Abstract

This article explores the motivations for how and why national Tamil identity becomes so desirable for politically active Tamil parents in Norway. What leads them to socialize their children into an embodied understanding of what it means to be Tamil – closely related to the Tamil Tiger discourse and practice? The article discusses how private practices of relatedness become technologies of nationhood, and vice versa. I argue that in their transnational lives, the children’s Tamil identity offers a way for the politically active parents to ease nostalgia for their own childhoods and a way to create a meaningful life for themselves and their children in a transnational context.

Author biographies

STINE BRULAND is a research assistant at the Department of Ethnography at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. From August 2011 she will be a PhD fellow at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Reference of the article: Stine Bruland, “Nationalism as meaningful life projects: identity construction among politically active Tamil families in Norway”, in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Volume 35, Issue 12, 2012

source: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1080/01419870.2011.599851#tabModule