Oivund Fugleruud in ???? where the the title runs thus: ‘ “Working for Sisters” — Tamil Life on the 71st Parallel’
[t is argued fhat there is a continuity in this pattem from the early migration workers in the 1970s ro present•day asylum-seekers. The “imicrohistory” of Tamil migration to one particular village is presented and discussed. It shows an overlap from one type of migration to another.
It is further argued that Tamil migration to Finnmark is in part a result of an adaptive process where managers in the fish industry have found it opportune to make use of the Tamils’ intemal organization as a resource in their own production- For the Tamils themselves, the hard work and the high salaries in the north represent an opportunity to settle debts incumed during flight and to fulfil economic responsibilities toward their families in Sri Lanka. In the article, focus is put in particular on the heavy responsibility of male migrants to build dowries for their sisters at hoome. lt is argued that this responsibility is in part a consequence of structural changes brought about by migration itself.
If you start in Oslo, the capital of Norvay, and go 2,000 kilometers north, about the same distance as from Oslo to Rome, you will come to the small town of Alta. This is the main town in Norway’s north• ernmost administrative district, Finnmark, and the place people go to buy a car or to take a case to court. If you continue by car or bus you will SOON see the last trees pass by. You now have six to twelve hours driving ahead, through the arctic tundra, before you reach one of the many small and isolated fishing communities facing the Barents Sea. This is what Norwegian tourist authorities call the “Land of the midnight sun”, seldom mentioning that four to five months of the year will be completely dark, that supplies are often scarce in winter because storms make transport impossible, or that snow in June is the rule rather than the exception. In this rather inhospitable area, Sri Lankan Tamils have made a place for themselves. Even if’ their numbers are small, seldom more than between fifty and one hundred in one village, statistics will show that in several settlements the Tamil segment represents five to ten per cent of the total population, They are, therefore, important groups to the local communities.
Refugees and migrants
Efforts have been made by many scholars Kuntz (1973) being among the most prominent, to analytically separate refugees from other categories of migrants. One characteristic of refugee migration which is Often claimed is that the “pull” factor is missing.
The case of Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekerst who in the “pre-Bosnian era” comprised one of the largest groups of refugees in Nonvay, presents a challenge to this understanding, Rather than differences between migrant workers and refugees, what we seet I will argue, is a continuity from one type of migration to another. Despite the fact that Norway has had an immigration ban since 1975, present refugee migration cannot be properly understood without taking economic aspects and earlier work migration into consideration.
This view on the importance of economic factors, it must be stressed. does not imply that I wish to challenge the basis of Tamil asylumseekers’ stay in Nonvay or their reasons for claiming refugee status. As migration researchers, we should, however, not let the restrictionist conception of “economic refugees” being in some undefined sense equal to “false refugees” dominate our perspective and structure our questions. What this conception tells us is mainly that a strictly legal understanding of refugee-producing situations is inadequate and unsatisfactory. If we scratch the surface, I think, we may find that economic planning is almost always important for refugees in their exile. Not primarily to fulfil cravings for comfort, but to bring out those in danger and support the ones who stay behind,
Tamil migration to Norway first received attention when asylum-seekers started coming in significant numbers in 1987, The ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka between the majority of mainly Buddhist Sinhalese and the minority of mainly Hindu Tamils had by then continued escalating since the July” in 1983 when more than 2,000 Tamils were killed by Sinhalese mobs, This escalation reached a climax with the Sri Lankan army’s attack on Jaffna, the main city within the Tamil regiont during the winter 1986/87. Equally important for refugee migration, however, was probably the ugly story of inter-Tamil rivalry, ending with the Liberation Tigers ofTamil Eelam (LTVE) literally obliterating rival Tamil groups by the end of 1986. Many of the asylum-seekers reaching Norway in 1987 and 1988 in fact had connections to these groups and were youngsters who had been chased out by LITE.
