Towards A New Kinship? Affective Engagements with Migrants Dead in the Mediterranean

Abstract

Between 2015 and 2018, Catania (Sicily) was one of the main arrival points for border crossers trying to reach the European Union without the necessary authorization from nation-states. A small group of locals involved with the Red Cross in migrant reception in the port decided in 2017 to organize themselves in order to find a way of “respecting” the dead border crossers arriving on European territory, alongside the living, during the search and rescue operations that have formed part of the landscape around the Mediterranean for several years. The idea of respecting the deceased turned into a project to develop a database aimed at providing a name and a biography for the unknown bodies buried in the local cemetery. The team succeeded in convincing the institutions involved in dealing with these bodies of the value of cooperating, which enabled them to consult the files held about the deceased by various police agencies and municipal institutions. Drawing on ethnographic material, we explore here an unexpected effect of the project. Our interlocutors – Red Cross volunteers, employees of the civil registry office, undertakers, forensic police officers – who were all involved in constructing the database, and more broadly in dealing with the bodies, soon expressed an attachment to the deceased. In this essay, we aim to examine the social and emotional feelings of connectedness that are created through everyday acts, and sometimes quite trivial actions: visiting the dead in the cemetery, naming them, dreaming of them recurrently, or telling stories about them during family gatherings. Combining an ethnographic account of these relationships with anthropological scholarship on kinship, as well as on death studies, we intend to bring out some of the features of the new place created within Catania, and among some of its inhabitants, for border crossers who have died at sea.