The Social Life of Dead Bodies. A new ethnographic approach to migrant deaths in and around the Mediterranean Sea

Introduction

Thousands of people have died in the attempt to migrate into Europe through irregular channels. In fact, 2023 has seen the highest number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean since 2017. We only ever see very few of these bodies. Some die in the deserts of Sudan and Libya never to be found, while others get stuck inside shipwrecks at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Even the dead bodies that end up on the shores of Europe often remain unknown and thus socially obscure.

Social Importance of the Deceased

However, in their local communities left behind, the dead and missing continue to hold great social importance.

SOLID Research Project

SOLID presents an innovative theoretical and methodological approach to understanding the social life of deceased migrants by employing a research strategy that is ethnographic, global, and collaborative. The aim is to promote the humanisation and social visibility of deceased migrants by creating a broader understanding of the human lives behind the tragic statistics of migrant deaths.

Analytical Lens of Social Anatomy

The SOLID research project introduces the analytical lens of social anatomy, which refers to the configurations of social arrangements that emerge around missing or deceased migrants. Various people and organisations employ practices of determination to identify, understand, and/or keep indeterminate who has passed away and how.

Collaborative Approach

By bringing together forensic, social, economic, humanitarian, political, and criminological actors and perspectives on the same unidentified bodies of deceased migrants, SOLID pursues an innovative analytical approach to the anthropology of death, specifically to dying in anonymity.

Tracing Social Concerns

It highlights the social importance of missing and deceased migrants in their communities as well as in Europe by tracing the social concerns left behind in:

1. Somaliland
2. Morocco
3. Greece
4. Spain

Through the innovative methodological approach of generative collaborations, this method captures the multiple configurations of knowledge and practices as different actors respond to the same dead bodies.