There is, in other words, no need to question most asylum-seekers’ bona fide status as war refugees, The civil war in Sri Lanka, which is still going is a typical “dirty war” where, as they say, the safest place to be is in the army. While LITE, the movement which since 1986 has been fighting alone for a separate Tamil state, probably has no more than 10,000 soldiers, there has since the mid-1980s at all times been more than 50 times that number of internally displaced persons as a consequence of the fighting. The official number of killed is 30000* probably more than 80 per cent of them have been civilians, My point here is only that the war and violencet brutality and murders is not the full story. Running parallel to this is another story, a story of Norwegian-Tamil connections, of family networks, and of refugees’ concern forSources of migration
In his book “Fluid Signs”, Valentine Daniel (1984) has observed the importance Of’ the presence of relatives or village-people for Tamil migrants in choosing a destination. This is important not only to obtain assistance in times of difficulty, but to establish the “compatibil• ity” of the destination with one’s own existence. To see why so many of the recent asylum-seekers have found their way to the northernmost part of Norway, we must go back in time and locate the precise origin of the Tamil-Nonvegian nexus. In an interview, one of the first Tamil immigrants to Norway, I will call him Mr T., told me the story of his background and how (he came to settle in the north. Because Mr T.’s story incorporates the founding story ot Tamil migration to Norway and illustrates the early history of Tamil settlement north of the Arctic Circle. it is worth recounting in brief:
MrT, was born in Aralil Jaffna peninsula, in 1944, Significantly, he belonged at school to the last class to receive the “English Medium” education before the language of teachinß was changed to Sinhala as a result of the implementation or the “Sinhala Only” policy in 1956. He can remember how his teachers in the 92 Øivimd Fuglemd
mid-1950s told the pupils the “Sinhala Only” policy meant they would have to prepare for a difficult time as members of the Tamil community. Mr T. graduated from the tenth grade in 1962 and was in need of employment’ The time when young educated Tamils could expect automatically to find a job in the public sector was now over, and some members of the professional class had already started to emigrate, While in fact obtaining a minor government job after some time, he felt very strongly, he says, that he as a Tamil had no future in Sri Lanka. When he met Hvo Norwegians visiting Sri Lanka as part of planning an NGO-financed fishery project on the island of Karainagar he seized the opportunity. More or less on impulse, he asked for a job on the projects and was told he was welcome any time at Karainagar,
The fishery project in question was the Cey-Nor project, started by the Norwegian NGO Forutl The initiator ot this project, who is now dead, belongs to our story here. Mr R, had come to Norway as early as the late 1950s and is generally recognized to be the first Tamil ever to have reached Nonvegian shores. According to Mr T., Mr R. as a young man ended up in Edinburgh studying fishery management after traveling by motorbike overland from India. Here, while holding a summer job in a hotel, he met two Norwegian ladies on holiday who told him if he wanted to learn about fishery he would have to come to Nonvay. The two ladies prepared everything for Mr R.is stay, and some time later he left for the Norwegian town of Stavanger where he first settled.
The Cey-Nor proiect itself was initiated after Mr R. was inter. viewed by a journalist working in a local newspaper. Telling the journalist his motivation for studying fishery in Norway was to go back and develop the fishing indust1Y in Jaffna, the journalist brought him to Forut, the assistance organization of the Nonvegian temperance society€ Here Mr R€ managed to convince the administration to support his idea of a fishery project in the Jaffna area-
Now employed to plan the project, Mr R. and the Norwegian journalist both were in Karainagar when Mr T. arrived, The project itself was, however, not yet started, and it turned out there was in fact no job for Mr T. Instead he was assisted by the forrner journalist in writing letters asking to be accepted as a student the field of fisheries, In Nonvay his letter ended up in the office of Findus, the largest fish factory operating in the country, They wrote him backs saying there was no school but if he wanted a job he should come to Innby, a northern town of about 4,000 inhabitants.
