The emergency as a layered and plural category. Introductory considerations

Abstract

Thinking about emergencies and crises has always been a complex task, a challenge that anthropology has long faced and that today requires new forms of epistemological, analytical and political engagement, made ever more necessary by the rapid succession of historical events with highly destabilising effects. [...] We find ourselves in a state of emergence that has become structural and determines political agendas and practises in many areas of public life. A condition that we want to try to understand, starting from research contexts and interpretative perspectives of long duration, detached from the sense of urgency that characterises public policies in "viral times", but still able to place ourselves in a dialogical perspective with the present in order to reflect critically on the category of emergency, as well as on the effects that narratives and public policies of the emergency type can produce in the everyday life of the territories and the people affected by them.