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Epilogue • Luisa Passerini
ship between the scientific establishment in the West and the cultures and
peoples that become objects of its studies. The challenge is to transform
the scientific patrimony in such a way as to reduce and then eliminate the
burden of hierarchies within it – between various European areas as well
as between subjects belonging to various countries and cultures. This challenge
can also be referred to as the engagement to deal with one’s own
ghosts; Natale Losi talks appropriately of “the ghosts of the trainer”, and
we should remember that oral historians have their ghosts as well.
Another object of further research, along a similar line of enquiry, emerges
from the section of this publication that moves to one country of Western
Europe, Italy, and more specifically to those sites where the Kosovars
found refuge there: in camps, centres and public gardens, but rarely in
proper homes. The presentation of “The Protagonists” and of “Places”
where the interviews took place (at the beginning of Migration and
Cultural Encounters: Kosovar Refugees in Italy) provides a vivid description
of not only the plurality of people brought together by the experience
of being a refugee, but also of the plurality of the host country, and this
could be explored by interviewing those who are or were the recipients of
the refugees. From this perspective, the types of contradictions evidenced
by Patricia Ruiz in showing the contrast between the international conventions,
declarations and protocols, on the one hand, and the actual
experience of the refugees, on the other, could find interesting correlates
in daily life public discourse. A further line of research could aim at taking
into consideration the proposal by Laura Corradi to consider the body
and the emotions as central, and to develop this theme more broadly. It is
heartening that, in spite of so many atrocities, many refugees’ narratives do
not show any sense of inevitability of the conflict and its degeneration, just
as no significant mention is made of matters of blood, history or land as
atavistic and unavoidable characteristics of tension (De Sario).
Final mention must be made of an issue that I hold particularly dear and
which appears in various forms throughout the papers. In which ways do
narratives contribute to or derive from conceptions of the continuity and
discontinuity of history – not only the narratives by the interviewees, but
our own narratives as researchers? This is a topic which can be treated
from the point of view of individual and collective identity as well as of
memory, but it can also be seen as a re-formulation of the present task and
function of the practitioner of the socio-historical sciences. Hopefully, this
will be one of the central themes for reflection in the continuation of this
work.
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