Posthumous Belongings: Choosing Disposal in Vaynakh Communities in Europe

For this panel, I propose an analyses of burying strategies and choices amoung the Vaynakh (Chechen and Ingush) communities in Europe (France, Belgium and Switzerland). These people mostly moved to Europe after the two Chechen wars (1994-1996 and 1999-2009), many of them, but not all, have received asylum. The link between Vaynakh refugees and their native soil is quite strong in terms of imagined geographies that push these people to act in certain ways and not others. At the moment of death of a member of community, the extended family should decide of the destiny of the dead body. Indeed, there is a possibility to bury relatives in Muslim slots of the European cemeteries, but since the place at the cemetery should be paid every 15 years (in France) and the idea of return is crutial, at least for the first generation of migrants, families prefer to invest into body repatriation. This procedure is quite expensive and slow down the process. However, inspite this delay, which is undiserable for Muslims, the Vaynakh communities often prefer this way of burying. This procedure has many constraints and represents a huge charge for the famillies of the deceased, accompagnied by a whole transnational economy of death abroad and repatriation which shed light on the belonging priorities, the evolution of religious practicies in mobility and the complex range of spatial and symbolical belongings. This paper is based on my empirical research (interviews and observations, monitoring of the digital sphere) in France (Paris, Nice, Strasbourg, Nantes), Belgium (Brussels) and Switzerland (Bern, Fribourg) in 2022-2024, which is still going and funded by the Institut Convergences Migrations in Paris.