Social Anthropology Seminar - Monday 7th October 2019 - Dr Vanessa Grotti
| Dates: | 7 October 2019 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Dr Vanessa Grotti |
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Social Anthropology Seminar
Monday, 07 October 2019
Dr Vanessa Grotti – European University
Institute in Florence
“Hosting the Dead: Forensics, Ritual and the Memorialisation of Migrant Human Remains in Italy”
In this presentation 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 organised recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of migrant dead, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales: it takes the politically charged form of memorialisation at the levels of the state and the local community; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasise the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed towards the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialisation and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism.
Second Floor Boardroom 2.016 / 017
Arthur Lewis Building
Time 4:15 to 6:00pm
(Tea and coffee available outside the room from 4:00pm)
ALL WELCOME!
Speaker
Dr Vanessa Grotti
Role: Speaker
Organisation: European University Institute in Florence
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
2.016 / 017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
