Migrants’ deaths at Europe’s southern border: Cultural psychological dimensions of memory and mourning in Lampedusa

Abstract

This paper explores undocumented migrants’ deaths, known as border-deaths, in the Mediterranean Sea by adopting liminality theory to memory and border concepts. Bordering, securitizing, externalizing, and militarizing policies have transformed the Mediterranean into the southern border of Europe. Consequently, the Sea has become a submerged cemetery where thousands of people have lost their lives. Particularly, the Italian Island of Lampedusa has become a geopolitical fiat boundary where conflicting securitarian/humanitarian symbolic frameworks compete. The death of migrants has been an ongoing historical issue, resulting a permanent state of liminality. Using empirical data collected through semi-structured interviews and participant observations in Lampedusa, this study aims to understand the cultural psychological dimension of memory from the experiential standpoint of Lampedusans citizens and community. The findings reveal three themes: the primacy of experience, the relational diffidence, and the memorialization/mourning practices act as subjective and collective forms of resistance subverting external oppressing narratives. Moreover, they also serve to differentiate mourners from spectators and to preserve the material functioning of the Lampedusan community by replicating the symbolic order holding it together. Finally, implications for a semiotic-cultural psychological and liminality theory of memory and border studies are discussed.