AbstractThis article explores the role of othering and the social sciences in Italian State formation through a historical sociology of the state. The mapping of particular forms of others in popular imagination including ‘vagrants’,‘beggars’, and ‘gypsies’, in the nineteenth century resonates with contemporary state projects which seek to document and identify new “alien” newcomer groups. The official document, an integral part of a technology of state power constitutes a kind of “cosmology”, with whole social orders, classes and others codified in each line entry. The state designates absolute definitions of places, bodies and things. In 1885 the first medical survey of Italy sought to map out the “medical geography” of the nation, such practices laid the ground work for conceptions of normalcy and difference. The definition of the ‘average citizen’ is an integral part of the construction of State as Cosmos. Difference and its mapping in its interplay with “normalcy” defines in many ways, the State. yet there can be no taken‐for‐granted submission of the subaltern classes to this state cosmos, nor to the practices of the social sci