Moving Bodies. Drowning and Creative Infrastructures of Identification

• In Event: Load-Bearing Bodies: Unjust Relations and Liberatory Horizons – I

Abstract

This article empirically analyses how the unknown bodies of migrants who died in the attempt to reach Europe are managed and potentially identified. Shifting attention away from the border, the paper provides a new angle to the crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean, investigating the practices developed in order to know and attend to the dead migrant’s body. More specifically, drawing from 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sicily in 2016 and 2017, the article presents an ethnographic account of the emergent Italian forensic infrastructure. It does so by looking at movement. The movement of bodies towards identification. The pursuit is informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS); the focus is on the socio-material practices aimed at the eventual identification of unknown bodies. Taking stock from recent debates in the anthropology of infrastructure in which scholars critique the idea that infrastructures are passive architectures comprising circulations, I propose an alternative perspective on infrastructure, arguing that infrastructures are processes of constant and creative adjustment and that these ongoing changes are the effect of circulation. The argument is developed in two steps. First, looking at the movement and circulation of bodies and bodily material in the infrastructure whose purpose is identification I show that the forensic infrastructure is enacted through this very movement. Second, foregrounding the material and social practices to identify an unknown body, the paper argues that circulations are performative events, that change things and people as they move through space and time.

Author

• Sara Casartelli, Sapienza, University of Rome -- Department of Communication and Social Research (CORIS)