Mísia Lins Reesink, Andrea D. Martins, and Jessica Greganich: Double Funerals. When Death Finds the Dead in Transnational Contexts
Abstract
In anthropological literature there are few cases of an ethnographic analysis of the phenomenon of death in transnational contexts, despite the fact that several anthropological empirical investigations have given attention to death in this context. Here we seek to address this gap by presenting a comparative analysis of three different situations of deaths that occurred in transnational contexts. The first case concerns Bengal immigrants in England, described by the British anthropologist Kathy Gardner; the second occurred in Surinam, described by the Dutch anthropologist Ivon van der Pijl; the third case comes from the Netherlands, amongst Brazilian migrants, and concerns our own research. In this way we seek to identify differences and similarities between these three cases, concluding that, in certain transnational contexts, the occurrence of the death of a migrant induces the families and/or communities to actions which we categorize and problematize as a “double funeral” ritual.
[double funerals, comparison, death, transnationalism, migration]
