The peripatetic nature of migratory life does not end with death. On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants travel around the world to be buried or scattered in ancestral lands. These complex cross-border operations involve specialized funeral homes, immigrant associations, municipal and consular agencies, faith-based organizations, and international airlines. Other migrants are laid to rest in the countries where they settled and died, sometimes in cemeteries for ethnic and religious minorities where available. Perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death, especially for immigrants and their descendants. The act of burial confers a final sense of fixity to identities that are more fluid or ambivalent in life. Burial is a means to assert belonging, attachment, and perhaps even loyalty to a particular country, community, or place. When the boundaries of the nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts.

This is a book about the complexities of death, dying, and burial in migratory settings and the role that end-of-life practices play in the negotiation of social, political, and cultural boundaries. My primary focus is on Muslims of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany, whose posthumous predicaments resonate with other minoritized populations in Western Europe and beyond. In spite of the great diversity of migratory trajectories, origins, and destinations, I see important commonalities in the experience of what I refer to as “death out of place” that speak to the ambivalent nature of home and belonging in an increasingly globalized world. With this formulation, I am trying to capture something shared by immigrant families confronting difficult end-of-life decisions in countries where they face structural barriers to political inclusion and equal social standing. The question of what is to be done with their mortal remains takes on added significance when cultural or religious traditions prohibit cremation and mandate burial in perpetuity – in other words, when bodies are expected to remain intact and in one place. How families navigate this complicated terrain offers insight into the stakes of membership in national and religious communities, the scope of sovereign power and authority, and the antinomies of citizenship and identity in contemporary multicultural societies.

Burial in Europe offers a symbolically powerful means for immigrants and their children to assert political membership and foster a sense of belonging. Yet the widespread practice of posthumous repatriation for burial in countries of origin illustrates the continued importance of transnational ties and serves as an indictment of exclusionary sociopolitical orders. In both situations, the corpse is central to grounding political claims for recognition. However, burial decisions unfold within a myriad of overlapping and sometimes conflicting political institutions and cultural value systems. They involve a range of formal actors and informal networks.

Dying Abroad starts from the premise that death and the rituals surrounding it provide an important window into the socioeconomic and political orders and hierarchies that structure human life in the twenty-first century. It argues that states, families, and religious communities all have a vested interest in the fate of dead bodies – including where and how they are disposed of and commemorated – and demonstrates that end-of-life decisions and practices are connected to larger political struggles over the boundaries of nation-states and the place of minoritized groups within them. At a time when a growing chorus of politicians lambast the failures of multiculturalism and call for the fortification of territorial borders, this book elucidates how posthumous practices anchor minority claims for political inclusion and challenge hegemonic ideas about the nation. By analyzing the role that end-of-life practices play in the negotiation of social, cultural, and political boundaries, Dying Abroad illustrates how the long-term settlement of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities is transforming Europe, and how Europe is in turn transforming the lives – and deaths – of those former migrants who now call it home.

Migrants, Minorities, and the Foreigners Within

By its very nature, migration is linked to movement across time and space – a litany of comings and goings, farewells and reunions. Anyone who has ever been an immigrant knows the liminal feeling of living between two worlds as well as the difficulty of reconciling different parts of their selves. Identity, as Stuart Hall insisted, is never singular but is multiply constituted across intersecting and antagonistic positions, practices, and discourses. “At the core of the diasporic experience,” he argued, “is a variant of what W. E. B. DuBois called ‘double consciousness’: that of belonging to more than one world, of being both ‘here’ and ‘there’, of thinking about ‘there’ from ‘here’ and vice versa; of being ‘at home’ – but never wholly – in both places; neither fundamentally the same, nor totally different.”Footnote ¹

Hall’s ruminations bring to mind those of another itinerant intellectual, Edward Said, who characterized his own life experience as a life lived “out of place.”Footnote ² For Said, the phrase “out of place” conveyed not just a geographical reality but an existential condition. In his eponymous memoir, he wrote that from an early age he had difficulty squaring his two halves. Edward, an English name given to him in honor of the Prince of Wales, always seemed disjointed from the Arabic Said. His loyalties and allegiances – his very sense of self – were confused and contradictory. He felt, as he poignantly put it, “out of place.”

Migrants must reconcile the absences generated by their emigration with reactions to their presence in new societies. Between these two poles, some have found themselves in a position of double absence, both from their countries of origin and arrival. In his discussion of the double absence of North African migrants in France, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the immigrant is atopos. S/he “has no place, and is displaced and unclassifiable … Displaced, in the sense of being always incongruous and inopportune, he is a source of embarrassment … Always in the wrong place, and now out of place in his society of origin as he is in the host society, the immigrant obliges us to rethink completely the legitimate foundations of citizenship and of relations between citizen and state, nation or nationality.”Footnote ³ In Europe, heated debates about the legitimate foundations of citizenship and the meaning of nationhood and nationality have only intensified in conjunction with technocratic efforts to create an “ever closer union” through deeper economic and political integration.

Writing in the 1990s, Étienne Balibar had already observed that European conversations about immigration and national identity were structured by a strange logic of “racism without races” – a racism whose “dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism, which at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions; in short … a differentialist racism.”Footnote ⁴ The ongoing militarization of Europe’s internal and external borders, a process that expanded dramatically in the wake of the so-called “migration crisis” from 2015 onwards, belies longer histories of national and cultural chauvinism through which the figure of the immigrant has come to appear as “inopportune” or “out of place,” simultaneously unsettled and unsettling.

In recent decades, a sort of collective amnesia about Europe’s imperial past and multicultural present has taken hold in many parts of the continent in what Paul Gilroy calls “postcolonial melancholia.”Footnote ⁵ Politicians routinely question the appeal and efficacy of multiculturalism, blaming migrants for everything from wage stagnation and unemployment to sexual predation and terrorism.Footnote ⁶ European conversations about collective identity and social cohesion are remarkably confused about histories of empire and circuits of labor migration, a confusion that leaves some people astonished by the presence of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities within Europe’s borders. As Stuart Hall wrote with reference to the United Kingdom, “there has been a ‘black’ presence in Britain since the sixteenth century, an Asian presence since the eighteenth.”Footnote ⁷ But the scope and scale of migration into Europe from the nonwhite global periphery, which has challenged and destabilized notions of European identity and given rise to “the multicultural question,” is largely a post–World War II and postcolonial phenomenon.Footnote ⁸

Reflecting on the relationship between empire, amnesia, and the politics of identity, Hall argued that historic relations of dependency and subordination – marked by 400 years of colonization, slavery, and imperial rule – were reconfigured when colonizers and formerly colonized populations reconvened on European soil. As he put it, “[I]n the wake of decolonization, and masked by a collective amnesia about, and systematic disavowal of ‘empire,’ this encounter was interpreted as a ‘new beginning.’ Most British people looked at these ‘children of empire’ as if they could not imagine where ‘they’ had come from, why, or what possible connection they could possibly have with Britain.”Footnote ⁹ Extending Hall’s analysis, Fatima El-Tayeb asserts that the complex interactions of race, religion, migration, and colonialism continue to haunt the presence of minorities in Europe today, placing them outside of the imagined postnational community.Footnote ¹⁰ In her view, the exclusion of communities of color from the European imaginary is a form of “invisible racialization” that manifests in the awkward coexistence of colorblind discourses that deny racial difference alongside regimes that construct nonwhiteness as non-European. In a twist on Balibar’s racism without race, El-Tayeb argues that Europeans possessing visual markers of otherness are not simply out of place but also out of time. They are “eternal newcomers, forever suspended in time, forever ‘just arriving,’ defined by a static foreignness overriding both individual experience and historical facts.”Footnote ¹¹ Irrespective of their citizenship status, long-standing minority populations – be they the descendants of Caribbean and South Asian migrants in Britain, North African migrants in France, or Turkish and Kurdish migrants in Germany – remain outside of dominant national imaginaries.

