Ephemeral Heritage: Boats, Migration, and the Central Mediterranean Passage

Materiality in transit: An ethnographic-archaeological approach to objects carried, lost, and gained during contemporary migration journeys

“…This highlights some of the ethical tensions which migration scholars must navigate-the dangers of retraumatization, of amplifying the hypervisibility and surveillance of people in transit, and of reinforcing asymmetric and neocolonial power relations (Andersson, 2019;Höpfner, 2022;Rozakou, 2017). I therefore aim to foreground the experiences of migrants and migrant voices (Rozakou, 2017), and for this work to stand as an activist effort (Carney, 2021;Greene et al, 2022;Kiddey, 2020) documenting migrants' resistance to the exclusive migration policies and militarized border regimes (De León, 2015) which restructure person-object relationships.…”

“…Blake and Schon (2019) conducted a field survey of beaches in southwestern Sicily and recorded material remains which illuminated practices of people arriving clandestinely on small vessels in recent years. Greene et al (2022) completed archaeological recordings of impounded vessels and their contents in Pozzallo, Sicily as an activist effort to record migrant materials as heritage and to document experiences that are frequently erased when migrant boats are destroyed by Italian authorities.…”

“…Data obtained through ethnographic interviews about objects during transit are (1) contextualized within recent anthropological debates on the materiality of contemporary migration and (2) read through an archaeological lens and compared to data from archaeological projects focused on materiality en route . This work is therefore situated at the intersection of ethnography and archaeology of contemporary migration and offers a complementary and comparative perspective to the growing literature on migrant materiality in transit (Blake and Schon, 2019; De León, 2015; Gokee and De León, 2014; Greene et al, 2022; Höpfner, 2022).…”

“…Throughout this article, I use the term “migrants” inclusively, referring to individuals undergoing the process of migration (Greene et al, 2022), rather than distinguishing between refugees, asylum seekers, and “economic” migrants—labels often arbitrarily defined by state authorities after the migration process is well underway. These juridical, social, and political categories produce violence and precarity for many individuals, and they do not reflect lived realities (Khosravi, 2010; Picozza, 2017) or the complex ambiguity and indeterminacy of the migration process (Carney, 2015; Zavella, 2011).…”