Informal economy in Southern Italy: A critical analysis of “contemporary slavery” in the agricultural sector”

The notion of slavery traditionally entails extreme exploitation, property rights and individual ownership. These concepts have been reflected in various legal instruments as well as in the popular understanding of slavery for centuries. Although the existence of legal definitions, the question of identifying what sort of practices can be classified as forms of slavery has never been an easy task, ranging between literally and rhetoric interpretations. More recently, in a world where slavery is no more legally recognized, so that nobody can be formally assigned the legal status of slave, the boundaries between these two interpretations seem to be even more blurred. Although the attempts of several academics to define and analyze slavery today, there are still a lot of questions at stake: what counts as a slave in the contemporary world? What creates difference between slavery and other forms of contemporary extreme exploitation (such as bonded labour, forced labour or unfree labour)? Can we really talk about “new” slavery? These questions open up a debate that seem to fit particularly well in the analysis of the working and living conditions of west-African migrant day-labourers in the southern Italian agricultural sector. In the last decade, the working conditions of these migrants have captured the attention of media, trade unions, activists for human rights and academics. In different ways, each of these actors has used the notion of slavery so as to mobilize civil society and denounce exploitative working conditions, although without any depth and critical academic analysis. At the same time, the same discourses underline the agency of migrants against recruitment system headed by caporali, i.e. go-between the landowner and the daily workers that exercise physical and psychological violence on the latter. Using an anthropological approach that combines field research and comparative analysis, I would like to address issues of slavery and unfreedom from “below”, by giving voice to migrant labourers themselves. Through the analysis of life histories and work biographies collected during my field research in southern Italy, I’ll try to answer the question: are they slaves?, showing how necessary is to place their experiences at the core of the contemporary anthropological debate on human bondage and slavery