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In this article, I analyze the practices of a group of Catholic nuns who run shelters for ‘victims of human trafficking’ in Italy, and are thus involved in state-funded rehabilitation programs for former foreign prostitutes. This case shows how the state and the Church are deeply implicated in each other’s projects of redemption and the creation of new forms of life. In Italy, the legal model for rehabilitating foreign prostitutes is avowedly secular yet also deeply shaped by a Catholic impetus to purify sinners. At the same time, however, the nuns themselves develop an understanding of redemption as a secular life-saving project in line with the state’s project of recognition, and thus inscribe their practices within the biopolitical effort to transform lives. Ultimately, I argue, leading by example becomes a specific Catholic instantiation of biopolitics that characterizes both the state’s and the Church’s approach to foreigners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although the production of national spaces, citizens, and populations through enumerative practices has been well explored in a variety of disciplines, anthropological methods and analysis can help to illuminate the everyday practices of enumeration, their unexpected consequences, and the co-construction of identities through these processes by both the “counted” and the “counters.” The authors in this special issue illustrate how enumeration inflects lived experiences, produces subjectivities, and reconfigures governance. Focusing on the spatial, temporal, ideological, and affective dimensions of the techniques of enumeration, the authors also provide insights into the multiple forms of biopolitical expertise and knowledge that accumulate legitimacy through numerical discourse. They also highlight the ways in which governing structures, institutional and cultural norms, market logics, and rational–technical interventions influence the relationship among numerical categories, subjectivity, and everyday experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]