In 1971, Mr T. left Sri Lanka on a plane headed for Switzerland. From there, he hitchhiked through Central Europe to Denmark. His recounting of this trip is characterized by stories of the help and support he received from people he accidentally met on the road, For examplet he travelled to the northern tip Denmark in order to take the ferry to Non,vay only to find that it was too late in the fall. Com letely brokei he was housed, fed and given ticket-money for t e long detour through Sweden by a Danish family. On the coastal liner which he entered in Norway* still without a penny, he met a rowdy bunch of homebound fisherme.n with their pockets full of money. Despite their foul manners, they took care of him, took him ashore to drink beer, and when they finally stumbled off the boatt one of them stuffed one thousand Nonvegian kroner in his pockett a considerable amount of money in those days.
What is most apparent in this part of Mr T.’s story is of course the change in the context of migration to Europe from the early 1970s till today. To imagine a Sri Lankan citizen being able to hitchhike from Switzerland to Nonvay, with the many border crossings such a project involves, would today be impossible. We should note* however, that in a sense Mr T.’s early migration was indeed a flight. In his own understanding, the implementation of the ‘”Sinhala Only” policy and the difficulty of finding work was a sign o! impending doom. This is understandable if we take into consideration the career expectations within the Tamil middle class resulting from their position under the farmer British administration. Due to long-standing traditions ofmissionary activity in Jaffna, the Tamil population had a high rate of literacy and fluency in English This made them popular as civil servants both in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) itself and in other parts of the British Empire. The fact that educated Tamils could expect to find a job in the public sector was indeed one major reason for the growing Sinhalese chauvinism after independence in 1948.
For Tamil migration to Nonvay there are byo institutions whose importance cannot be exaggerated. One is the Cey-Nor project which figures in MrT,’s story. This project, which became so successful that finally it was expropriated by the Sri Lankan government. must over the years have employed several thousand people in boat-building, production of fishnets, fishing, conservation and management. With its Norwegian leadership it was a highly effective channel for communicating an image of the rich North to the local population in Jaffna. The other institution of importance is the so-called Folkehoyskole (“folk high schools”). The Folkehoyskole are a number of one-year private high schools, mainly teaching humanities and art, basing their existence on young people who have not decided where to go in life and who need a year to think. Far some reason, which probably has to do with the missionary urge to educate the natives, admission to these schools for Third-world students was left as a “loophole” in the immigration regulations after the implementation of the immigration ban. Even though potential students had to present an economic guarantee for living costs, many young Tamils who would otherwise have tried to go as asylum-seekers found it more safe and, in fact, less costly to raise this guarantee than to pay an agent to arrange “refugee travel”. Once in Norway, the Folkehoyskole students had the possibility under immigration regulations of being admitted into the regular school system and remaining on a temporary visa until their education was completed. In principle, the conditions for holding on to such temporary visas were very strict in terms of school results and educational progression. After 1983, however, Tamils soon found that if they dropped out of schooli which many of them did, immigration authorities still found it difficult to force them back to Sri Lanka due to the civil war situation.
A small-town example
The possibility of obtaining visas as Folkehoysko!e students existed until 1989 when the same so-called “criteria of possible return” started to be applied for student visas as for ordinary Third World visitors’ visas, This meant that from now on a student visa would not be granted unless there was reason to believe the applicant could and would go back after finished education, something which excluded the young Tamils. During the period it worked, however, the arrangement was very important for Tamil migration. Let me return ta Mr T, and show through the detailed story of migration to the small town of Innby how one kind of migration succeeds another:
Shortly after MrT. came to Innby, one other Tamilt Mr M. from Kankesanthurai, arrived. Mr M. had been a sailor on a Nonvegian ship, and when he felt like settling down to build a family he applied to Findus for a job and was sent to the fish-factory in Innby. These two individuals are the founding fathers of the Tamil settlement in Innby.
Having started the job and found a place to live. Mr M. brought his wife from Sri Lanka. She within a short time secured a job and a working permit for one of her sisters, who was already engaged to Mr N. After arrival this sister, therefore, in turn obtained a job and working permit for her future husband, who arrived shortly- Mr N, is today the Ta.mil with the longest period of residence in towm Mr MY’s wife and her sister also obtained a job and working permit for one Of their brothers and for the husband of a third sister in the family.
