Paolo Boccagni will participate in the Third conference of the Thanatic Ethics Network in Hong Kong, 8-9 January, about Death “Matters”: The (Im)material and the Sensory in Death in Migration. Paolo’s presentation is about Coping with the absence that is always present: Sensorial Traces and Impingements of Death in the Everyday Lives of Young West African Migrants in Europe. See the abstract below.

Based on a four-year ethnography of an asylum centre in Italy, my presentation approaches the subtle emergence of death in the self-narratives and everyday lives of young male people in ‘waithood’. Among my closer interlocutors, a certain sight, noise or smell was sometimes enough to bring back to the senses episodes of eerie proximity to death. Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarship on “absence” as a critical past that may encroach on the present, both mnemonically and sensorially, I show how past encounters with death loom on the here-and-now – a sheltering facility where people share a past life-or-death migration pathway and a present need to “float” above untold and weighty life histories. Stimuli as random as a movie, a picture, a certain dress or song may bring them back there-and-then, for a while. More often than not, instead, death is an absent presence that demands silence and attempts at forgetting. In sum, the sensorial weight of death in migration does not involve only the use of the senses in commemorating the loss of human lives. As critical, everyday life “banal” sensoriality discloses unexpected interstices that connect refugees with their past interaction with death and have deep cognitive, emotional and moral impingements for them, and for the ethical and political debate on death in migration. Why, as my interlocutors put it, some (fellow migrants) died, whereas they survived? What’s the sense of that? Furthermore, how far can (or should) you share your past death encounters with ‘ordinary’ people who know nothing of them and make every effort to expel death from their phenomenological field, despite its stubborn ways of creeping back in?