Mourning Missing Migrants : Ambiguous Loss and the Grief of Strangers
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.
Main Authors
Format
Books
Book part
Published
2020
Subjects
Publication in research information system
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press
The permanent address of the publication
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-202102081458Use this for linking
Parent publication ISBN
978-94-6372-232-2
Review status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt1sgz6.10
Language
English
Is part of publication
Border Deaths : Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-related Mortality
Citation
- Mirto, G., Robins, S., Horsti, K., Prickett, P. J., Ruiz Verduzco, D., & Toom, V. (2020). Mourning Missing Migrants : Ambiguous Loss and the Grief of Strangers. In P. Cuttitta, & T. Last (Eds.), Border Deaths : Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-related Mortality (pp. 103-116). Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt1sgz6.10
License
Copyright© 2020 the Authors