MIGRATORY STRATIFICATIONS. A NEW PERSPECTIVE TO OBSERVE THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN MIGRATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE

International and internal migrations are the driving forces and, at the same time, the reflection of deep social, cultural, economic, demographic and territorial changes. Namely, they interact as well as they are influenced by the global phenomena, of which they are part, thus affecting national and local contexts. Taking up Mauss’s famous expression – later applied to human mobility by Sayad –, migration constitute a total social fact, in which the totality of human practices and experiences is involved in a relationship of interdependence, articulated in the interaction with social, economic, political, cultural and religious universes, and with social representations of the world. Starting from these assumptions and adopting a diachronic perspective, it is possible to observe, on the one hand, how migration phenomena reshape the societies of origin, destination and transit; and, on the other hand, the stratification of different migration ages – in turn, shaped by changing global and local scenarios – through incorporations in material artefacts and socio-cultural practices. Therefore, this Special Issue focuses on what can be defined in terms of ‘migratory stratifications’: the overlapping of different migration phenomena that, in intersecting periods, persist in the same socio-cultural and territorial context. Migratory stratifications impose signs – on territories and societies – that sediment, without deleting the previous ones, and they compose landscapes of memory in continuous evolution, through a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements that can nevertheless show their semantic unity. The same social landscape can be crossed by a succession of immigrations, emigrations and transits of different nature and origin, implemented in different ways by a multiplicity of actors, peculiar for national, class, gender and generational characteristics.