Órdenes y desordenes de edades en comunidades minorizadas. Aproximación comparativa entre las familias rom transnacionales en Italia y la juventud rural andina del sur de Colombia

This article tackles the experience of growing up among two minority communities: a Roma community in Italy and a rural Andean community in South Colombia. We will show that growing up is a process based not only on mechanisms and rules, but also on experiences and relations. Children and young people experience this process through their bodies, especially by entering into active sexual life. This aspect plays a crucial role in orders and disorders of age categorizations. Such orders are not only in-groups, but also in the interaction with major society, given that minorization process relies also upon the fact that such communities are seen as characterized by a disorder in age categorizations. We will explore the very basis of the normative ideal of ages and sexuality. Our fieldworks are a good point of observation to question the political and moral orders of childhood, family, kinship, gender and reproduction. In this sense, we will question the interaction between age categories and sociopolitical processes. On one hand, we will illustrate our study of norms regulating ages among a Roma transnational family network coming from Serbia. More specifically, we will explore practices used to transform child into complete Roma. We will focus on emotions and feelings that are characterizing children’s experiences. On the other hand, though a study realized in Colombia, we will point out the gap between “urban” meanings of teenager’s pregnancies given by health caregivers and the experiences of rural young people, that have to be replaced in their affective, sexual and parenting trajectories. To sum up, the focus on orders of ages and the entering into sexual life allows to understand the debate on minorities. The ethnographic gaze on emic conceptions and experiences shows socio-political dimensions embedded in a plurality of orders and disorders of ages, that is to say disputes and conflicts on norms and mechanisms that are structuring age categories.