Managing Migrant Border Deaths in Southern Italy: Medico-Legal, Ritual and Burial Practices

Abstract

This chapter addresses the pressing contemporary political and social issue of migrant death as a result of dangerous irregular migration routes across the Mediterranean, and local provision for the migrant dead in southern Italy. Drawing on the concept of bordering and (non)grievability, it details the evolving Italian governance and social responses to the border dead. It goes on to examine local mortuary and burial practices, for the border dead with particular attention to their visibility, and the roles of the state, local municipalities, clergy and local residents. Its contrasts the initial integration of the migrant dead within local cemeteries with subsequent dedicated burial sections or grounds, showing how each of these tactics can serve to make the migrant dead socially and politically invisible, through poor documentation of burials, immobilizing assimilation within local cemeteries, or through marginalization in peripheral burial grounds for the border dead.