Banchi alimentari, volontariato e stigma. La cerimonia di degradazione di Garfinkel e il ruolo del lavoro nella rappresentazione del povero

This paper focuses on the representation of food bank users through the lens of Garfinkel's degradation ceremony (1956): that is, a communicative work aimed at transforming an individual's total identity into a lower social iden-tity, by recalling moral indignation, in order to reassert social norms and reinforc-ing group solidarity. The aim of this paper is to investigate how representations on users might be put in place in a real life assistance context, as a food bank, and the ways in which this could be framed as a degradation ceremony (Garfinkel 1956), as a way to reassert the social norm by clearly separating the ingroup and the outgroup (Goffman 1963). For this purpose, the paper will discuss the results of a qualitative research held in two food banks in Turin, Italy, conducted using participant obser-vation and qualitative interviews with users and volunteers.