In Germany, a country with a troubled history of prioritizing blood and ethnicity as the basis of a shared identity and political community, minority populations face considerable challenges in achieving equal social standing as cocitizens.Footnote ¹² My own usage of the qualified phrase “Muslims of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany” to describe my interlocutors is meant to underscore a fundamental tension at the heart of public debates surrounding immigration, race, religion, citizenship, and identity in Europe today. In a political climate marked by rising xenophobia and Islamophobia, such qualifiers are an effect of what many believe to be the incommensurability of categories such as German and Muslim or Muslim and European.Footnote ¹³ Similar to what Lisa Lowe has indexed with reference to Asian Americans in the United States, people of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany are seen by many Germans as perpetual immigrants, as the “foreigner within.”Footnote ¹⁴ While it would be misleading to characterize these communities as immigrants, especially since many generational cohorts were born in Germany and hold German citizenship, this sense of the foreigner within is pervasive in public discourse.Footnote ¹⁵ It is reflected in banal practices of demographic bookkeeping, like the German Federal Statistics Office’s use of the category “persons with a migration background” (Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund). First introduced in 2005, this category refers to anyone who did not acquire German citizenship by birth or who has at least one parent who did not acquire German citizenship by birth. In practice, this category includes first-, second-, and parts of third-generation “immigrants.” More than half of those whom the German Federal Statistics Office counts as a “person with a migration background” are actually German citizens.Footnote ¹⁶

The idea that ethnic and religious minorities in Germany are eternal newcomers, perpetual immigrants, or forever foreigners is also a well-worn trope among far-right politicians like Alexander Gauland, cofounder and honorary chairman of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose platform explicitly states that “Islam is not a part of Germany.” Gauland has come under fire on several occasions for his inflammatory rhetoric. In one speech, he suggested that Aydan Özoğuz, the Hamburg-born Bundestag member and Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees, and Integration in the third Merkel cabinet, should be “disposed of in Anatolia.”Footnote ¹⁷ AfD members proudly reject what they see as “political correctness.” At a speech in a village near Dresden, André Poggenburg, who was at the time the state chairman of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, told his supporters that “these camel drivers should go back to where they belong, far beyond the Bosphorus to their mud huts and multiple wives.”Footnote ¹⁸ While such blatantly racist statements are a mainstay on the German right, many politicians have expressed concern with the growing diversity of Germany’s population, including former chancellor Angela Merkel, who in a well-known 2010 speech claimed that German multiculturalism had “utterly failed.”Footnote ¹⁹

Unlike in Britain or France, the onset of labor migration from Turkey to Germany was not directly connected to histories of colonization. However, South–North migratory flows to Western Europe must be understood as part of a broader set of political and economic processes linking core, peripheral, and semiperipheral regions in the world capitalist system. Between 1955 and 1973, more than 2.5 million foreign workers immigrated to Germany through the Gastarbeiter (Guest Worker) program, a temporary and cyclical labor recruitment initiative established by German policymakers to overcome shortages in domestic labor markets and to ensure the steady rotation of cheap manpower throughout the German economy, particularly in low-skilled and industrial sectors.Footnote ²⁰ Similar labor recruitment programs were implemented throughout much of Western Europe, in countries such as Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.Footnote ²¹

Despite the steady growth of the immigrant labor force, official government rhetoric maintained that “Germany is not a country of immigration,” and successive administrations from the mid-1950s onwards adopted policies that increased the number of foreign laborers in Germany while simultaneously barring pathways to naturalization and integration into Germany society. Convinced by the “myth of return” – the idea that immigrants would stay for a few years, earn some money, and eventually go back home – German policymakers made little effort to integrate foreign workers and were uninterested in creating any sort of pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. As the name of the Guest Worker program implies, policymakers believed that the presence of foreign laborers would be a temporary phenomenon primarily motivated by economic necessity.Footnote ²² But labor migration is never merely about economic considerations or cost–benefit calculations. As the Swiss poet and playwright Max Frisch declared during the height of labor recruitment initiatives in Western Europe, “We called for labor, but people came instead.”Footnote ²³

The arrival of new migrants from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean into Germany brought different peoples, cultures, ideas, social practices, and ways of life into contact with one another. Unlike postcolonial migrants, who possessed at least a rudimentary knowledge of the languages and cultures of the metropole, most first-generation migrants to Germany had little familiarity with the country. Though the Gastarbeiter program facilitated labor migration from Spain, Greece, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia, and Yugoslavia, immigrants from the Turkish Republic constituted the largest share of the guest worker population. When the program was officially abolished in 1973, Turkish-origin migrants accounted for 23 percent of the country’s immigrant labor force.Footnote ²⁴

In the decades following the termination of the Guest Worker program, German public opinion on immigration was decidedly mixed. Surveys conducted in the early 1980s found that as many as 79 percent of respondents felt that there were “too many immigrants living in Germany.”Footnote ²⁵ One 1982 study comparing German attitudes about Turkish- and Italian-origin immigrants in West Germany discovered that 69 percent of survey respondents thought that Turks “behaved totally differently” than Germans (as opposed to 47 percent who thought the same about Italians).Footnote ²⁶ As historian Sarah Thomsen Vierra has argued, “[D]ue to their larger numbers and to Germans’ perception of them as particularly ‘foreign’ culturally, Turks became more visible and controversial than any of the other Gastarbeiter groups.”Footnote ²⁷

Meeting minutes from a private discussion between newly elected chancellor Helmut Kohl and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982 confirm that such views were held at the highest levels of government. Unveiling a plan to reduce the number of Turks in West Germany by 50 percent within four years, Kohl told Thatcher that Turks “came from a very distinctive culture and did not integrate well.”Footnote ²⁸ Describing what he saw as a “clash of two different cultures,” Kohl spoke of problems such as illegal employment and forced marriages that he believed were endemic to the Turkish community. By way of contrast he noted that “[West] Germany has had no problems with the Portuguese, the Italians, even the Southeast Asians, because these communities integrated well.”Footnote ²⁹ In the eyes of elected officials and members of the general public alike, Turkish guest workers appeared incongruous to the established sociocultural order in Germany. They were people who were seemingly out of place.

Almost fifty years after the termination of the Gastarbeiter program, it is not uncommon for individuals whose parents or grandparents immigrated to Germany to express some ambivalence about their social standing in the country. Such feelings are underpinned by considerable social stratification and disparities in life chances and economic opportunities. Numerous studies have highlighted the persistence of discrimination in labor and housing markets as well as significant wage gaps and high unemployment rates among ethnic and racial minorities vis-à-vis “native” Germans.Footnote ³⁰ Furthermore, Germans possessing visual marks of Otherness continue to be defined by a static foreignness that places them outside of dominant national imaginaries. As journalists Alice Bota, Khuê Pham, and Özlem Topçu, argue in their 2012 book We New Germans: Who We Are and What We Want:

In 2018, the question of origins, which is often a question about loyalties and allegiances, sparked a contentious national debate following football star Mesut Özil’s decision to quit the German national team after their disappointing performance in the World Cup. Özil, a third-generation Turkish German and recipient of the Bambi Prize for Integration (given to a public figure who serves as an example of successful integration into German society), came under fire after meeting with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during a state visit to the UK.Footnote ³² In a statement posted on Twitter, Özil wrote, “Whilst I grew up in Germany, my family background has its roots firmly based in Turkey. I have two hearts, one German and one Turkish.”Footnote ³³ Özil said that for some members of the German public, it didn’t seem to matter that he was born and educated in Germany, paid taxes in Germany, donated sports facilities to German public schools, and helped deliver a World Cup victory to the German national team in 2014. “I am still not accepted into society. I am treated as being ‘different,’” he asserted. “I am German when we win but I am an immigrant when we lose.”Footnote ³⁴

Such statements capture the difficult position that members of minoritized communities find themselves in as they navigate complex questions about home, belonging, and identity in contemporary Europe. They underscore the sense of in-betweenness felt by those whose circuitous family histories hinder their ability to gain acceptance and recognition as full, equal, and authentic members of the body politic. This condition of liminality may help spur the development of new forms of transnational identifications and local attachments. As Ruth Mandell argues in her comprehensive ethnographic study of Turkish origin communities in Germany, “One surprising outcome of the Turkish diasporic existence is that for some, the home land and the host land become mutually constitutive feeding the imaginary attachment to both places, further complicating the idea of a pure teleology of return.”Footnote ³⁵ Acknowledging that Turkish Germans are in Germany to stay, she notes that “population statistics reveal that relatively few actually repatriate.”Footnote ³⁶

While this may be increasingly true in life, repatriation is still quite common in death, in what sociologist Besim Can Zirh describes as “a ritualized and spatial practice of community-making beyond national cartographies.”Footnote ³⁷ Numerous scholars have highlighted the prevalence of postmortem repatriation for burial across a wide range of minority communities in different national settings, including Sunni and Alevi Muslims in Germany,Footnote ³⁸ Belgium,Footnote ³⁹ and the NetherlandsFootnote ⁴⁰; Moroccan and Senegalese-origin migrants in SpainFootnote ⁴¹; Christians of Middle Eastern origin in Britain, Denmark, and SwedenFootnote ⁴²; Maghrebi and sub-Saharan diasporas in FranceFootnote ⁴³; Mexicans in the United StatesFootnote ⁴⁴; and Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Taoist, and Muslim communities in the United Kingdom.Footnote ⁴⁵ In spite of the vast geographical, religious, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences – not to mention disparate histories of migration – posthumous repatriation, as Adrián Félix aptly observes, “appears to be a minoritarian affair.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Nonetheless, it would be misleading to assume that migrants’ transnational backgrounds would necessarily result in posthumous repatriation for burial in ancestral lands. This sort of thinking is analogous to the myth of return. Scholars of migration have long examined the so-called push and pull factors that determine why some people cross borders while others stay put.Footnote ⁴⁷ End-of-life practices are likewise informed by a variety of different factors, including economic and religious considerations, feelings of social inclusion or exclusion, and the availability (or lack thereof) of appropriate burial grounds in countries of settlement. Practices such as burial and repatriation unfold within a dynamic sociocultural and political field that is shaped by states, families, and religious communities, all of which share an interest in the fate of dead bodies and where and how they are disposed of and commemorated.

