Dolore senza nome

This article develops an anthropological interpretation of what may be called “nameless pain”: forms of suffering that remain socially unstable not because they are inexpressible, but because the object to which they refer has not yet acquired a shared public status. Starting from the distinction between physical events and socially recognised experiences, the article argues that social sciences have rightly emphasised the cultural construction of emotions, but have often left underexamined the practical ontology of the objects that elicit them. Drawing on Victor Turner’s theory of liminality and antistructure, ritual is understood not merely as a therapeutic response to suffering, but as a classificatory and public procedure that stabilises uncertain moral objects. The argument is developed through two cases: perinatal grief, where technological visibility and prenatal attachment make the foetus increasingly recognisable as a lost child, while social and ritual recognition remains incomplete; and the autobiographical narrative of male victimhood in Marco Sammarini’s *La spirale del silenzio*, where the loss of status, paternal identity and moral credibility struggles to become intelligible as legitimate suffering. In both cases, pain remains suspended when the object of loss cannot fully enter a shared grammar of recognition.