Ecologies of Remembrance is an ethnographic study of the material afterlives of contemporary migrant death along the Central Mediterranean route to Europe (between North Africa and Italy). The news media around the Mediterranean are frequently dominated by the aftermath of maritime disasters in which dozens, sometimes hundreds of migrants die on the perilous crossing to southern Italy from North Africa. Whilst migrant death is a recurring subject in academic study and journalism, scarcely any research is carried out on the ground into the material and symbolic treatment of unidentified human remains (unlike along the US-Mexico border), even in key receiving and transit countries such as Italy. Yet the social afterlife of human remains is of immense importance in the case of migrant deaths because of the ways in which they bring into focus the webs of relations in which migrants are caught, bringing together transnational kinship networks, local landscapes, local communities and solidarity groups and wider political motivations and actions. Migrant deaths on the Mediterranean route resonate more powerfully and in different ways from other cases of unidentified death, of migrant agricultural workers for example.
How do people dispose of the anonymous remains of such disasters? What kinds of social relationships and connections are generated by the process? What are their motivations and emotional involvements of the people concerned? And what are the historical resonances of these unique and complex mortuary practices? What are the political consequences of the sacralization of the loss of human life juxtaposed against the normalization of the bare life existence of displaced people? By focusing on the passages of unidentified human remains in Italy from retrieval at sea through forensic processing and burial, we have organized this conference to depart from previous studies of border regimes and frontier deaths, and into a broader ecosystem of local, national, and transnational emergency response, scientific evidence-making, mourning and remembrance.
We propose to bring together research papers on works of tracing, forensic investigation, and burial, connecting metropolitan centers with Tunisia, Sicily, Lampedusa and Calabria. This way, we intend our conference to demonstrate the entanglements between transnational kin networks, local landscapes and communities, religious and solidarity groups, and national and international political discourses. The sites and practices we hope to consider include sites of storage of remains associated with unidentified deaths on the migration trails in Tunisia and Italy; exhibition spaces (formal and informal); temporary morgues and forensic labs at ports of arrival in Sicily; forensics laboratory for central analysis and processing, cataloging and archiving (like in the Istituto Medico-Legale Labanof, Milan); sites associated with maritime retrieval and rescue (navy, fishing communities); rural cemeteries accommodating anonymous migrant remains. By tracing the passages of this material along its manifold routes from the seabed to cemeteries, cemeteries, and assemblies, we hope to bring into consideration with each other the works and lives of different actors including activist groups, forensic scientists, emergency personnel, local, regional or national politicians, clerics and local people such as well-wishers who decorate tombstones. Through the exploration of mourning without kin, this conference will follow the trail of sorrow and justice, local ritual appeasing and burial of migrant remains.
The Conference is co-sponsored by the ISERP Conference Funding Grant, the Faculty Fellowship Program at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, the Anthropology Department, the CSSD Working Group on Migrant Personhood and Rights: A Crisis of Recognition, the Columbia Center for Archaeology, and the Barnard Human Rights Program. It continues a Wenner-Gren funded research project co-directed by Vanessa Grotti and Marc Brightman, in which Naor Ben-Yehoyada is collaborating.
Wednesday, September 11
Welcome (3:15—3:30 PM)
Panel I – Afterlives of unidentified death along the migrant route (3:30—5 PM)
Agnès S. Callamard (Columbia, UN-OHCHR) – Saving Lives is not a Crime: Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions
Vanessa Grotti (European University Institute) – Hosting the Dead part 1: Ecologies of Remembrance: Situating the Afterlives of Migrant Dead at Sea in Italy (1997-2019)
Discussant: Yannis Hamilakis (Anthropology, Brown)
Chair: Matthew Engelke (Religion, Columbia)
Film Screening & discussion with filmmakers (6:30—8:30 PM): It Will Be Chaos (2018)
Lorena Luciano, Filippo Piscopo
Thursday, September 12
Panel II – Bodies and landscapes (9—10:30 AM)
Marc Brightman (University of Bologna) – Hosting the Dead part 2: Mourning Strangers and Scales of Remembrance in the Landscape
Osman Balkan (Swathmore College) – The Biopolitics of Borders: Death, Deterrence, Resistance
Discussant: Sarah Wagner (Anthropology, George Washington University)
Panel III – Vicissitudes of remains (11 AM—12:30 PM)
Valentina Zagaria (London School of Economics) – What Remains: Relating to What is Found from Mediterranean Border Crossings on the Shores of Zarzis, Tunisia
Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Anthropology, Columbia) – Divided We Drown: Relics and the Reach of Relatedness through the Mediterranean Seabed
Discussant: Zoë Crossland (Anthropology, Columbia)
Panel IV – Mobilization, contestation, advocacy (1:30—3 PM)
J.C. Salyer (Anthropology and Human Rights, Barnard) – The Denial of Human Dignity in the Age of Human Rights
Leah Zamore (Center for International Cooperation, NYU) – The Political Economy of the Global Refugee “Crisis”
Concluding discussion (3:30—5 PM)
Zoë Crossland, Brian Boyd (Anthropology, Columbia), Sarah Wagner, Vanessa Grotti