Social memory, public memory, and marginality: the case of the “death in migration”

Memory is a source of ‘immunization’ for individuals (psycho-cognitive memory and biological immune system) and for communities (De Martino). We can consider culture as the memory of society. Particularly, the cultural memory of disasters plays a fundamental role. Ideally, it should help to reduce the vulnerability of societies to the risks of recurrence of natural/technological/social catastrophic events. However, memory is not an exact process, but a selective and reconstructive one (Bartlett). Furthermore, the memory of society is multiple and continuously exposed to the risk of distortions, interpretations, and manipulations. Social memory (Halbwachs) is the broader sphere of communicability that delimits the arena in which the different collective memories (of groups) compete for the relevance and plausibility of their own discourses. It will correspond, with good approximation, to the term “public memory”. In particular, the media and journalism play a very important function, as public memory is a memory of the public sphere (Habermas) and, somehow, the public sphere is itself memory (Jedlowski). This presentation aims to compare two social memories of a single catastrophic event in which a marginal social category was involved: migrants illegally crossing the Mediterranean Sea. The research focus concerns a watershed event of the recent migratory phenomenon: the Lampedusa shipwreck that took place on the 3rdOctober 2013. The goal is to show how collective and public memory contrast each other. Two opposite cultural and communicative processes will be analysed: The first one (dematerializing) involves actors and social agencies in the concealing and rarefaction of the material aspects connected to death. The second (materialising) is based on the recognition of death in ‘corporeal’ terms. These processes mobilise physical and cognitive resources and are deployed on both a symbolic and real level.