The Men and the Sea. after a Trauma: Inhabitants, Tourists and Migrants Alongside the Calabrian Coast of Cutro
The paper deals with the different sea’s representations in a Calabrian village, Cutro, which has been the context of a migrants’ shipwreck. The research observation is based on three types of sea’s users: inhabitants, tourists and migrants. This shipwreck of migrants has been about 100 meters near the coast; therefore the small town has received an high attention by public media because of the rescue failure of many migrants, who were almost near the shore.
Two years after this event, this paper describes the different narratives about the shipwreck by three different groups of actors: a. the group of migrants who have been saved, b. the inhabitants including the rescuers of survivors, and c. the visitors and tourists.
From the overall interviews emerge, not only different stories about the tragedy, but common representations towards the sea by a traumatic matrix. The above mentioned specific part of Cutro’s sea is no longer a water where interviewees are able to go inside in a relaxed way. In the field observation, the common trauma does not appear as a consequence from a concrete territorial risk by rapid onset elements (for instance, tsunamis or storms) but it is the result of concrete social actions.
In the paper, the concepts of risk, vulnerability and time of exposure to risk - which in sociological literature are applied to physical territorial events (especially after earthquakes) - have been reviewed through the narratives of these three types of interviewees (inhabitants, tourists, migrants). Behind the common trauma, even the sea is not lived as previously, transformed into a surface by controverse social meanings and divergent cultural symbols.