Photograph Shireen Walton

Italy has a rapidly ageing population, with 28% of the population over 60 – the second highest percentage globally after Japan [1]. Changing work patterns, and external youth migration following the economic crisis, has left behind a generation of ageing parents and grandparents without traditional structures of family care. Since the 1990s, a significant presence in the care sector in Italy have been migrant carers. Often referred to in Italian as badanti (singular badante), migrant care workers constitute an important form of elderly care not provided by a family member [2]. As a consequence, a transformation has been observed from a family to a ‘migrant-in-the-family’ model of care [3]. In these circumstances, it has been suggested that migrants help Italian families to maintain valuable traditions of family care [4].

All the while, the nascent relationship between Italian elders and badanti raises some notable contradictions within Italian politics and society concerning care and migration. As the indispensability of informal migrant care becomes ever more apparent, the country continues to debate immigration policy, in the run up to a general election in March 2018.

As an anthropologist I am seeking a wide-angle view of ageing and caring in multicultural Italy. This requires a suspending of categories – of migrant, refugee, asylum seeker or badante – in order to engage with Italy’s various mobile and transnational populations who are themselves ageing – often away from their homelands. Who cares for who and how? How are everyday ailments dealt with? And what forms of communication are involved – for example, how do smartphones and Googling affect traditional health/care practices and notions of wellbeing? These are just some of the issues I will be exploring, in public and private spaces, on- and offline, in a multicultural neighbourhood of Milan where I will be living for 16 months.

References:

[1] United Nations 2015 World Population Ageing Report

[2] Van Hooven (2010). ‘When Families Need Immigrants: The Exceptional Position of Migrant Domestic Workers and Care Assistants in Italian Immigration Policy’. Bulletin of Italian Politics. Vol. 2, Issue: 2, pp. 21-38.

[3] Bettio, F., Simonazzi, A. and Villa, P. (2006), ‘Change in Care Regimes and Female Migration: the “Care Drain” in the Mediterranean’, Journal of European Social Policy. Vol. 16, Issue 3, pp. 271-85.

[4] Rugolotto, S., Larotonda, A., van der Geest, S., (2017)., ‘How Migrants Keep Italian Families Italian: Badanti and the Private Care of Older People.’ International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care. Vol. 13 Issue: 2, pp.185-197.