The implications of death out of place and the complexity of the field within which it unfolds became the subject of international headlines with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic as global news outlets recounted the challenges faced by immigrant and minority families whose loved ones had succumbed to the disease.Footnote ⁴⁸ As governments around the world imposed lockdowns and border closures to mitigate the spread of the virus, numerous countries enacted travel restrictions on both the living and the dead, suspending cross-border travel and cross-border repatriation of corpses and human remains. These decisions left many people in distress, including Mamadou Diagouraga, a French Muslim whose father’s dying request was to be buried in a family plot in his home village in Mali. Islamic tradition dictates a speedy burial in a Muslim cemetery (usually within twenty-four to forty-eight hours after death), but according to different estimates, between 60 and 80 percent of French Muslims with migratory histories are repatriated to ancestral homelands for burial in what is an elaborate and at times lengthy logistical undertaking.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, fears of coronavirus infection prevented Mr. Diagouraga from burying his father in Mali. “Not having respected his last wishes,” he told reporters in Paris, “it’s true, it is heartbreaking.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Muslims who wished to bury their dead in France encountered a different set of problems during the pandemic. Like Germany and many other European countries with sizable Muslim populations, France has a severe and longstanding shortage of cemeteries with sections reserved for Islamic burials.Footnote ⁵¹ Since French burial law stipulates that individuals must be buried in the municipality where they lived or died, Muslim communities in areas of the country where Islamic burial plots are in short supply have had to come up with creative solutions. Responding to the growing number of coronavirus deaths in the Muslim community, a group of imams in Lyon issued an unusual fatwa allowing for the temporary burial of Muslims in non-Muslim burial grounds.Footnote ⁵² Kamel Kabtane, rector of the Grand Mosque of Lyon, explained to reporters that families could later exhume and rebury (or repatriate) the bodies as circumstances allowed. He also stressed that the scarcity of Islamic burial grounds was a serious public policy issue.Footnote ⁵³ “We must think in the long term and for all those who were born here and consider France their homeland. We must establish genuine high-capacity Muslim cemeteries oriented toward Makkah, and not just small areas for Muslims,” he said.Footnote ⁵⁴ Kabtane’s sentiments were echoed by Chems-Eddine Hafiz, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris. Noting that the coronavirus has “hit the Muslim community with full force,” Hafiz told reporters that the shortage of Islamic burial grounds “has been going on for years, and we are now paying a high price for it. The younger generations want to be totally French,” he said, “and clearly willingness to be buried in France is a type of integration.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Similar conversations about end-of-life practices, integration, and the stakes of political membership were taking place in Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy in the wake of mounting death tolls caused by the pandemic.Footnote ⁵⁶ “Some old people still want to be buried in their country of origin. But many have children, grandchildren in Italy and now prefer to be buried here” said Gueddouda Boubakeur, president of Milan’s Islamic Centre.Footnote ⁵⁷ “Younger Muslims want to be buried in Italy because they’re Italian,” he declared. Yet across the whole of Italy’s 8,000 municipalities, there are only seventy-six cemeteries with sections reserved for Islamic burials in a country that is home to nearly 2.7 million Muslims. “It is as if Italy forces you to repatriate your loved ones,” said Hira Ibraim, a twenty-three-year old Muslim whose mother died in March 2020 in the northern Italian township of Pisogne. “I was so sorry that many families who live in small municipalities like mine, without Islamic cemetery areas, haven’t been able to give their loved ones a worthy burial.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Reflecting on this situation and its implications for Italy’s Muslim communities, Said El Bourji, who founded the country’s first Islamic funeral home in 2011, asked, “How are we supposed to take roots in Italy if we don’t possess Islamic cemeteries where we can be buried?”Footnote ⁵⁹

These stories help illustrate how end-of-life decisions and practices are connected to broader political struggles over the boundaries of nations and the place of minoritized groups within them. Posthumous practices anchor minority claims for inclusion and offer a symbolically powerful means to assert political membership and foster a sense of belonging. Yet the desire to be buried in ancestral lands underscores the continued relevance of transnational attachments and demonstrates how the impact of exclusionary sociopolitical orders can follow some people to the grave. Those who experience death out of place, like Muslims of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany, may face barriers to belonging in both the countries where they live and those where they are purportedly from. How they attempt to resolve these contradictions, in death and in life, demonstrates both the profound importance and fundamental ambiguity of the location and significance of home for transnational migrants and their kin.

An Ethnography of Transnational Deathways

This book offers an ethnographic account of the transnational deathways of Muslims of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany. The majority of my fieldwork took place in Berlin and Istanbul between 2013 and 2017. During my time in Germany, I shadowed Muslim undertakers at several Islamic funeral homes, observing and participating in every aspect of their day-to-day work. I accompanied them on trips to hospitals, morgues, municipal offices, consular agencies, mosques, airports, and cemeteries. I assisted them in funeral ceremonies, helping to transport and bury deceased Muslims in a number of different cemeteries in the city. Together, we also prepared corpses for international repatriation and delivered them to Berlin-area airports for shipment on cargo and commercial flights. In addition to my participant observation of Berlin’s Islamic funeral industry, I also conducted semistructured interviews with bereaved families, government officials, religious leaders, medical practitioners, and representatives of Islamic funeral funds, all in an effort to better understand the role that end-of-life practices play in the negotiation of social, political, and cultural boundaries. Alongside these formal interviews, I had countless informal conversations with community members during visits to numerous ethnic and cultural associations, youth centers, mosques, restaurants, and cafés, which ultimately helped shape the direction that my research took.

In 2015, I spent three months conducting fieldwork in Istanbul to learn more about the receiving end of the repatriation process. In Turkey, I was able to interview municipal cemetery administrators and to accompany undertakers to the airport to retrieve corpses that had been shipped from overseas. During my time in Turkey, I attended and observed several funeral ceremonies and visited nearly a dozen municipal cemeteries to better understand differences in funerary rituals and memorialization practices. In the summer of 2017, I returned to Berlin for follow-up interviews and to visit and photograph a new Islamic burial ground that had recently been established to serve the city’s Alevi communities. In total, I spent fifteen discontinuous months conducting fieldwork during a four-year period.

Much of my time in Berlin was spent in the neighborhoods of Neukölln and Kreuzberg, areas with a high concentration of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Kreuzberg is often referred to as “Little Istanbul,” though in recent years, some of its long-term residents have been displaced as the neighborhood undergoes gentrification and commercial development. In impromptu conversations and formal interviews alike, I heard many people’s stories about their families’ history of migration and settlement in Germany, about summer vacations and annual trips taken to Turkey, about their hopes for their children and their future, and about the challenges they faced in their day-to-day lives. Many recounted their personal experiences with discrimination and the difficulties of being fully accepted into German society. The notion of integration came up frequently and was a heated topic of debate.

Social scientists often speak of integration in structural terms, focusing on metrics such as immigrants’ socioeconomic status, access to citizenship, level of education, employment, political participation, linguistic abilities, neighborhoods of residence, and whether or not they have nonimmigrant friends.Footnote ⁶⁰ While such studies help clarify macro-level trends, my own interest in issues surrounding integration and identity was not in how states integrate immigrant populations or whether some countries were more successful in incorporating ethno-racial and religious minorities than others, but rather in how the notion of integration was understood and experienced by those who were themselves the targets of state integration policies. For my interlocutors and conversation partners, integration was not a public policy issue that could be discussed in terms of socioeconomic benchmarks. It was an existential question. As one man in his mid-forties who had lived in Germany for most of his life told me over tea and pastries at a café in Neukölln:

Such reflections bring to mind a question posed by W. E. B. DuBois in a very different context more than a century ago: How does it feel to be a problem? For people with Turkish and Kurdish heritage in Germany, the answer is quite personal.

