Experiences of Tensions in Re-orienting Selves: Tamil Refugees in Northern Norway Seeking Medical Advice.

Research among refugee populations tends to focus on the dramas of war and trauma. This paper instead brings attention to the more mundane everyday aspects of Tamil refugee resettlement in a fishing village along the arctic coast of Norway. Here, many Tamils experience various diffuse aches and pains that the local health personnel find difficult to diagnose and treat. In response to the difficulties, this study aims to investigate health and sickness as embedded in social life and cultural values. Data were generated during two different fieldwork periods: between 1996 and 1999 the author did short field visits in the region and conducted in-depth interviews and participant observation amongst Tamils and local health care workers, including observing health care consultations; and between September 1999 and September 2000 intensive fieldwork was undertaken amongst Tamil refugees in a small fishing village. A sample of two case studies illustrates Tamils' experience of being misunderstood as individuals and overlooked as social persons. Rather than looking at illness as symptoms of physiological or psychological malfunctions, the article suggests an understanding that allows an active, perceptive body and views the self as an orienting point of 'being in the world'. The Tamils are seen to live in a tension in which the self and the body are forced to re-orient themselves in the new social world. Tamils' illnesses are thus proposed rather to express a challenge and collapse in habituated patterns for constituting meaning and social practices.