Paper Short Abstract:

The small island of Lampedusa is dotted with radars. With their electromagnetism, they are at the center of a socio-environmental struggle over the health of the local community and fauna, the Central Mediterranean migratory route, in multiple connections that this paper attempts to disentangle.

Paper Abstract:

Radars on Lampedusa rise up like towers or totem poles next to the piles of boats on which migrants have reached—or attempted to reach—the island. Closer to Tunisia than to the Italian mainland, Lampedusa is a crucial point on the Central Mediterranean "illegal" migration route and, at the same time, a strategic place for military control of the area. But the radars also have another feature: with their electromagnetism, they are considered by the local population to be the cause of the many tumors impacting the island’s inhabitants. In addition, the electromagnetism from those radars is considered highly harmful to the many species of migratory birds that pass through the island and for which a protected area was created.

At the intersection of the politics and experiences of migration, militarization, environmental conflicts, body and illness, Lampedusa’s radars and their ethnographic exploration suggest a paradigm that allows us to disentangle the elements underpinning the contemporary regime of borders and borderlands—for those who permanently inhabit those territories, for those who attempt to cross them “illegally”, and for non-humans using the island as a crucial passage point.

In this framework, this paper will consider socio-environmental activism, local community struggles, border control, migration management, and differential conceptions of the environment, nature, and human and non-human health in marginalized borderlands, and will attempt to scrutinize these multiple entanglements and to reflect on the contribution of an anthropological gaze to understanding and potential actions in such increasingly frequent situations.