Mr T., on his side, first married and then invited two of his sis. ters to come and work in the factory. This is how far it got before the immigration ban was implemented in 1975.
From now on, securing a job would no longer help a foreigner obtain a working permit. The Folkehoyskole, therefore, became important to bring in new family members. These, still according to Mr Tv, would spend one year at school and pick up the essentials of language before starting work in the local fish factory. In 1976, Mr T, brought a third sister to Nonvay this way, Mr M. and his wife obtained a school visa the same year for the wife’s second sister, whose husband was alreadv in Nonvay„ In general, however, the candidates for Folkehoyskoje had to be in the 18-25 age range, and we see at this point a change in generation of the immigrants. Durin 1977* Mr T. obtained school visas for three cousin-children an for one child of the brother ot his wife. Mr M.’s side did the same for one nephew of Mr N. and for one nephew of the husband of Mr M.’s other sister. In addition, two Tamil youths unrelated to the two families found their way to the local fish-factory through the school-system, In the next few years, a period of break-up followed for the little Tamil community- Mr T. himself was finally admitted to advanced education in fishery management and left with his family to settle in another northern town. Two Of his sisters married and moved south with their husbands. Mr M. and his wife left for Oslo and a few years later disappeared from the countlYr In the late 1970s, Nt.’s sister, married to Mr N., died. Two of Mr Tv’s cousin-children left after a few years for education in the south. Mr N.’s nephew illegally migrated to Canada in the early 1980s.
Despite all this* however* there is a continuity until today. From 1983 on. when refugee migration started to gain strength, we see a process of rebuilding the community around the remaining members of the families- As already mentionedt Mr N. stayed and soon married again. In 1985, a younger brother of his new wife moved in with them after finishing the Folkehoyskole. Also, the brother of Mr Mts wife married* and two of his wife’s nephews settled in Innby after having their asylum applicalions accepted. On Mr T,’s side, one more nephew and one niece of his wife joined her brother*s child after having been accepted as asylum-seekers. Mr Teis cousin-child married a girl who arrived as an asylum-seeker after her application for a marriage visa was rejected. Later two of her cousins arrived as asylum-seekers and settled.
This story illustrates, I think, that the earlier Tamil migrant workers have been important for the accommodation of later asylum-seekers and have helped establish a pattern of residence in the northernmost part of Norway which is unique compared to other refugee groups. The situation in Innby is really not special for a fishing community in Finnmark, except for the fact that it is a village with one of the longest histories of Tamil migration. Surprisingly often we find that entrepreneuring individuals, most of them with a work histaty from the Cey.Nor project, have managed to incorporate a number of close and not so close relations into the local work-force. The work in the fish industry is not necessarily a lifetime career. As shown by the history of migration to Innby, it has served mainly as a stepping-stone into a “regular” exile situation. As will be discussed below, this entails in particular the possibility of paying debts and fulfilling economic responsibilities towards family members at home.
Hard work and flexibility
The case of Tamil settlement in Finnmark is interesting because it is the story of how a group of immigrants which comprises no more than 5,000 individuals in Nonvay as a whole, and is rather marginal within a national context, may establish a strong local standing through its social characteristics and the incentives which cultural im• peratives provide. Without trying to prove this statistically, it is my impression from interöe.wing workers and managers within the fish industry that Tamil refugees since the mid-1980s have replaced many of the Norwegian seasonal workers and the Finnish short-term migrants who until this point had been important to the industry There is reason to believe that this is mainly due to their internal organization and to their flexibility as workers. The fish industry is very sensitive to changes in the supply of fish for processing, something which makes organizing the labour force a challenge. If the supply of fish is goods the management needs people who can work day and night and who will perform jobs where they are most needed If the sea turns “black, as they say, and the supply is suddenly turned off, the need is there to reduce costs quickly by dismissing personnel.
