Death on the Borders: Humanitarian Device, Body Disposal and Reception Practices in the City of Catania

Abstract

According to IOM, there have been 20.000 dead or missing migrants in the Mediterranean since 2014. According to the NGO United, there have been 44.000 dead people on the European borders since the beginning of 1990s. more than the 75% of these people goes missing in the sea (UNCH 2016). In Italy only a small part (around 15%) of retrieved bodies can be identified and sometimes repatriated. In most cases, the bodies are buried with no names in coastal cemeteries. In the face of the expeditious disposal of the bodies, linked to public health issues and to the working of the devices that connotate the border regime (Hotspots), those communities that accommodate these corpses face the need to “integrate” someone else’s death in their own universe of sense thanks to specific practices of “hospitality” dedicated to the defunct. Through a project that maps buried migrants in the cemetery of Catania and in collaboration with the local committee of Red Cross and the municipality of Catania, since 2017 we have started, with the program Mecmi, an ethnography of the practices of body disposal and of burial rituals dedicated to more than 260 corpses.