Family Rituals in the Context of Migration: Research Data and a Case Analysis Between Italy and Chile

Rituals promote the ability to attribute meaning to our lives because rituals are profound structures that define the continuity of experience between the past, present and future. These repeated behaviors might serve protective functions for a family’s well-being and may support a family’s identity continuity. Rituals are also deeply involved with cultural identity. Migration can also have a strong influence on family culture because, in general, it is a stressful event for several factors, which affect the family’s system of adjustment and add strain during the transitions of the family life cycle. In this context of family modifications, rituals can be used as a mechanism to reduce these stresses. In particular, to cope with the losses and uprooting of entire systems of meanings, migrant families perform rituals, such as re-creation rituals, in addition to preserving traditional rituals. Furthermore, it is likely that the immigrants’ abandonment of these rituals could lead to problematic adaptations. This chapter aimed to explore ritual meaning to understand ritual functioning in the Italian and Chile contexts. We present studies carried out in Italy regarding the relationships among family daily life, rituals and child development, and we report that the repetition of routines and rituals enables the creation of a structure of predictability that aids children in becoming competent in their social relationships. Furthermore, a family study aimed to explore the structure of daily life to understand and compare family functioning in Italian emigrant couples in Italy has been performed to analyze rituals in migrant and Italian families. Rituals are important resources for generating movement and are dynamic for families whose members, particularly children and adolescents, suffer due to cultural integration difficulties. Regarding this topic, we analyze an intervention in Chile, where the therapeutic context offers the opportunity to build and experiment with rites of passage, allowing the identification of new relational structures that incorporate the new experiences.