Seen from the management’s point of view, the Tamil workers are ideally suited to this situation, a fact which is openly admitted. By most managers Tamils are praised for working hard. One factory official pointed out to me that in 1987 the normal amount of fish cut by a Norwegian in a day’s work would be between 300 and 400 kilo, Most Tamils, on the other hand, will cut close to 1,000 kilo in a normal day and afterwards ask to work overtime. In his view, the Tamil workers have helped to raise not only the level of expected output, but through the money they make the work is done on piece-work contracts – also the social reputation of factory work as such. Particularly, the flexi%ility is enhanced though the decreasing importance of gender roles within production, Being originally without experience in fish-factory work, the Tamils lack prejudices found among Norwegian and Finnish workers, Traditionally, the cutting and handling of the fish has been regarded as ‘Women’s work”. Men would work at the factories, but only as overseers, or, outside, in loading, transport etc. Even in times of acute labour shortage it would be difficult to shift the workers around to finish cutting for a special delivery. Today this is changing. Tamils have shown that a good cutter may have monthly earnings of between 25,000 and 30,000 Nonvegian kroner or benveen 4,000 and US dollarst a Sum of money most unskilled workers in Nonevay will find attractive,
Most important, perhaps9 the Tamils keep discipline within their ranks and seldom complain about the treatment offered them. Making use of the Tamils’ internal organization as a resource in their own production, there is a tendency for factory managements only to employ Tamil workers related to people who are already employed. In this way, any problem created by a worker will backfire on one of his own relatives.
Debts and dowry
The story of Tamil settlement in the north is interesting, For the Tamils themselves it is, however, not necessarily a happy stat-yr Many young people’s careers in the fish industty are at the expense of further education and fuller participation in Norwegian society. If you invite Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, into your house, Saraswati, the goddess of learning and wisdomi will leave, the Tamils say. Among refugee counsellors it is a common complaint that motivating Tamils for language and vocational courses is difficult. All they want to do is make money. Also, life in the north is hard, Many complain that the cold and darkness in winter bring depressions. In summer the bright light in the nighttime makes sleep difficult. The climatic conditions are perceived to be “unnatural”. To those who remain in factory work for too long, the constant standing up while cutting fish and the repetitious nature of the work operations tend to cause physical problems. The hea»r reliance on a few countrymen means little variation in social life. The interaction with Norwegians is mostly limited to working situations. For being such a large group in a foreign environment, the Tamils’ most conspicuous characteristic in these northern communities is their lack of visibility. Their use of public space is limited and mainly connected to organized events. The main reason for this is not ethnic tension, even though squabbles over scarce resources like jobs, housesi and local girls have occurred, The reason is that the Tamils work. eat, sleept and work. During weekends they sGsit each other and start a new week. One Nonvegian lady, in a village where the Tamil settlement is of rather recent origin, expressed her impression like this:
“When they came in 1988 they laughed and played almost naked in the snow. We all found it amusing. Then they disappeared into the factories and we have never seen them again.”
What we must ask; I think, is what their motivation is for taking upon themselves this burden of hard labour.
The first years’ earnings from factory work seem to go mainly in two directions. For the asylum-seekers the first priority is to repay the loans and credits which have gone into paying transport to No:vay. A guided “package tour” from Sri Lanka with forged visas and supervised border crossings easily runs into 60,000 to 80,000 Norwegian kroner (10,000 to 12.000 US dollars), and financing normally involves both assistance from the extended family and borrowings from inofficial credit institutions. Some of these “‘institutions” have representatives in Norway who will see to it that the money is repaid. A so• ciologically more interesting obligation, however, is the importance attributed to assisting parents in building dowries for their sisters. While dowty practices have now been banned by the I..IITE in Jaffna, we may observe dowries inflating within the exile community. An often-heard complaint of male refugees in the north is that dowries are reaching a level where it has become difficult to establish families. Through dowry the phenomenon of migration connects to the vent core of Tamil culture. and I will end this article by taking a closer look at what is going on.
