Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2024: Osman Balkan, for Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe

Winner: Osman Balkan (University of Pennsylvania) for Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Osman Balkan’s Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) presents a fascinating ethnography of the oft-overlooked transnational implications of migrant deaths, and how those living outside of their birth countries—along with their families—navigate complicated, border-crossing end-of-life issues. Based on in-depth fieldwork in atypical sites (such as funeral homes) and with uncommon interlocutors (such as undertakers) in Berlin and Istanbul, Balkan provides a cogent analysis of the meanings associated with transnational deaths and movements of bodies among Germany’s large Turkish diaspora, as well as how these meanings relate to broader questions concerning identity and belonging. This timely work makes for especially compelling reading during our contemporary age of mass migration, and reveals in nuanced fashion how today’s debates concerning immigration also shape what Balkan refers to as the “afterlives” of immigrants, as well as the lived realities of their next of kin (both at home and abroad). The impressive fieldwork on which Dying Abroad is based also inflects the book’s writing, which is deeply reflexive and includes field notes and a discussion of the author’s positionality. It is the committee’s pleasure to present this year’s Charles Taylor Award to this powerful and politically important “ethnography of transnational deathways,” which makes clear contributions to the interpretivist tradition.  

Selection Committee:

Farah Godrej (chair), University of California, Riverside

Kevin Funk, Columbia University

José Ciro Martínez, University of York