Almost everyone that I met asked me about my own experiences in the United States. As a second-generation immigrant whose childhood was spent between the United States and Turkey, I found myself in the position of an insider/outsider during my fieldwork. Unlike many of my interview partners in Germany, I did not grow up within a diaspora community. We were the only Turkish family in a small town in upstate New York. Yet frequent travel to Turkey and several years of education in Turkish public schools in Istanbul and Ankara have given me an intimate familiarity with Turkish culture, language, politics, and history. Throughout my life, I’ve grown accustomed to experiences of liminality and misrecognition. In Turkey, people consider me to be an American. In the United States, many view me as Turkish. Like countless other U.S.-born minorities, I am frequently asked where I am from and have also been told to go back to where I came from. Some people take it upon themselves to praise my English language skills, though as a first-year PhD student, the director of my graduate program inquired about the absence of my TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) scores, presumably because it was difficult for her to imagine that someone with a name like Osman Balkan could be a native speaker of English. From an early age, I had a good idea about what it felt like to live in a society where others view you as an outsider. These experiences have undoubtedly influenced my scholarly interests and intellectual trajectory. They also helped me connect on a deeper and more personal level with my interview partners in Berlin.

My interlocutors had not encountered many people with Turkish heritage that had grown up outside of Western Europe or Turkey. Inevitably, they asked me questions like “What do Americans think of Turkish people?” Or “What is life like for Turks in the United States?” They were disappointed to learn that Americans don’t really think about Turkish people at all and know very little about the country.Footnote ⁶¹ The number of Turkish-origin migrants in the United States is relatively small and geographically diffuse. There is no American Kreuzberg.

Nonetheless, people that I spoke to had certain preconceptions about Americans and the United States, a country that they related to in unexpected ways. When they learned that I had lived in New York City, many told me, “You have Harlem, we have Kreuzberg. We are like Blacks in America.” This comparison is striking, not least because of the notable paucity of race in contemporary political debates in Germany, where like many Western European states, discussions about immigration, multiculturalism, diversity, identity, and social cohesion tend to be rooted in categories like ethnicity, religion, and national origin.Footnote ⁶² As other scholars have noted, this sort of self-racialization is a strategy through which some members of minoritized groups in Germany try to make sense of their structurally precarious position in German society.Footnote ⁶³

The questions that I was asked about my own experiences naturally lent themselves to conversations about the experiences of my interlocutors. As an insider/outsider, I was able to relate to, empathize with, and reflect deeply upon what I saw around me. My own background and experience – my positionality – unquestionably impacted my ability to navigate Turkish Berlin. In one memorable encounter that I chronicle later in this introduction, my affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania created an unexpected atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, but for the most part people were as eager to talk to and learn about me as I was to and about them. Ethnographic studies are never unidirectional. Our interlocutors always study us back and allow us into their lives in calculated ways. Winning trust is critical and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to encouraging people to tell their stories, especially when they involve emotionally difficult subjects like death. As a researcher, I tried to be respectful, honest, and transparent about my intentions with everyone that I spoke with, attempting to put into practice what John Jackson has called “ethnographic sincerity.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The diverse networks of contacts that I developed throughout the course of my fieldwork helped open doors that might have otherwise remained closed to me.

Yael Navaro-Yashin has cautioned against a “colonial” conception of research in which the world is treated as a laboratory where students of anthropology can pick and choose field sites as they please. She writes that “only certain spaces and themes make themselves available for study by certain people.”Footnote ⁶⁵ For Navaro-Yashin:

I don’t take this to mean that only members of a particular group are qualified to study or to say something meaningful about that group, a position that valorizes the authenticity and epistemic verity of individual experience, which can lead to a reactionary and narrow-minded politics typified in the injunction to “stay in your lane.” I do believe, however, that knowledge of unwritten cultural codes, mores, habits, histories, struggles, aspirations, and beliefs helps inform one’s approach and abilities as an observer and analyst of social, cultural, and political phenomenon. As a discipline, anthropology has been well attuned to (some might say obsessed with!) questions of positionality, reflexivity, and power dynamics in ethnographic research. Such discussions are becoming more widespread in my own discipline of political science in tandem with the publication of a growing number of ethnographic accounts of political life.Footnote ⁶⁷ As ethnographer and fellow political scientist Timothy Pachirat has argued, “The role of the ethnographer can be a productive and necessary source of reflection and analysis, rather than a shortcoming to be silenced or downplayed.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Just as my personal background may have helped open certain doors, others remained shut. One of the important shortcoming of this book, which I wish to acknowledge at the outset, results from my limited exposure to female spaces and voices. Although several of my interview partners were women, many of the informal venues like the cafés and restaurants where I chatted with strangers for hours at a time were spaces predominantly frequented by men. Furthermore, all of the undertakers that I shadowed were men, a trend that reflects broader disparities in the deathcare industry at large.Footnote ⁶⁹ Other studies have focused explicitly on the gendered experiences of men and women with Turkish heritage in Berlin as well as those of German converts to Islam.Footnote ⁷⁰ While I was granted some leeway and credibility as someone that others read as a Turkish-origin Muslim male, I am cognizant of the ways in which this particular subject position limited my access to other spaces, voices, and perspectives.

Studying death and bereavement ethnographically poses distinct ethical challenges. Early on in my research, I had to come to terms with a difficult but important set of questions. Was it possible, or even desirable, to study other people’s grief and loss in a detached and dispassionate manner? How would the murky lines between participant and observer become even more muddled in moments of collective mourning? For Muslims, communal prayers for the dead are a central part of any funeral ceremony. As an observer of these rituals, I also participated in them, lining up shoulder to shoulder and offering my own prayers to the recently departed. In such moments, my perspective toggled between that of a researcher and that of a member of the Muslim community. Attending and participating in the funerals of strangers was emotionally challenging. I experienced a range of feelings, from sorrow and trepidation to curiosity and empathy, acutely aware that some may have characterized my participation in these rituals as voyeuristic. One on occasion where I sensed that my presence at a funeral may have been disturbing some of the mourners, I left mid-ceremony, much to the surprise of the undertakers whom I had accompanied there.

Some of the existing scholarship on death and bereavement includes explicitly self-conscious reflection about the role of the researcher and how personal losses contribute to the making of ethnography.Footnote ⁷¹ One poignant example is anthropologist Finn Stepputat’s description of a moment of intellectual revelation that came after his wife’s unexpected death:

In this passage, Stepputat describes how his own personal experience with loss and bereavement gave him insight into broader cultural and political phenomena – namely, the ways in which state power and sovereignty is exercised upon dead bodies. While I had no personal connections to the deceased or to the bereaved in the funeral ceremonies that I participated in, my own ethnographic immersion – though emotionally taxing – generated important insights that influenced the trajectory of my research. I discovered, among other things, that the public and collective rituals accompanying death and burial offer a compelling window into social hierarchies, communal boundaries, contested identities, and power relations. I also saw firsthand how dead bodies serve as sites of struggle over signification and meaning.

At the outset of each of the chapters in this book, I offer ethnographic vignettes and moments of intellectual revelation in the form of “field notes.” Drawing from my own personal experiences in the field, these notes and reflections speak to different aspects of the politics of death, burial, migration, and identity, and set the stage for the ensuing discussion. The first set of notes, which illustrates some of the political stakes and risks of conducting ethnographic research in transnational migratory settings, comes towards the end of this chapter. Before I share these field notes, I wish to underscore a few additional points about the politics of dead bodies in an effort to further clarify the political ramifications of death, dying, and burial and to elucidate the ways in which states and other actors are invested in the management of the dead. One of the central claims that this book develops is that states, families, and religious communities all have a substantial interest in the fate of dead bodies. Determining what happens to the dead, including how they are disposed of and commemorated, is an eminently political calculation. To further substantiate these arguments, I turn to the vast transdisciplinary literature on death, burial, and the politics of mourning, which has influenced my own approach and understanding of the contradictions and implications of death out of place. Although I subsume this scholarship under the general heading of what political theorist Achille Mbembe has termed “necropolitics,” my own approach to the necropolitical emphasizes its more quotidian iterations.

The Politics of Dead Bodies and Everyday Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe’s thought-provoking interventions on the nature of sovereign power, violence, and the state’s right over life and death have opened up broad new lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry across a wide range of academic disciplines. Building on the work of Michel Foucault and the proposition that the ultimate expression of sovereignty lies in the ability to exercise control over life and death, Mbembe formulated the concept of necropolitics to describe and make sense of “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.”Footnote ⁷³ Drawing on examples such as the slave plantation, the penal colony, and territories under military occupation such as Palestine, where “new and unique forms of social existence” have appeared, Mbembe tracks the emergence of necropolitical regimes whose function is to create conditions of maximum deprivation.Footnote ⁷⁴ In these so-called death worlds, populations are not killed off en masse in spectacular acts of violence. Instead, they are reduced to conditions of life that confer upon them the status of the “living dead” through willful neglect.Footnote ⁷⁵ In such spaces, the exercise of sovereign power lies in its ability to define which lives matter for the vitality and future existence of the political community. By marking certain lives as valuable and others as expendable, necropolitics is, in Mbembe’s rendering, thoroughly invested in the uneven distribution of life and death across certain populations.

