DEATH MOBILITIES: FUNERALS, TRANSLOCAL FAMILIES AND URBAN LIFE IN SOUTH SUDAN AND SUDAN

Death is pervasive and over the past half decade it has become a common part of everyday life for most South Sudanese family networks. Life-long and intergenerational experiences with violence, coercion and mobility shape how
South Sudanese families perceive death and manage funerals. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, this project proposes to combine archival research in the Sudan Archive at Durham University and the Sudan and South Sudan National Archives with oral history and multi-sited ethnographic research to study how funerary and mortuary practices and meanings have changed since the mid-twentieth century when new patterns of conflict and mobility began to emerge, and compare this to how present-day urban-based, mobile and multi-lingual and multiethnic South Sudanese families manage funerals and postfunerary events across the two urban contexts of Juba in South Sudan and Khartoum in Sudan.
Repatriation, exhumation and reburial are novel mortuary techniques used in the present-day context of displacement and rapid urbanisation and mobile dead bodies help spatially separated family networks maintain kinship connections
across multiple geographical locations and lived realities. South Sudanese people have been engaging in coercive and more voluntary forms of migration since the nineteenth century slave trade; as part of late-nineteenth and twentieth century colonial military and health campaigns and labour migration; and during post-independence civil wars. This study explores how present-day mechanisms for managing death draw on historical evolutions of mortuary and funerary practices in communities dealing with violent death, death 'out of place,' and anonymous death.