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

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, 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.

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

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 as various people and organisations employ practices of determination to identify, understand and/or keep indeterminate who has passed away and how.

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, and specifically to dying in anonymity.

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 Somaliland, Morocco, Greece and Spain through the innovative methodological approach, generative collaborations.

This method captures the multiple configurations of knowledge and practices as different actors respond to the same dead bodies.