Karen Fog Olwig: FÆLLESSKABETS BEGRAVELSE?

Resumé

Oprindelse og forbundethed blandt caribiske migranter

Migration studies seem to have created a “hybrid” research object, defined both

thematically (as a category of people affected by migration) and in terms of cultural

background (as a group of people belonging to a particular “diasporic” community by

virtue of their shared place of origin). Through an ethnographic analysis of the funeral

of a Caribbean migrant to England, the article shows that the burial ritual created an

arena for the creation, demarcation and contestation of several different, partially

overlapping communities. This points to the need to explore the concrete expressions

of moral values and obligations, of social notions and practices of relatedness and of

cultural identification and recognition that unite and divide particular groups of people

of migratory background. At a more general level, it underlines the need to deconstruct

the conflation of the category of migrants and their descendants with diasporic

communities of belonging rooted in a distant place of origin.