In its focus on the different allocation of death, however, Mbembe’s account of the necropolitical overlooks one of the key sites where necropolitics takes place: the human corpse. While states mete out death, dead bodies themselves are a critical terrain of statecraft, in part because of their materiality, symbolic power, and associations with the sacred.Footnote ⁷⁶ As I’ve argued, contestations over corpses – where and how they should be buried and what they signify – are also contestations over the boundaries of political communities. Corpses are central to processes of world-making, as Katherine Verdery demonstrates in her brilliant study of Eastern Europe’s transitions from socialism. Following the collapse of communist governments in the region, the exhumation and reburial of revolutionary leaders and public figures was central to the reordering of worlds of meaning in postsocialist societies. Verdery’s account underscores the physicality of the corpse, arguing that a (dead) body’s materiality is vital to its symbolic efficacy. Unlike abstract notions such as “patriotism” or “the nation,” dead bodies, she observes, can be “moved around, displayed, and strategically located in specific places.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Dead bodies are particularly potent as political symbols because of their ambiguity and polysemy. The dead can carry vastly different meanings for differently positioned actors, which helps explain why different groups like states, families, and religious communities make claims upon them. During the transitions from socialism, as Verdery shows, the corpses of both famous and infamous public figures served as unexpected loci for struggles over the configuration of national identities, social relations, and the postsocialist moral and political universe. In this period, public rituals of exhumation and reburial were central to the resignification of communal boundaries and collective identities. Such practices also helped justify and legitimate different visions of future sociopolitical, moral, and economic orders.

Dead bodies are curious objects. Philosopher Julia Kristeva sees them as the paradigmatic form of the abject. “Corpses,” she writes, “show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Dead bodies remind us of our own finitude and mortality, realities that most of us try not to dwell on in our daily lives.Footnote ⁷⁹ Though dead, the corpse maintains some qualities of personhood by virtue of the fact that “it” was once a living, breathing, speaking, thinking, and feeling being. Being dead, however, the corpse is no longer a person. At the same time, it is not quite a thing. This curious ontology of the corpse – neither person nor thing – is crucial for understanding why humans go to great lengths to care for corpses (such as repatriating them thousands of miles for burial), and conversely why their mistreatment can cause such great anguish. In a sense, the dead are never quite dead.

What is at stake in how we treat dead bodies? A parable about Diogenes the Cynic, recounted by historian Thomas Laqueur in the opening pages of his magisterial account of the cultural meaning of the dead, lays out the terms of the debate.Footnote ⁸⁰ Diogenes, an ancient philosopher whom his contemporary Plato described as “a Socrates gone mad,” was known for his eccentric behavior and unconventional teachings. He supposedly lived in a barrel near the Athenian Agora and roamed the city with a lantern during daylight in search of an honest man. One day, Diogenes told his followers not to bury him when he died. “Toss my corpse over the city walls and let nature take its course,” he said. Seeing their horrified reactions, Diogenes suggested that they should leave a staff near his corpse so that he could drive away the wild beasts that would inevitably consume it. “But how can you do that,” they asked, “for you will not perceive them?” “How am I then injured by being torn by those animals,” Diogenes replied, “if I have no sensation?”

Reflecting on Diogenes’ terse rebuttal, Laqueur concedes that he was certainly right about one thing – a body stripped of life cannot be injured. But in assuming that the treatment of dead bodies was of little consequence, Diogenes was in Laqueur’s estimation “existentially wrong, wrong in a way that defies all cultural logic.”Footnote ⁸¹ The dead cannot simply be neglected or abandoned, left as carrion for scavengers and beasts of prey. They “are not refuse like the other debris of life,” writes Laqueur.Footnote ⁸² Though we are compelled to attend to the dead because of processes of decomposition and putrefaction that take hold of the body after death, burial, as Robert Hertz argued, is not simply a matter of hygiene. In his influential 1908 essay “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death,” Hertz argued that the corpse is an object of “horror and dread,” both because of the abject qualities that Kristeva identified, but also because “when a man dies, society loses in him much more than a unit; it is stricken in the very principle of its life, in the faith that it has in itself.”Footnote ⁸³ Like his teacher Émile Durkheim, Hertz believed that society regenerates itself in and through ritual. He saw in funerary rites a process through which communities move individuals from the world of the living to the world of the dead, what he referred to as the “double” or “second burial.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Through funerary rites, what Arnold van Gennep calls “rites of passage,” the dead are put in their proper place – out of our world and into the realm of the ancestors.Footnote ⁸⁵ This is one reason why the location of burial is so important for many, something that takes on added salience when people experience death out of place.

There is, of course, enormous variation in the ways that different groups perform transitions from life to death, reflecting – among other things – different beliefs about the body, the soul, and the afterlife. If funerary rites are denied by states or other actors who treat corpses as if they were mere things and not people – either by desecrating them or by leaving them unburied – the consequences can be momentous.Footnote ⁸⁶ Laqueur points out the striking parallels between the story of Achilles dragging Hector’s lifeless body over the fields of Troy in Homer’s Iliad and the images of a dead American soldier being pulled through the streets of Mogadishu by followers of General Mohamed Aidid in 1993. During World War II, Nazis dumped the corpses of executed resistance fighters on the streets of Paris for all to see, just as drug cartels in Mexico hang their victims’ bodies from bridges and highway intersections today.

In 2015, Turkish security forces flaunted the desecrated, denuded corpse of Kurdish guerilla fighter Ekin Wan in the southeastern city of Varto, while in 2014, the Ferguson police department left Michael Brown’s dead body in the middle of an intersection for four hours. Readers of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish will likely never forget his cringeworthy description of the gruesome eighteenth-century execution of Damiens, who after being publicly tortured and quartered, had his body parts burned at the stake.Footnote ⁸⁷ Nor is it easy to forget Machiavelli’s account of the murder of Remirro de Orco, who Duke Cesare Borgia had “placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces with a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him,” a ferocious spectacle which “left the people at once satisfied and stupefied.”Footnote ⁸⁸ King Creon’s well-known injunction against the burial of Polynices and Antigone’s defiance of his orders offers another example of how different actors are invested in the fate of dead bodies. The horror and awe that the mistreatment of human bodies evokes is timeless. In the face of such practices of corpse degradation, writes Laqueur, the “radically different eschatologies” of the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world “seem to melt away.”Footnote ⁸⁹

The force with which sovereign power is brought to bear on the dead is clearly on display in spectacular examples like the acts of violence directed against corpses, what political theorist Banu Bargu calls “necropolitical violence.”Footnote ⁹⁰ But we must also consider the more quotidian forms of necropolitics that are present in everyday practices of corpse management and memorialization. As Finn Stepputat reminds us, all states establish a range of institutions, laws, and practices to oversee the transitions from life to death, including what happens to dead bodies.Footnote ⁹¹ Although states may delegate certain postmortem responsibilities to private, social, and religious entities, they usually claim ultimate authority over the definition and governance of the dead within their jurisdiction, relying on a combination of legislation and institutionalized procedures.Footnote ⁹² This can be a contested process, especially when there are discrepancies between burial laws and religious or cultural expectations about the proper treatment of dead bodies.Footnote ⁹³ According to Stepputat, “the death of a person represents an occasion for the performance of sovereignty, not only for territorial states but also for a range of sub-, trans- and supra-national entities that seek to claim or produce autonomous domains of power.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The governance of the dead, then, is a crucial means through which both state and nonstate actors construct and contest the boundaries of political communities.

One of the most widespread and well-known means through which states manage the dead in order to consolidate national communities can be seen in the rituals surrounding unknown soldiers.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a memorial invented by the governments of Italy, France, and Britain during the final years of World War I.Footnote ⁹⁶ While state memorials to the dead have a very long history (Thucydides writes about the ancient Athenian practice of the empty tomb or Cenotaph), the monuments that governments have built to honor unknown soldiers are a decisively modern phenomenon that is paradigmatic of nationalism. According to Benedict Anderson:

Soldier dead have long played an important role in efforts to bolster political communities and their professed values. In his funeral oration, Pericles spoke of the bravery of fallen Athenian soldiers while extolling the virtues of the Athenian people and their democracy, much like Abraham Lincoln did centuries later at his famous speech at Gettysburg, where he declared that the deaths of Union soldiers would enable the rebirth of the American nation.Footnote ⁹⁸ Politicians frequently speak of the “ultimate sacrifice” made by soldiers killed in action (“they died for our freedom”), and states go to great lengths to recover their soldier dead to ensure they are brought “home” to their “appropriate” resting place.Footnote ⁹⁹ As I explore in Chapter 1, a similar impetus is present in government and civil society efforts to repatriate the bodies of former migrants to countries of origin for burial. In both instances, the underlying desire is to bring the body back to its “proper” resting place.