Transfer of property
Dowry regulations and rules for transfer of property in general have shown a remarkable degree of continuity in What we can see from old colonial records is that traditionally three categories of tamily property have been recognized* all of which have been transferred from generation to generation according to strict rules. The category of chidenam is what in English will normally be termed “downy”, This is hereditary property brought by the wife into the mar. riage, and which is again transferred to her daughters at their marriage. The category of mudisam is property brought by the husband into the marriaget and which will be inherited by his sons at their parents’ death. The last category, thednthetam, constitutes what may be called *acquired property”, property which has not been transferred but has been acquired by the parents during their lifetime. In the days before wage labour became widespread, rhediarhetam was mainly interest on the two categories considered as capital. Acquired property was to be divided after the death of the parents, first in two like parts for brothers and sisters as groups, then each part split up for the individual sons and daughters.
As one can see, the categorization of property in chidenam and mudisam results in what S. J. Tambiah (1973) has called sex-determined bifurcating devolution”, where the husband’s property invariably remains with male heirs and the wife’s with the female heirs. In other words, dowry was to be regarded as a sort of pre-mortem inheritance given at the time of marriage with a clear understanding that the daughter had no further rights in her father’s inherited property„ The sons, on the other hand, had no claims in the family estate as long as their parents were alive. On the contrary, sons were traditionally obligated to bring inta their parents’ estate all earnings until their parents died, even after they married and established separate households. They would also be held accountable for debts contracted by their parents after their parents’ death – even if nothing was left as inheritance.
Etymologically, the Tamil term chidenam is derived from the Sanskrit concept of iistridhanam% meaning “female property”. In fact, Sri Lanka Tamil law in a regional context gives exceptionally strong rights to women. The codex leaves no doubt that women may receive as dowry all kinds of movable as well as immovable property. Michael Banks, during his fieldwork in the Jaffna peninsula in the mid-1950s (1957)i noted that pieces of landj normally with a house included* constituted the “core” of dowry among members of the Vellala caste that he studied (Banks: 1957, p, 182). This is far fram the practice on the Hindu mainland where normally only movable valuables are given as downs’. The purpose of this pre-mortem inheritance* however, was not to establish any kind of equality between sons and daughters. Rather, given Jaffna’s basic propensity for hypergamy, of which more will be said later, it wast one, a means finding a husband with whom to establish, and, two, an important ingredient in the Jaffna status game. In the words of the old law codex, it is not for the girls but for the property that most of the men marry”. It is therefore no notion in the Code that all daughters should get identical dowries; the size of the property depends on the market value of the husband,
The most important change in the rules of property transfer before the I-TTE’s present ban in fact took place under the Portuguese in the seventeenth century. This change was the collapse of strictly sext divided property as a legally binding principle, something which plied that dowry could now be given to daughters also from the father’s mudisam or from the parents’ thediathetam. It is important to observe, howevert that this alteration did not change the relatively strong position of women with respect to property rights- Even if not distinguished in origin, the dowry has always been considered the legal property of the woman. and as one of my informants put it, for the husband to take control over this property has until recently been considered a shameful action..
In fact, there is every reason to believe that the abolition of sex-divided property resulted in a relatively larger part of the parental estate going into chidenamt marrying of the daughters being a cultural imperative and something which cannot wait like inheritance. Such a policy, moreover, has in Jaffna been likely to win acceptance from sons, because of the very important institutionalized restrictions on brothers marrying before their sisters unless there is an unreasonable age-gap between them. Judging by present evidence there is reason to believe that men are more willing to sacrifice part of their inheritance in order to marry off their sisters and thus be able to establish families on their ownv
“Working for my sisters …’t
The Tamil settlements in the north are predominantly malet as is Tamil migration to Notway as a whole, In 1987, for example, the year with the largest number of asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka arriving in Nonvay so far, 1,241 Tamils came. Of these only 154 were women. The worry that these male refugees feel seems, by their ovn descriptions, to reflect a situation where brothers have been delegated moral and economic responsibility for thew sisters’ marriages by their parents. In the prevailing war situation it is very often a chosen son who pre mortem inherits the total realizable capital of the family against taking further responsibility upon himself. This implies, inter aliai that he must procure his sisters’ dowries before establishing a family on his own. That the potential husbands are themselves most often already in the West makes this task no less demanding, quite the contrary. These men have themselves sisters at home to be married to men in the West who have sisters at home Instead of one dowty helping to finance another, floating as capital within the system of family-networks, the cost of “illegal” transport now siphons this capital off to greedy agents.
