Life on the Outside

This study of the Tamil diaspora is one of the first full ethnographic studies of a particularly post-colonial migrant community, and a major contribution to the study of migration, globalization, identity politics and "long distance" nationalism from an anthropological perspective. At its most transparent level, Fuglerud's study traces the history of Tamil migration, from the arrival of the economic migrants of the 1960s to the "asylum seekers" of the mid-1980s onwards, and draws unnerving parallels between the status of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka, as a beleaguered and persecuted minority waging a war of liberation, and as a displaced, marginalized and excluded refugee community, with only tenuous links to the "host country" and a fierce but often contradictory attachment to revolutionary politics and to Tamil customs and rituals. In the process of displacement, Fuglerud argues, particular aspects of Tamil culture marriage --- dowry, chastity and ritual --- acquire a heightened significance: tradition, literally, is consolidated in exile, and inextricably bound up in the violent struggle for independence in Sri Lanka. The contradictions and inconsistencies which characterize the Tamil refugee communities, and the success of revolutionary Tamil nationalism in exile, highlight the transnational nature of identity politics and demonstrate why the fumbling attempts by the state to integrate these diasporic communities are doomed to failure. For the Tamils, displacement is not so much a question of geography as a state of mind.