For immigrants the answer to where a dead body belongs is far from obvious. On any given day, thousands of migrant corpses are shipped around the world to be laid in ancestral soils. Others are buried locally in cemeteries that have been established to accommodate ethnic and religious minorities. This talk, which draws on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul, examines the transnational mortuary practices of Turkish and Kurdish communities in Germany to highlight the ways that death shapes political membership and identity. By tracing the actors, networks, and institutions that determine the movement of dead bodies within and across international borders, it analyzes the processes through which authority, territory, and populations are managed at a transnational level.