Anderson points out the difficulty of imagining a “Tomb of the Unknown Marxist” or a “Cenotaph for Fallen Liberals,” arguing that nationalism, unlike Marxism or Liberalism, is centrally concerned with death and immortality, lending it a strong affinity with religious imaginaries. This affinity, which for Anderson is by no means coincidental, is what inspires him to begin his canonical study of the cultural roots of nationalism with death, which he characterizes as “the last of a whole gamut of fatalities.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The invocation of the ghostly qualities of nationalism and the affinity between death and the nation is also an invitation to consider the spectral dimensions of nation-states. “To study social life,” Avery Gordon asserts, “one must confront the ghostly aspects of it.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This is not a plea for the paranormal but a recognition that ends are not always endings. Endings can have afterlives. Ghosts produce material and observable effects. As Gordon puts it:

Scholars heeding Gordon’s call to “admit the ghost” into their analyses of social, cultural, and political life have proliferated alongside a growing transdisciplinary interest in questions concerning haunting and afterlives.Footnote ¹⁰³ These works, which speak to topics as varied as the afterlives of gender, loss, revolution, empire, solitary confinement, monuments, area studies, and even punk rock, cohere around a shared interest in exploring how the past extends into, interrupts, or impinges upon the present.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While in its colloquial usage the notion of afterlife commonly refers to a realm of consciousness or existence after the biological death of a person, as an analytical concept, “afterlives” is concerned with what remains and what returns. Afterlives “point to what haunts that which might otherwise be celebrated as an unencumbered, fresh start.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In this vein, my own approach to death out of place and the politics of dead bodies presumes that the biological death of a person is not simply a negation, an erasure of being, or the termination of the individual or the self. Death is a productive and generative moment that sets into motion a complex chain of meaningful human activity. “The living need the dead far more than the dead need the living,” writes Thomas Laqueur, because “the dead make social worlds.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The human corpse is not an agentic force in the traditional sense of the word but there is, nonetheless, something more to dead bodies than just insentient organic matter.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Laqueur sees their presence as enchanting our allegedly disenchanted world. In their afterlives, the dead contribute to public and political life in unpredictable but consequential ways.

Dead bodies serve as concerted sites of political activity over the boundaries of political communities and their foundational values and ideals. Long-buried corpses can acquire new public meaning in times of political turbulence and change. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the corpses of the old sociopolitical order became targets of a peculiar form of political violence. When the National Convention voted to destroy the royal mausoleums of Saint-Denis in 1793, the skeletons of twenty-five kings, seventeen queens, and seventy-one princes were exhumed; thrown into two great ditches; and covered with lime to eradicate them. Revolutionaries with pickaxes removed their lead burial vaults, melted them down, and turned them into bullets. That same year, the body of Cardinal Richelieu was taken out of its tomb and decapitated with much fanfare.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such examples seem to corroborate Walter Benjamin’s assertion in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Following passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990 by the U.S. Congress, numerous museums and other cultural institutions have been compelled to return the looted human remains and grave goods of Native Americans to those who can prove their relationship to such items.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Policymakers saw the return of these artifacts as a way to come to terms with past injustices by restoring sacred objects that had been pillaged from Native Americans to their rightful owners. One of the central motivations underlying this vision of restorative justice was the idea that the dead and their belongings should be returned to their proper owners and places. Native American communities’ demands for repatriation were often expressed as a desire to “bring home” these stolen relics.Footnote ¹¹¹

Of course, migrants and minorities are different than soldiers, kings and queens, cultural icons, and indigenous remains and objects. One connection that I see between such disparate figures is that the activity surrounding their corpses is intimately tied to processes of place-making. Different actors assert and challenge the boundaries of political, national, religious, and moral communities in and through practices involving dead bodies. To “bring a dead body home” is a powerful symbolic act that involves both the actual transportation of material remains and the assertion of a particular vision of collective identity and membership. The practice of repatriation (of bodies and of objects) reflects a widely held, commonsensical idea that the dead have their proper place and that denying this would be unjust.

Importantly, places are made meaningful and endowed with a sense of “placeness” by virtue of the dead that inhabit them. The act of burial is a place-making practice par excellence. Giambattista Vico argues that the ancestors of European patrician families laid proprietary claims to their lands by signaling towards the graves of their forefathers. “Thus by the graves of their buried dead,” he writes, “the giants showed dominion over their lands, and Roman law called for burial of the dead in a proper place to make it religious. With truth they could pronounce these heroic phrases: we are sons of this earth, we are born from these oaks.”Footnote ¹¹² It was through such gestures that claims of ownership were legitimated.Footnote ¹¹³

While graves and the dead bodies that occupy them can provide proof of proprietary rights over land, they can also lend force to symbolic claims of ownership and belonging. Recall the statements made by Muslim religious leaders in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic: “Younger Muslims want to be buried in Italy because they’re Italian” and “The younger generations want to be totally French, and clearly willingness to be buried in France is a type of integration.” One of the core arguments that I develop in this book is that people assert membership in particular groups – be it at the level of the family, religious community, or nation – through postmortem practices such as burial and repatriation. Engseng Ho reminds us that the graves of migrants, while literal endpoints, are also “beginnings for their descendants, marking the truth of their presence in a land.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ As I’ve asserted, states, families, and religious communities all have a stake in the fate of dead bodies and work in different ways to ensure that they end up in the “right” place. What that right place is and what it signifies for different actors is by no means a foregone conclusion. In an effort to demonstrate how the dead contribute to the construction and reproduction of collective boundaries and communal identities, this book traces the actors, networks, and institutions that determine the movement of dead bodies within and across international borders. By doing so, it helps shed light on the processes through which relations between authority, territory, and populations are managed at a transnational level.

A transnational analysis is attentive to the different types of economic, cultural, political, and familial ties and connections that exist across national borders. Scholars of migration use the term “transnationalism” to talk about the ways in which contemporary migrants are simultaneously embedded in, identify with, and participate in multiple communities that are not just, or even primarily, rooted in a single national collectivity.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Writing in the 1990s, Nina Glick-Schiller and her collaborators suggested that the existence of transnational ties points to the emergence of a “new type of migrant experience” and by extension, a new type of immigrant. These “new” immigrants no longer break their ties with their countries of origin or simply stay put and assimilate to the host society. While immigrant communities across the world have historically maintained ties with countries of origin in various domains of life, the time–space compression enabled by improvements in transportation and communications technologies have certainly made cross-border travel and communication much cheaper, easier, and more readily available to ever greater numbers of people in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Studies of transnational migration are attentive to the different types of connections that migrants forge across home and host societies and also to the ways that states become involved in managing their diasporas abroad. Approximately 4 million people with Turkish heritage live in Germany, making it one of the largest Turkish diasporas in the world. For several decades, the Turkish government has actively worked to maintain connections with Turkish-origin communities in Germany, both because of the large volume of economic remittances sent to Turkey and because many Germans of Turkish descent are still eligible to vote in national elections in Turkey.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, whose European operations I discuss further in the next chapter, maintains control over hundreds of mosques in Germany (and across Europe) and is an influential actor in the institutionalization of Islam in Germany. At times, various groups with widely divergent visions of the political future of the Turkish republic, including Kurds, Alevis, Islamists, Kemalists, Yezidis, and Gülenists, have come into open political conflict in Germany, a reflection of the transnationalization of Turkish politics. The political stakes of this transnationalization became glaringly evident in the aftermath of what I had expected to be a routine visit to Berlin’s Şehitlik Mosque in July 2014. As my field notes in the next section illustrate, domestic disagreements between different Turkish-origin subcommunities in Germany can play out in unusual and consequential ways.

The Man in Pennsylvania

Berlin’s Şehitlik Mosque is one of the city’s only buildings with traditional Islamic architectural features like a domed roof and pointy minarets. Centrally located in the neighborhood of Kreuzberg, it is a welcoming and busy hub of activity that attracts worshippers of all ages to its religious services. During my fieldwork, I spent a great deal of time at the mosque, participating in funeral services and weekly Friday prayers. The Şehitlik Mosque hosts cultural events like concerts and art exhibitions and also organizes public outreach programs for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Its courtyard is home to a small bookstore that sells books in both Turkish and German as well as clothes, trinkets, and accessories. Visitors can purchase tea and coffee from the mosque’s canteen, which on Fridays also serves excellent sandwiches with grilled sucuk, a spicy beef sausage that is popular in Turkey.

