Description
Although death in the Mediterranean is a common occurrence, only in rare cases have authorities carried out formal procedures of recovery and identification of missing migrant bodies. This paper analyses the case of the shipwreck of August 18th 2015 in the Mediterranean to highlight how forensic investigation contributes to processes of assembling migration through a particular scientific optic. The process of forensic investigation makes migration perceptible by sorting and cataloguing bodies in the hope of their future reunion with their kinship networks. In this sense, the bodies recovered need first to be made intelligible to technical forensics procedures and then fed into particularly ordained missing people databases. Afterwards, genetic information from potential kinship networks is gathered and compared to those present in the database. I argue that this attempt at matching the assembled forensic evidence with people’s memories and personal histories rests on practices of translation that are often unstable and incomplete, leaving bodies unidentified and buried in anonymous numbered graves. However, the tentative stitching together of the situated knowledges of forensic practitioners and those of sending communities reveal the multiple trajectories and imaginaries which contribute to constructing migration as a phenomenon, belying any univocal narrative of human mobility.