The pattern of marriage between women in Sri Lanka and men in exile must be seen against the background of the Jaffna Tamils’ practice of hypergamous marriages, the tradition Or *’rule” that women should many someone of higher status than themselves. Jaffna being a part of the Hindu cultural region, traditionally what was important in settling marriage agreements was the balancing of women’s dowries against husbands’ sub-caste status, A development where “modern” criteria for ranking, like education, profession. and income, undermine the importance of caste status has been accentuated by the war and the refugee migration. Considerations of caste are in no way absent in contracting marriages, but the importance of nuances in descent and previous marriages within the families is less than it used to be. Given an acceptable origin, what is now most important in de. ciding rank vatue is a secure visa or, even better* an alternative citizenship in a western country These two factors, the transfer Of property within the same generation instead of between generations, and the practice of hypergamy tend to create spirals of inflation in the ex. change system where material wealth and social status are converted.
Problems related to marriage and family represent a tremendous warry to most Tamil men in exile. The capital lost through flight must be regained, and the responsifflity for their original families must be fulfilled before they can establish on their own. The sums of money involved will normally be anything between 10,000 and 100,000 US dol. lars in one dowry, and for a migrant with two or three sisters the task is formidable in Europe’s present labour market* even if aiming only at the lower end of the scale. Therefore, while marriage in the West represents the possibility of a future without war far the daughters, the dowry institution at the same time often means that the male migrant’s marriage and family life will be delayed or even cancelled. That many Tamil refugees experience the Scandinavian, bureaucratic system for receiving refugees as close to unbearable with its language programs, work-training courses, and limited possibilities for making money (Steen: 1992) is therefore not surprising. The young men do not have that many years before they are not so young any more, After 35 the prospects of establishing a family decreases rapidly, even far a man,
Acknowledgement: The research on which this article is based has been financed by the Norwegian Research Council.
References
Banks, Michael: 1957, The Social Organization of the Jaffna Tamils of North Ceylon, with Special Reference to their Kinship, Marriage, and Inheritance. Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge University (unpublished .
Daniel, Valentine E.: 984, Fluid Signs: Being a person the Tamil Way. Berkeley (University of California Press).
Kuntz, E.F.: 1973, The Refugee in Flight: Kinetic Models and Forms of Displacement, in: International Migration, Vol. VII, No. 2.
Steen, Ann-Belinda: 1992, Varieties of Refugee Experience: Studying Sri Lankan Tamils, in: Denmark and England. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Copenhagen (unpublished).
Tambiah, S.J,: 1973, Dowry and Bridewealth and the Property Rights of Women in South Asia, in: Goody, Jack/rambiah, S.S., Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge University Press).
Acknowledgement: The research on which this article is based has been financed by the Norwegian Research Council.
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A NOTE from the WEB on Oivind Fuglerud
Øivind Fuglerud is professor of social anthropology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His research interests include Diaspora formations, politics of cultural representation and aesthetics. He has published a number of works on the conflict in Sri Lanka and its consequences, including Life on the Outside – the Tamil Diaspora and Long-Distance Nationalism (Pluto Press 1999).
ALSO NOTE = Ich arbeite für meine Schwestem Zum Leben der Tamilen am 71 Breitengrad
D! hat.