Applying for asylum. Narratives, translation, and textualization

Abstract

This essay deals with the initial administrative steps of a refugee status de-termination procedure in Italy, by focusing on the bureaucratic interaction between an asylum seeker and institutional subjects I could observe during my fieldwork on international protection’s procedures. Drawing from case studies in linguistic anthropology in similar European contexts, I analyze the ways in which processes of interviewing, translating and inscribing asylum seekers’ narratives into standard bureaucratic forms by public officers and interpreters, act as powerful filters that empty those stories, eventually weakening they’re in-ternal coherence and final credibility.