Mourning Missing Migrants

Abstract

While the term missing refers to various instances and practices, we focus on the bodies of deceased migrants that remain unidentified, and on the inability of families to mourn someone when there is no body to grieve for. We deploy some ethnographic fragments of how Italian communities sometimes mourn those who are buried without a name and we describe the many problems of mourning someone whose fate is unknown through a discussion of the notion of ‘ambiguous loss’. Our contribution articulates some of the politics around deaths in migration by considering how missing migrants and their bodies are mourned in multiplicity.

Soil Within Us: An Autopedology of Migrant Family History and Mourning through the Medium of Soil

“…Finally, as the Japanese language has it, she 'returned back to the family' (Uozumi et al, 2023, n.p. ), hopefully alleviating their protracted state of 'ambiguous mourning' (Mirto et al, 2020) (Fig. 2).…”

“If no one grieves, no one will remember”: Cultural palimpsests and the creation of social ties through rituals

“…While research on public mourning for celebrity deaths offers some clues as to how strangers mourn, such as when millions around the world paused to collectively grieve the passing of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson (Brown et al, 2003; Schwartz, 2015), with the famous there is still some sense of prior connection, however imagined, and a biography, however fabricated, to draw upon. When scholars give attention to people gathering to mourn total strangers, it typically involves extreme or dramatic events, such as when unidentified migrants wash ashore a foreign land (Mirto et al, 2019). But “if a funeral is to work as a social rite against death, it must work for all, not just for the closely bereaved” (Bailey & Walter, 2016).…”