Critically Mediterranean: An Introduction

Elhariry, Yasser; Talbayev, Edwige Tamalet

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-71764-7_1

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…'Naturalizing' border regions such as a desert or a sea produces a distancing and dehistoricizing effect on what are highly connected, transformative and living environments with a rich history and characteristic ecology of interspecies relations. Regions such as the Mediterranean are defined and alive through the sea, which, exceeding characterizations in terms of natural wilderness and hostility, is also perceived as a place of abundance, connectivity and regeneration; yet such peripheral regions have also been homogenized as living outside of modernity and located outside of time (Elhariry and Tamalet Talbayev 2018). Death itself is not merely caused by state regimes, it can take many guises in migration and migration itself is widely thought of by sending communities as a passage from life to death or from death to life.…”

Section: Necropolitics and The Central Mediterranean Routementioning

confidence: 99%

Hosting the Dead: Forensics, Ritual and the Memorialization of Migrant Human Remains in Italy

Brightman

Grotti

2021

Migrant Hospitalities in the Mediterranean

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In this chapter we consider the afterlife of the remains of unidentified migrants who have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Albania and North Africa to Italy. Drawing on insights from long-term, multi-sited field research, we outline paths taken by human remains and consider their multiple agencies and distributed personhood through the relational modalities with which they are symbolically and materially engaged at different scales of significance. The rising number of migrant deaths related to international crossings worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, has stimulated a large body of scholarship, which generally relies upon a hermeneutics of secular transitional justice and fraternal transnationalism. We explore an alternative approach by focusing on the material and ritual afterlife of unidentified human remains at sea, examining the effects they have on their hosting environment. The treatment of dead strangers (across the double threshold constituted by the passage from life to death on the one hand and the rupture of exile on the other) raises new questions for the anthropology of death. We offer an interpretation of both ad hoc and organized recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of dead migrants, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales: it takes the politically charged form of memorialization at the levels of the state and the local community; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasize the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed toward the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialization and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism.

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Section: Necropolitics and The Central Mediterranean Routementioning

confidence: 99%