256 research outputs found
Hosting the Dead: Forensics, Ritual and the Memorialization of Migrant Human Remains in Italy
No full textIn this chapter we consider the afterlife of the remains of unidentified migrants who have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Albania and North Africa to Italy. Drawing on insights from long-term, multi-sited field research, we outline paths taken by human remains and consider their multiple agencies and distributed personhood through the relational modalities with which they are symbolically and materially engaged at different scales of significance. The rising number of migrant deaths related to international crossings worldwide, especially in the Mediterranean, has stimulated a large body of scholarship, which generally relies upon a hermeneutics of secular transitional justice and fraternal transnationalism. We explore an alternative approach by focusing on the material and ritual afterlife of unidentified human remains at sea, examining the effects they have on their hosting environment. The treatment of dead strangers (across the double threshold constituted by the passage from life to death on the one hand and the rupture of exile on the other) raises new questions for the anthropology of death. We offer an interpretation of both ad hoc and organized recovery operations and mortuary practices, including forensic identification procedures, and collective and single burials of dead migrants, as acts of hospitality. Hosting the dead operates at different scales: it takes the politically charged form of memorialization at the levels of the state and the local community; however, while remembrance practices for dead strangers emphasize the latter’s status as a collective category, forensic technologies of remembrance are directed toward the reconstruction of (in)dividual personhood. These ritual and technological processes of memorialization and re-attachment together awaken ghosts of Italian fascism and colonialism
Introduction: Mediterranean Migrant Hospitalities
No full textThis book takes some of the insights of the anthropology of hospitality to illuminate ethnographic accounts of migrant reception in various parts of the Mediterranean. Anthropology has revisited the concept of hospitality in recent years, drawing on the insights of ethnographers of the Mediterranean, who ground the idea and practice of hospitality in concrete ethnographic settings and challenge the ways in which the casual usage of Derridean or Kantian notions of hospitality can blur the boundaries between social scales and between metaphor and practice. Host-guest relations are multiplied through pregnancy and childbirth, and new forms emerge with the need to offer mortuary practices for dead strangers. The volume does not attempt to define a distinctive Mediterranean hospitality, but explores the potential of the concept of hospitality to illuminate the spatial and scalar dimensions of morality and politics in Mediterranean migrant reception
Matrix removal and reaction cell approaches for the determination of trace elements in seawater by ICP-MS
No full textIsotopic analysis of Antarctic snow by quadrupole inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry using a total-consumption sample introduction system
No full textNurturing the Other: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia.
No full textCombining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders such as American missionaries through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana. The author examines and contrasts Amerindian and non-Amerindian views on this process of social transformation through the lens of the body, notions of peacefulness and kinship, as well as native warfare and shamanism. The book addresses questions of change and continuity, and the little explored links between first contacts, capture and native conversion to Christianity in contemporary indigenous Amazonia
Effect of operating conditions on excitation temperature and electron number density in axially-viewed ICP-OES with introduction of vapors or aersols
No full textThe combined effect of the power and the carrier gas flow rate on excitation temperature, electron number density, ionic-to-atomic line intensity ratios and departure from local thermal equilibrium has been studied in an axially-viewed plasma with introduction of different amounts of wet aerosols, partially desolvated aerosols or dry vapours, according to empirical modelling and experimental design methods. Under robust conditions (1500 W and a carrier gas flow rate of 0.7–0.85 L/min), an increase in water loading led to an improvement in the plasma excitation properties, while desolvation caused degradation. In contrast, under non-robust conditions, the
plasma was no longer able to tolerate an increase in water loading and desolvation resulted in an improvement in the plasma characteristics. The hydrogen formed during the hydride generation process significantly improved the plasma excitation properties, regardless of the conditions. In this instance, the plasma characteristics were primarily affected by the reductant concentration, which determined the amount of hydrogen generated, and by the carrier gas flow rate, which controlled its residence time within the plasma. In contrast, there was no relevant change in the plasma excitation conditions due to systematic variation of HCl concentration from 0.1 to 6 M
Expanding the capabilities of a single-quadrupole ICP-MS for lead and strontium isotopic analysis of polar samples
No full textEffect of operating conditions on excitation temperature and electron number density in axially-viewed ICP-OES with introduction of vapors or aerosols
No full textLead isotopic analysis of Antarctic snow by quadrupole ICP-MS using a total-consumption sample introduction system
No full textLead isotopic ratios in the Arctic environment
No full textPublished data of lead isotopic ratios in the Arctic environment have been gathered in a dataset file (available as supplementary material) and reviewed to summarise the main information obtained for the different environmental compartments (atmosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere). The analytical procedures applied to achieve the precise measurement of this important environmental proxy are also illustrated and discussed. Finally, a general overview of the sources of atmospheric lead across the Arctic is provided
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