data” or have they
actually “let the ethnography speak”? It seems to me that ethnography, as
conceptualised and mobilised in this volume, is reduced to a bare reportage
rather than explored in its potential of heuristic and analytical tool in its
own right.

                                                                     Letizia BONANNO
                                                                     University of Kent
                                                                 l.bonanno@kent.ac.uk




2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2021: 285-288