On this particular day, the mosque was quiet. When I arrived in the late afternoon, the only other people that I saw were a group of middle-aged and elderly men sitting around a white plastic table in the mosque’s courtyard. One of them was the imam of the mosque. He had been in Berlin for about six months, having been sent over by the Directorate of Religious Affairs in Turkey. The Turkish state is an important player in matters concerning Islam in Europe. Through the European branches of its Directorate of Religious Affairs, it subsidizes and manages hundreds of mosques across the continent. It also pays the salaries of Turkish imams in Germany and many other European countries. In addition to its financial support, the Directorate helps staff these mosques by appointing imams trained in Turkish theological institutions to serve for four- or five-year stints abroad. Some public officials in Germany have criticized the policy of importing religious leaders because they see it as giving undue influence over matters concerning Islam in Germany to foreign governments.Footnote ¹¹⁸ While the German government has created new institutions to train Islamic religious leaders, such as the Center for Islamic Theology at Münster University, which was established in 2011, the vast majority of imams that find employment in mosques affiliated with the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs in Germany are sent from Turkey.

I walked over to the table and introduced myself to the group of men, asking if I could join them. “I’m here doing research for my dissertation,” I told them. “I’d like to learn more about Islam in Germany and am especially interested in the burial practices of Muslims here.” The imam gestured for me to take a seat next to him and asked me where I was from. I explained that my parents had emigrated from Turkey to the United States. “I was born there but grew up back and forth between the United States and Turkey,” I said. “Are you a journalist?” he asked. “No,” I said. “I’m a PhD student here to conduct research. My university is in the United States.” Reaching into my bag, I pulled out a business card that I had had printed up before starting my fieldwork, thinking that it would lend me some credibility when I made interview requests. I later found out that “PhD student” was a common cover used by German intelligence agents when visiting mosques and Islamic associations in Germany. Consequently, people were understandably wary when approached by outsiders who wanted to ask them questions in the name of research.

The imam, a mustached man in his late fifties, took my business card and examined it. It was a simple white card with the university’s crest and name as well as my name and departmental affiliation. Adjusting the white skullcap on his head, he looked up from the card at me and asked, “What’s this university?” Without thinking I answered, “It’s the University of Pennsylvania.” An uncomfortable silence ensued. I looked around the table, noting the puzzled expressions on the faces of the other men. Their eyes had hardened somewhat, but they remained silent. “Hmmmm …” the imam interjected skeptically, inviting me to elaborate. “Yes, it’s the University of Pennsylvania,” I repeated. “That’s where I’m doing my doctorate. I’m a PhD student there. In the political science department.”

At this point I was a little confused. I didn’t understand what was so perplexing about the situation. I had assumed that most of the people I would talk to had probably never heard of the University of Pennsylvania. I didn’t expect that my credentials would be so carefully scrutinized. “Pennsylvania,” said the imam, drawing out the word. “Penn-siiil-vehy-nee-ahh.”

Then it hit me. The U.S. state of Pennsylvania is home to the reclusive cleric Fetullah Gülen, who has spent more than twenty years in self-imposed exile at a walled-off compounded in the Poconos, a wooded weekend destination a few hours north of Philadelphia. Gülen is the spiritual leader of the Hizmet movement and has focused much of his energies towards establishing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) schools in Turkey, Central Asia, Africa, Indonesia, and the United States.Footnote ¹¹⁹ He has been an active and well-known figure in Turkish domestic politics and was a longtime ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan until the two had a falling out. For years, Erdoğan referred to Gülen as “the man in Pennsylvania.” In Turkish public discourse, “Pennsylvania” often serves as a metonym for the Hizmet movement. Individuals sympathetic to Gülen and his organization have been targeted by the Turkish government and in some cases, imprisoned on charges of infiltrating key branches of the state such as the military, police, and judiciary. Many Turks believe that Gülen himself is operating a parallel, deep state structure within the Turkish state.

At the time of my visit to the mosque, the war between Gülen and Erdoğan was, relatively speaking, still in a cold phase. Things would heat up a few years later when, on July 15, 2016, a faction of the Turkish armed forces launched a failed military coup attempt in which more than 300 people were killed and 2,100 injured. President Erdoğan, who saw Gülen’s hand behind the coup attempt, took to the airwaves the morning after it happened and announced, “I have a message for Pennsylvania: You have engaged in enough treason against this nation. If you dare, come back to your country!”Footnote ¹²⁰ Erdoğan’s government has pressed the United States to extradite Gülen to face trial in Turkey, but at the time of this writing, he remains in Pennsylvania.

Even before the military coup attempt, Gülen was widely known and reviled by supporters of the Ak Parti (AKP) and President Erdoğan, both at home and abroad. Until that very moment, I hadn’t considered that my affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania could potentially mark me as a Gülenist sympathizer, but as I sat there in the courtyard of the Şehitlik mosque, I quickly understood why the imam had received me with some reservation and skepticism. Laughing nervously, I tried to set the record straight. I explained to him that my university was a longstanding and well-regarded academic institution in the United States. “It’s a university that’s in the city of Philadelphia, which is in the state of Pennsylvania,” I told the imam. “It’s been around for more than two hundred years, long before Gülen ever set foot in Pennsylvania. It has nothing to do with him or with his movement.”

The imam seemed unconvinced. He agreed to talk with me, but his mood had noticeably soured. He took a few of my questions but our conversation was extremely brief. Offering laconic and perfunctory responses, he told me after three or four minutes that he had other things he needed to do and couldn’t talk further. “I’m going to keep your business card, if you don’t mind,” he told me as I stood up to leave. “Good luck with your research and with all of your work in Penn-siiil-vehy-nee-ahh.”

I left the mosque feeling shaken, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. I was truly baffled by the situation, which felt Kafkaesque. Did he really think I was a Gülenist sympathizer because my university had the word “Pennsylvania” in it? Or because I lived in the state of Pennsylvania? Was I guilty by geographical association? A few days later, I recounted this experience to a few acquaintances as we sat drinking tea at an outdoor café. One of them, whom I had met through a fellow doctoral student who was with me that day, worked as the social media coordinator for Deutsch Türkisches Journal (DTJ), an internet news site that describes itself as “The expert portal about Turkey and the German-Turkish community.” I told my companions about what had happened at the mosque in jest, thinking that it made for a funny anecdote about the unexpected twists and turns of fieldwork. I didn’t realize at the time that the DTJ had had Gülenist leanings, and I was certainly not prepared for what came next.

After we parted ways, the social media coordinator recounted my story to his boss, the editor in chief of the Deutsch Türkisches Journal. This editor found the story so compelling that he decided to use it as part of an op-ed (without my consent). The first two paragraphs of the op-ed read as follows:

The op-ed goes on to criticize the role of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) for its monopoly over the interpretation and practice of Islam in Turkey. The author laments the connection between Gülen and the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, arguing that the German branch of the Diyanet fosters a hostile and polarized climate among German Turks. He asserts that the Diyanet has become an overtly and unnecessarily politicized institution and insists that its activities should be relegated to the realm of religion, not politics.

I became aware of this article, which all but outed me by name, after I had returned to the United States. The imam that I had met at the mosque sent me a livid email, taking issue with the ways that the events had been portrayed by the DTJ. In his email, he asked me why I had fabricated such a story and why I had misrepresented his actions to make him look like a bad guy. He ended his email with the following sentence, written in all capital letters for added emphasis: “YOU SAID YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE COMMUNITY IN PENNSLYVANIA.”

I was horrified when I read his message. Although I wrote him back several times, offering a good faith explanation of what had happened in an effort to reach some resolution and mutual understanding, I never heard back. To this day, I wonder whether this encounter and its aftermath jeopardized my intellectual or political credibility in the eyes of Turkish authorities. I have no way of knowing whether the imam spoke to anyone about our meeting or shared the op-ed with people in positions of power. Even if he had, I don’t know whether they would care. Would they read this encounter as something insidious or threatening? Or see it as a simple misunderstanding?

While these questions linger in my mind, this incident taught me valuable lessons that have informed my understanding of fieldwork and its intersection with surveillance, power, and transnational politics. By forcefully demonstrating how different worlds could collide in unexpected and consequential ways, it helped illuminate the political stakes of my field site and compelled me to reflect upon my own blind spots as a Turkish American working in a different national setting. As a researcher conducting extended fieldwork for the first time, I became cognizant of the limitations of my perspective as an insider/outsider. Irrespective of my preexisting cultural knowledge or linguistic abilities, I was not fully equipped to appreciate the complex micropolitics of my field site and the antagonisms, hierarchies, and social divisions that segmented members of the broader diasporic space I had entered into.Footnote ¹²² A politics preceded me. Subsequently, I learned to be both open and cautious. Open about my intentions and objectives, yet cautious about sharing stories about my own experiences in the field. I took seriously the task of establishing relationships with others while recognizing that I should not presume anything about their political commitments, perspectives, or beliefs.

