Hosting the Dead: Forensics, Ritual and the Memorialization of Migrant Human Remains in Italy

In this chapter we consider the afterlife of the remains of unidentified migrants who have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Albania and North Africa to Italy. Drawing on insights from long-term, multi-sited field research, we outline paths taken by human remains and consider their multiple agencies and distributed personhood through the relational modalities with which they are symbolically and materially engaged at different scales of significance. The rising number of migrant deaths related to international crossings worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, has stimulated a large body of scholarship, which generally relies upon a hermeneutics of secular transitional justice and fraternal transnationalism. We explore an alternative approach by focusing on the material and ritual afterlife of unidentified human remains at sea, examining the effects they have on their hosting environment. The treatment of dead strangers (across the double threshold constituted by the passage from life to death on the one hand and the rupture of exile on the other) raises new questions for the anthropology of death. We offer an interpretation of both ad hoc and organized recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of dead migrants, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales: it takes the politically charged form of memorialization at the levels of the state and the local community; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasize the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed toward the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialization and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism.

Guests and Hosts in an Athens Public Hospital: Hospitality as Lens for Analyzing Migrants’ Health Care

Based on six months of ethnographic research in the maternity clinic of a major Athens public hospital in 2017, this chapter employs the conceptual lens of “hospitality” to analyze relationships that formed around the care of pregnant migrants arriving in Greece since 2015. Permanent health-care personnel, mostly midwives, are the hosts; guests include migrant women, NGO workers that accompany them to the hospital, Greek Roma maternity patients, obstetrics residents, and the native ethnographer herself. The focus is on pregnant migrants; the other guests provide comparative fodder to flesh out the subjectivity of the hosts. Through an ethnographic reconstruction of the microcosm of the clinic as a space of care, sovereignty, and everyday life, the chapter takes on two theoretical issues: the problem of scale and the argument that the hierarchical character of hospitality is incompatible with a rights-based framework. Critiques to the use of the host-guest trope as a frame for the analysis of relations between migrants and receiving states and societies are well heeded. Yet I demonstrate that guest-host dynamics are very much operative in the interaction between state-employed, permanent health-care personnel and migrants. My analysis highlights the limits and capacities of hospitality’s scalar transpositions, as well as the critical potential of hospitality as a lens that elucidates how legally guaranteed migrants’ rights are accessed and granted in practice; hospitality and rights thus emerge as complementary rather than opposing structural and explanatory frameworks.

Caring for Others, Managing Migrants: Local and Institutional Hospitality in Lampedusa (Italy)

In my chapter I analyze, first, the social elements explaining the hospitable, and not hostile, attitude Lampedusa inhabitants have shown over the years toward migrant people. I argue hospitality cannot be understood as a cultural element or an intrinsic characteristic of the Mediterranean identity. This attitude is mostly linked to historical dynamics and structural factors that characterize this Italian borderland. As the concept of reciprocity suggests, the fact that Lampedusa has historically been a place of emigration to Sicily and other Italian or Northern Africa regions led to a sort of identification with migrant people. At the same time, foreign migrants have always been temporary guests on this island. This situation facilitated, I suggest, the perception of migrants as non-dangerous visitors, unable to change the social landscape. Secondly, I explore the negative effects the transition in the perception of migrants from guests to take care to people the Italian state is entitled to manage has produced on the island. The replacement of a local model of hospitality based on informal practices and spontaneous places with an institutional model characterized by bureaucratic procedures and militarized sites led to a forced separation between local and migrant people.

Introduction: Mediterranean Migrant Hospitalities

This book takes some of the insights of the anthropology of hospitality to illuminate ethnographic accounts of migrant reception in various parts of the Mediterranean. Anthropology has revisited the concept of hospitality in recent years, drawing on the insights of ethnographers of the Mediterranean, who ground the idea and practice of hospitality in concrete ethnographic settings and challenge the ways in which the casual usage of Derridean or Kantian notions of hospitality can blur the boundaries between social scales and between metaphor and practice. Host-guest relations are multiplied through pregnancy and childbirth, and new forms emerge with the need to offer mortuary practices for dead strangers. The volume does not attempt to define a distinctive Mediterranean hospitality, but explores the potential of the concept of hospitality to illuminate the spatial and scalar dimensions of morality and politics in Mediterranean migrant reception.

Ritual and Ritualism in a Contested Sea: Scalar Distortions of Space and Time

The ground of mutual understanding between locals and migrants in the Mediterranean Sea emerges through the performance of ritual activities. These should be distinguished from the formalistic or incantatory sense of “ritualism.” They include the socially engaged practices of hospitality—a virtuous tradition that governments, even as they claim it for the nation-state, violate in local eyes by confining migrants to impersonal spaces and uncertain futures. Passages across the sea also partake of a pervasive sense of ritual, which thereby offers rich metaphorical material for considering the scalar shifts at play—shifts that entrain such conversions of social interaction into the asocial frameworks of neoliberal management (which in turn encourage aridly scientistic modes of inquiry) but conversely also domesticate cultural distance through a subtle apperception of shared habits of gesture and generosity, made accessible by the close vision of ethnography as described in these essays.