Staking a Claim to Land, Faith and Family: Burial Location Preferences of Middle Eastern Christian Migrants

ABSTRACT

The question of where to conduct funeral rituals may confront migrants and their descendants with a stark existential choice which reveals much about how identities are negotiated in and through place. This paper scrutinises the relationship between identity and place through the prism of preferred burial location. More concretely, it sets out a typology of motivations for preferred burial location in contexts of migration. In addition to advancing analytical clarity with this typology, the paper also aims to promote theoretical clarity by questioning the hypothesis that burial in the country of residence constitutes a straightforward indicator of migrant integration. Based on 67 qualitative interviews with Christians of Middle Eastern origin in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, the paper presents various rationales for preferred burial location, showing the sometimes ambivalent relationship which migrants negotiate between place and identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• migrant death
• burial place
• migrant burial practices
• place
• identity
• integration
• belonging

Acknowledgements

I am particularly grateful for the support of my colleagues Fiona McCallum, Lise Paulsen Galal, Marta Wozniak-Bobinska and Sara Lei Sparre in carrying out interviews for this research. I am equally grateful to Anne Rosenlund Jørgensen for translating interview material from Danish into English. This article has also benefited greatly from the insights of Eva Soom Ammann and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alistair Hunter is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, within the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies department. His current research focuses on ageing and dying in migratory contexts.

Notes

1. One exception is Gunaratnam (2013), who gives the example of a Kenyan man diagnosed as HIV positive whose wish to be repatriated from Britain to Kenya for burial could not be fulfilled due to the administrative difficulties of repatriating bodies with HIV infection.

2. The vast majority of our interviews took place between February 2014 and July 2014, that is, just before the advance of the Islamic State Organisation (also known as ISIS) through Northern Iraq. It may be speculated that security would have been mentioned by our respondents even more had we conducted interviews after July 2014. Numerous acts of desecration of Christian graves have been reported since the organisation's occupation of large swathes of Northern Iraq. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3043255/ISIS-destroy-Christian-graves-headstones-sledgehammers-Islamist-terror-group-continues-purge-against-religions.html.

Additional information

Funding

The DIMECCE project is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 291827. The project Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme. This article was written during a visiting fellowship held at the Institut national d’études démographiques and generously funded by the Ville de Paris.