Description
From ancient Athens’ Faleron necropolis of the invisible dead to the unmarked graves in the makeshift cemeteries on the islands of the European periphery, unusual cemeteries appear as the liminal spaces evidencing the long history of “grey areas” where communities showed particular lack of respect and care in handling the bodies of deceased individuals, whom they considered outcast, foreign, undesirable. Archaeological research uses the concept of “deviant deaths” to define these practices, a concept I apply in a European migratory context linking it to the racialisation of current EU border security. Avoiding a linear, Eurocentric reading of death management history and looking beyond the necropolitical theoretical framework, I argue that in the context of migration, deviant burial practices and post-mortem management of migrant bodies are not "exceptional" or "extraordinary", caused by special logistical pressures on states as it is often claimed. Instead, it is part of a long tradition in the west where "deviant burials" and “degraded and insulted dead” constitute a distinct but "synonymous" part of the funerary language of regularity with clear racial and colonial connotations.
