Appartenenze, culture e gruppi di lavoro: pratiche formative e metodi etnoclinici

The coexistence of people and groups culturally different that characterizes contemporary societies, rises the need to find out how to consider and appreciate differences - on knowledge, practices, conceptions of life and the world - and how to make them a meaningful contribution and an opportunity for innovations in the construction of collective living spaces of the public life, of professional contexts and of institutions of our societies. Taking into account the presence, in the italian care services, of working groups made up of operators of different cultural origin, and referring to the ethnopsychiatric thesis and the etno-clinical mediation practices, the research focuses on an analysis and a review of current practices of professional training with working teams, on the one hand, taking a critical stance towards the universalist pretensions of knowledge and theories that guide them, and, on the other hand, considering the cultural differences as a constraint in thinking about the group itself and in promoting its skill to learn from, and to deal with the specifities of their work. The ethnopsychiatric perspective as epistemological and methodological reference asked first of all to gain a decentralization respect to the matrices of thought and forms of Western knowledge production, with the aim of recognizing them as historically and culturally determined and to outline the genealogy and evolution of concepts and theories produced in West on the human subject, on learning processes, on groups and forms of belonging. In the course of researching this decentralization has been possible thanks to the experience of traveling and living in another cultural world (Brazil) where, through immersion in a system of thought radically different from where I come from, it was possible to learn how to confront with the knowledge of others, becoming not a detective but an apprentice of other ways of thinking and acting with reality and, most importantly, gaining a double gaze with which to face the experience carried out in the Italian services. The decision to carry out research in these services has been imposed by the presence of an increasing number of foreign operators who work there and also their importance in the recent transformations of the Italian welfare system, its problems and contradictions. The professional training experience with the operators involved in the research (including 13 healthcare assistants, three nurses both of italian and foreign origin, their coordinator and the professional trainer who conducted the activities) has represented an opportunity to differentiate the speeches and the thinking about the care practices of these services, to bring to light their effects of institutionalizing, and also discuss the specifics of the work and the relationship with the old people as a take care of the threshold between life and death, bringing out the scarcity of thought and practices with which Western culture deals with this passage.