Overview of Chapters

The chapters that follow analyze different aspects of what I have called “death out of place.” With this formulation, I am referring to the experience of death in situations where individuals have multiple and sometimes conflicting allegiances, attachments, and loyalties to different places and political communities. Such people may face barriers to political inclusion and belonging in both the countries where they reside and those they are purportedly from. The question of what is to be done with their mortal remains takes on added existential urgency when these remains can be in only one place.

In Chapter 1, I examine an important set of institutions that provide logistical and financial support for the cross-border transportation of Muslim corpses: Islamic funeral funds. These institutions emerged in tandem with the aging of first-generation Muslim immigrants in Western Europe in the 1990s and the growing need for culturally and religiously appropriate funerary services. In some ways, they are similar to burial assistance funds founded by mutual aid societies and fraternal organizations in England and the United States in the nineteenth century. Unlike their historical predecessors, whose raison d’etre was to provide their members with a “decent” local burial, contemporary Islamic funeral funds are motivated by a different set of imperatives: returning corpses to their “proper” resting places.

Although the funds emphasize their charitable functions and employ notions of mutual aid and religious duty when describing their work, their services have important political implications. I argue that by incentivizing cross-border repatriation, they affirm the symbolic connection between the dead body and the nation and help legitimize the idea that the dead belong in a particular place. In doing so, they engage in a form of necropatriotism. In developing this argument, this chapter focuses on two of the largest and most important Islamic funeral funds in Europe, whose combined membership is nearly 400,000. These funds are administered by longstanding and well established Turkish Islamic associations, Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği (The Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs or DITIB), which is connected to the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs, and Islamische Gemeinschaft Millî Görüş (Islamic Community National Vision or IGMG), a prominent Turkish diaspora organization established by followers of Necmettin Erbakan, an influential Islamist politician and former prime minister of Turkey (1996–1997).Footnote ¹²³ Alongside their funeral funds, both DITIB and IGMG offer a wide range of religious, educational, and cultural services, such as the organization of hajj pilgrimages and Eid celebrations as well as Qur’an courses, language training, and professional education.

This chapter situates these two organizations both within the broader universe of Islamic civil society associations in Europe and within the wider world of immigrant associations that focus on the provision of transnational funerals for diaspora communities with ties to countries such as Mexico, Algeria, Zimbabwe, and Guinea-Bissau. Drawing on interviews with fund administrators and close readings of primary sources such as promotional literature and membership contracts, the chapter elucidates the strategies and practices through which DITIB’s and IGMG’s funeral funds institutionalize, incentivize, and justify posthumous repatriation for burial.

In Chapter 2, I turn to another set of actors that are central to the provision of Islamic funerary services in Europe: Muslim undertakers. The creation of a European Islamic funeral industry is itself a novel consequence of migration from Muslim-majority countries. The private market for funerary services in many Muslim countries, including Turkey, is quite limited. Burials are usually performed by public sector employees (undertakers and religious authorities) at minimal cost to citizens as part of the welfare state. While most European governments offer subsidized or no-cost burials to indigent citizens, they have largely outsourced funerary services to private entities. The first Islamic funeral home in Berlin – one of the first in Germany – was founded in 1983 in response to the growing need for culturally competent and religiously appropriate funerals for the city’s Muslim communities. In the intervening decades, several Islamic funeral companies have been established by Muslim entrepreneurs, many of whom are first- and second-generation immigrants themselves.

This chapter is based on immersive and extensive participant observation across six Islamic funeral homes in Berlin. As part of my research, I worked as an apprentice to Muslim undertakers, assisting them in every aspect of their day-to-day tasks. My focus in this chapter is on the mediating role that these undertakers play between immigrant families and the German state. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, I argue that the undertakers’ ability to navigate both the regulatory structures of the German bureaucracy and the cultural expectations of their customers is a principal source of their professional authority and occupational identity. As intermediaries, these undertakers guide families through the cultural, religious, political, and legal landscapes structuring the transitions from life to death. In reconciling competing sets of administrative and cultural norms, they preside not only over end-of-life decisions and their theological implications, but also over pedagogical moments of sociocultural integration in contemporary Germany. Importantly, the work of mediation is a two-way street. Undertakers teach lessons about the state to minoritized citizens but also offer lessons to the state about its own citizenry, often by countering negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims in Germany.

While the first two chapters cohere around the legal, institutional, and economic aspects of death out of place, or what might be understood as the material conditions of death, burial, and end-of-life care in migratory settings, the second part of Dying Abroad examines the symbolic and cultural dimensions of death and dying among Muslims of Turkish and Kurdish descent in Germany. Scholars of transnationalism have emphasized how the multiple and permanent ties sustained across “home” and “host” countries are often accompanied by the social and symbolic construction of places and spaces of belonging. In the context of transnational migration, such processes are produced through the sending and utilization of remittances (in the form of both cash and goods), and also in the performance of certain rituals and ceremonies.Footnote ¹²⁴ In Chapters 3 and 4, I am particularly interested in processes of place-making and identity construction evident in the rituals and ceremonies accompanying acts of burial and memorialization.

Chapter 3 offers a visual ethnography of Muslim burial grounds in Europe, focusing on representations of religious, ethnic, and national identities on the tombstones of Muslim graves. The Greek word for sign, sêma, is also the word for grave. For the ancient Greeks, the grave marker was not viewed as an ordinary sign but as “a sign that signified the source of signification itself, since it ‘stood for’ what it ‘stood in’ – the ground of burial as such.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In this chapter, I illustrate the central role that burial grounds play in the construction of diasporic memory and collective identity by analyzing tombstones located in several Islamic cemeteries in Germany and other Western European countries. In spite of the long-term settlement of Muslims in Europe, Islamic cemeteries are still extremely rare. In Germany, less than 1 percent of the country’s approximately 32,000 public burial grounds have dedicated space for Muslims. Though uncommon, such spaces are suffused with deep cultural meaning. As places where the physical landscape is symbolically inscribed and (re)signified, Islamic burial grounds offer insight into the changing contours of political membership and identity in increasingly multicultural European societies. They are places where ethno-religious minorities assert their long-term presence and in doing so, help normalize symbols of national, religious, and linguistic diversity in contemporary Europe.

In this chapter I argue that expressions of posthumous personhood reflect efforts to confer stability to identities that are more fluid or ambivalent in life. Displays of belonging through epitaphs, images, and grave design offer a symbolically powerful way for ethnic and religious minorities to demonstrate membership in various collectivities. By examining the range of semiotic strategies in the iconization of the dead, this chapter also demonstrates how identity formation extends beyond the limits of biological life.

In Chapter 4, I shift from symbolic representations of posthumous identities to the different meanings attributed to burial decisions and practices. Drawing on interviews with a wide range of individuals with migratory histories, this chapter investigates the reasons families choose to inter their loved ones locally in Germany or to repatriate them to Turkey for burial and analyzes the significance that they ascribe to these choices. It underscores how the seemingly quotidian decisions attending the interment of corpses are structured by broader political and existential questions about the meaning of home and homeland. While local burial laws and the limited number of Islamic cemeteries may impact the practical feasibility of performing Islamic funerary rites, this chapter argues that family ties, ideas about the meaning of national soils, and feelings of social exclusion play a greater role in determining burial outcomes and their social significance than the laws circumscribing Islamic burial practices in Germany.

In developing this argument, this chapter asserts that migrant funerals offer a powerful moment to interrogate political membership and belonging because they represent a critical juncture where members of diasporas and minoritized communities attempt to reconcile multiple allegiances and affinities. As I argued above, ideas about identity and belonging are often underpinned by attachments to places, and the act of burial is a performative practice of place-making par excellence. The location of a grave is of great symbolic importance to those left behind because it provides them with a sense of ownership and connection with a specific place, which in turn can be used to legitimate their claims to that place. For descendants, the decedent offers corporeal proof of belonging. In this reading, burial serves the dual function of legitimating claims for inclusion and strengthening place-based attachments.

While this chapter disentangles them for analytical purposes, narratives about family ties, the significance of soil, and the importance of social position often overlap, complement, and at times contradict each other. Families can act as “push” or “pull” factors when it comes to determining the “proper” location of burial. Likewise, soil is endowed with a multiplicity of meanings. Furthermore, feelings of social exclusion can translate into a stronger desire for repatriation; conversely, burial in Europe can serve as a means by which to assert one’s full membership in the body politic.

Determining the method and location of burial of immigrants is connected to broader identitarian concerns over the boundaries of national and political communities and the place of minorities within them. As Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) member and integration minister for the state of Baden-Württemberg Bilkay Öney argued during deliberations over Islamic burial in Germany, “Integration must cover the whole span of life – from the birth to the death of a person.”Footnote ¹²⁶ In light of changing demographic patterns and an aging Muslim population, questions about the end-of-life practices of German and European Muslims are only likely to multiply.