Identité, altérité, créativité : les formes de collaboration dans la phase liminale
Identity, otherness, creativity: forms of collaboration in the liminal phase

Summary/Abstract: As historical crossroad of different people and cultures, the Valle di Susa has long manifested a sense of community which, far from being territorially and culturally bounded, acknowledges the potential enrichment brought about by process of incorporation of alterity as a way to create original strategies of co-existence. A review of the main characteristics of the alpine valleys described in the academic literature, allows to show how and why the Valle di Susa is different from other alpine valleys of Piedmont. In addition to some traditional projects for asylum seekers’ reception, more recent agreements allocating only a few asylum seekers in each village has renewed forms of bottom-up mobilization towards innovative forms of social inclusion. Thanks to the asylum seekers already hosted in the valley, a network of local inhabitants, volunteers and migrants is now serving as a bridge between migrants in different hosting communities. Asylum seekers are caught in an uncertain and delicate liminal phase, in which the personality of individuals is fluctuating between a sense of loss of social and relation values and the need to learn new social and cultural traditions. Addressing liminality not only as a phase of interruption of the previous social status, but also as a period in which the actors can produce new forms of creativity, my aim will be to consider emerging strategies to incorporate alterity into the local communities, focusing on the important role of new forms of creativity implemented by migrants in the past, that could be able to include newcomers into local realities.

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