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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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Operation “Mare Nostrum” was set up by Italy following a shipwreck off Lampedusa in October 2013, in which 356 people lost their lives. It was replaced in November 2014 by Operation “Triton”, this time coordinated by Frontex, the EU”s border and coastguard agency, but unlike its predecessor, its top priority is border surveillance rather than life-saving.
2 This space was initially set up to accommodate the first bodies to arrive in Catania following the shipwreck on 18 April 2015, but it was later used to accommodate all the bodies of migrants that were brought ashore at this port following search and rescue operations. The administration soon named this space the “quadrato migranti” (migrants” square). This is how all our interlocutors refer to this space.
3 See https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has been producing statistics on border deaths since 2013. Contrary to the migrant defence collectives that had initiated the project of counting border deaths in order to make the harmful effects of the border regime visible through the publicisation of figures, the IOM disconnects the figures of deaths from the environment in which they occur (Heller and Pécoud Citation2019). Despite this depoliticisation, the statistics show an exponential increase since the 2000s of lives lost on migratory routes owing to the restrictions placed on movement that push those attempting the crossing to areas where they are exposed to the “facts of nature”, thereby transforming the sea and the desert into places of death (Schindel Citation2016).
4 It should be noted that the fight against people-smugglers, which is emphasised by governments, tends to obscure the responsibility of the policies implemented by the European Union.
5 This is with the exception of three shipwrecks that received extensive media coverage, for which the national authorities made substantial resources available to work on identifying the victims. The tragedies of 3 October 2013 and 18 April 2015 in the central Mediterranean were the subject of an exceptional protocol (Cattaneo Citation2018), as was the shipwreck in the Otranto Channel on 28 March 1997.
6 International coalition created in 2011 to defend the rights of migrants at sea.
7 The names of our interlocutors have been changed to ensure anonymity and confidentiality, except for the members of the Restoring Family Links (RFL) programme who initiated the project. These are referred to by their real names, in accordance with their wishes.
8 For more details on the design of the database and the documents from which the data were collected, see our earlier paper (Furri and Kobelinsky Citation2020).
9 As Pitt-Rivers (Citation1974, 98) notes, the bond is initiated only on the basis of mutual agreement, which does not seem to be the case here. It should be noted that Pitt-Rivers is speaking here about ties of friendship that are formalised through an analogy with kinship, such as the relationship of compadrazgo in Andalusia.
10 The use of sight in this excerpt (“When I see migrants … ”; “I don”t see things … ”) is noteworthy, since the visibility of border deaths – and more broadly of unauthorized migrants – is a key political issue.