When Forms of Life Become Unintelligible: Family, Governance, and Political Ontology

In 2024, a neo-rural family living in the Palmoli forest (Abruzzo) was involved in a food poisoning incident. After an emergency call, Italian authorities initiated investigations and expert evaluations, that ultimately led to child protection proceedings, culminating in the suspension of parental authority and the removal of the children from the household. The ordinance, issued on 13 November 2025, sparked a wide public and political controversy over the limits of child protection, family norms, and state intervention. In this paper I examine how implicit assumptions about what counts as a family shape welfare and child protection policies in contemporary welfare states, taking as a starting point the controversy surrounding the “family in the woods” case. I argue that this critical case works in exposing the ontological assumptions which make a social reality intelligible, and thus governable, to the State: a classification system of implicit criteria of development, education, and social integration, relying on administrative patterns through which a social complexity is simplified, standardized, and made comparable. Rather than treating such cases primarily as legal conflicts between parental rights and child protection, I argue that they are better understood as conflicts over political intelligibility–over which forms of life can count as legitimate family forms. The neo-rural family is analysed as a form of life that exceeds institutional intelligibility. The conflict at stake does not concern compliance with existing norms alone but raises an epistemic–ontological problem regarding the very conditions under which social realities are classified, recognised, and governed. I advance that welfare and child protection policies do not simply judge behaviours–working as neutral instruments of governance–but they rely on an implicit ontology of the family that they simultaneously presuppose and help to stabilise. As a result, certain forms of life which result eccentric to the institutional ontology of the family are not simply judged out of the norm, but they become politically unintelligible. The case makes visible the entanglement of ontological assumptions and normative commitments in contemporary governance, showing that what is at stake is not only how families are governed, but which forms of life are rendered possible or impossible to exist by specific political ontologies–and how this bears on the accountability and legitimacy of the state.