AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	80. Memories of own country: maintaining social networks across boundaries
Paper ID	541
Author(s)	Tiilikainen, Marja
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Since the outbreak of civil war in 1991, an estimated number of one million Somalis have scattered around the world as asylum seekers and refugees. War traumas, dispersed families, discrimination faced in resettlement countries, many worries and disappointments are part of social suffering experienced by many Somali migrants. According to my PhD study (2003), Somali women in Finland frequently complained about symptoms such as vague pain, tiredness and ‘stress’, which Finnish doctors could not diagnose and give medication to. Moreover, many women felt their symptoms to have begun after arrival to Finland. Some of these women, and also men, travel back to Somalia to consult religious and other healers, and to receive culturally and religiously appropriate treatment and cure to their illnesses. In particular problems related to witchcraft, evil eye and spirits, but also other chronic diseases motivate Somali migrants to return home. In this presentation, I aim to discuss illness experiences and explanations of Somali migrants from the perspective of home and homelessness. How do Somali migrants remember and construct home/homelessness by illness narratives? In what ways is returning “home” a healing experience? This presentation is based, first, on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Northern Somalia, often referred to as Somaliland in summer 2005 and 2006, total 3.5 months, including observations and interviews of several healers and Somali patients from the diaspora. Second, the paper draws from data gathered as part of my PhD study (2003) in comparative religion and medical anthropology on the everyday life of Somali women in Finland.

Illness Narratives of Somali Migrants: Home and Healing in Transnational Context