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Paper Short Abstract:

As migrant people continue to die at the France/UK border, activists are engaged in both calling out these deaths and "dealing with" them (identification, burial). I conceptualise their practices as “reluctant” rituals, that care for victims of the border while refusing to banalise their deaths.

Paper Abstract:

When a migrating person loses their life at the northern French border, a gathering is systematically held the following evening on a public square in the center of Calais. At a border where necropolitical violence is widespread, the ritual gathering of activists, citizens and migrating people refuses to let border deaths go unnoticed. The ritual can however give rise to discomfort or tension: for some it is a moment of political protest, for others one of commemoration or grieving - all of which spark different emotions and situated rituals. Departing from several ethnographic moments of participation in these gatherings between 2016 and 2023, this paper explores how people collectively create and negotiate death rituals in a context marked by state violence. It discusses how the labour of dealing with the dead (identification, communication with the family of the deceased, burial/repatriation, commemoration) has in large part fallen to activists (along with the dead’s peers in migration), who express discomfort elaborating procedures and rituals for coping with border deaths, in establishing infrastructures which take for granted that more deaths will come. Conceptualising these as “reluctant” rituals that have emerged through the violent repetition of border deaths, I explore dynamics of collective struggle that emerge at the intersection of caring for victims of the border and resisting the banalisation of border deaths.