Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Tamil refugees and their offspring engage with Tamil ritual objects and imagery in Norway. It addresses the ways in which objects in diaspora can take on new and shifting values and meanings that create new senses of identity, expressing and generating hopes for the future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how Tamil refugees and their offspring engage with Tamil ritual objects and imagery in Norway. While ritual forms and artefacts are commonly seen to represent continuity between the past and the present, this paper addresses the ways in which objects in diaspora can take on new and shifting values and meanings that create new senses of identity, expressing and generating hopes for the future. Based on an ethnographic study among Tamil refugees and their families in Northern Norway and Oslo, the paper also investigates how Tamil individuals and groups struggle to have their voices heard and recognized as legitimate and equal partners in social life, and role played by material culture in this process. Central assumption is that involvement in multi-sensorial rituals and engagement with artefacts help to shape life itself: as a mode of being. Taking a perspective of engagement and embodiment I suggest that objects can become crucial to the transgression of diasporic experiences of stigma and alienation, thus becoming agents of wellbeing and success.