Vulnerability is a characteristic which is socially recognized as being common in migrant communities. Health problems are exacerbated by poor integration into the general community, social and economic levels that are below the average in the country of residence, cultural and linguistic barriers, etc. Though these factors have long been recognized, and a number of campaigns have taken place to improve awareness of the risks of infectious diseases (such as TB, hepatitis and AIDS) among this population, there has been in Portugal, up to the present, no anthropological reflection with any degree of depth on this process of encounter between different kinds of knowledge and practice of cure, linked to specific historical and cultural contexts, nor a thorough analysis of the opportunities and risks which stem from medical pluralism. The need for this reflection on migrant's pathways to care is particularly felt in na area such as Lisbon, whose urban space is also a space where autonomous logics and worlds coexist, a field of dramatic change, of deep social contrast and power struggles, of new identity dynamics, of unpredictable shades of individual subjectivity. On the one hand, health care providers are confronted by such a sharp gradient of cultural otherness that a real risk arises of inadequacy and even inability to apply routine processes of clinical intervention; at the very least, their effectiveness is strongly reduced. On the other hand, in many cases migrants lose their bearings when confronted with a biomedical "morality" - defining risk, disease, health and cure, and conditioning the perception and representation of the body - that, for them, does not make any sense. When they demand na explanation, the inadequacy of the biomedical interpretations is felt with acute discomfort by the migrants. The research project we propose to undertake finds the main objectives of its reflection in the suffering, the emotions and the discontent of migrants: it is in those...