In the last decades, the transnational dimensions of global migrations gained an increasing theoretical and ethnographic importance. By transnational I am thinking about the social ties that permanently link the "sending" and the "receiving" country. One of the consequences of such interpretative shift has been the acknowledgment that such ties and mobilities - real or imagined - are accompanied by the social and symbolic construction of places of belonging. These processes of place making are revealed in the use of remittances and in specific discourses on identity, to mention just a few examples. Based on a case study about Bangladeshis in Lisbon, carried out both in Portugal and in Bangladesh, between 2003 and 2007, I will show that the management of death and dying reveals the ritual dimensions of such processes of place making in transnational contexts.
Bangladeshis in Lisbon; death; Islam; transnationalism