Marc Brightman

MARC A. BRIGHTMAN, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, was awarded funding in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Ecologies of Remembrance: The Moral Afterlives of Unidentified Death along the Central Mediterranean Migration Route.’ The project is an ethnographic study of the moral and material afterlives of contemporary migrant death along the Central Mediterranean route to Europe (between North Africa and Italy). Focusing on the passages of unidentified human remains in Italy from retrieval at sea through forensic processing and burial, this project departs from previous studies of border regimes and frontier deaths, and into a broader ecosystem of local and national emergency response, scientific evidence-making, mourning and remembrance. Through field research in places of forensic investigation and burial, connecting metropolitan centers with rural Sicily, Lampedusa and Calabria, and Albania, and using a symmetric anthropological approach that pays attention to the different actors involved in handling the physical, social and ritual aspects of human remains and their identification, it documents entanglements between transnational kin networks, local landscapes and communities, religious and solidarity groups, and national and international political discourses. By exploring the moral and technical processing of migrant remains at different scales, it has contributed to the anthropology of death, moral anthropology, the anthropology of memory and material culture studies.