Gone with the Wind? : Immigrant Women and Transnational Everyday Life in Finland

Increased mass migration, as a result of economic hardship, natural disasters and wars, forces many people to arrive on the shores of cultures very different from those they left. How do they manage the legacy of the past and the challenges of their new everyday life? This is a study of immigrant women living in transnational families that act and communicate across national borders on a near-daily basis. The research was carried out amongst immigrant women who were currently living in Finland. The research asks how transnational everyday life is constructed. As everyday life, due to its mundane nature, is difficult to operationalise for research purposes, mixed data collection methods were needed to capture the passing moments that easily become invisible. Thus, the data were obtained from photographic diaries (459 photographs) taken by the research participants themselves. Additionally, stimulated recall discussions, structured questionnaires and participant observation notes were used to complement the photographic data. A tool for analysing the activities devealed in the data was created on the assumption that a family is an active unit that accommodates the current situation in which it is embedded. Everyday life activities were analysed emphasizing social, modal and spatial dimensions. Important daily moments were placed on a continuum: for me , for immediate others and with immediate others . They portrayed everyday routines and exceptions to it. The data matrix was developed as part of this study. The spatial dimensions formed seven units of activity settings: space for friendship, food, resting, childhood, caring, space to learn and an orderly space. Attention was also paid to the accommodative nature of activities; how women maintain traditions and adapt to Finnish life or re-create new activity patterns. Women s narrations revealed the importance of everyday life. The transnational chain of women across generations and countries, comprised of the daughters, mothers and grandmothers was important. The women showed the need for information technology in their transnational lives. They had an active relationship to religion; the denial or importance of it was obvious. Also arranging one s life in Finnish society was central to their narrations. The analysis exposed everyday activities, showed the importance of social networks and the uniqueness of each woman and family. It revealed everyday life in a structured way. The method of analysis that evolved in this study together with the research findings are of potential use to professionals, allowing the targeting of interventions to improve the everyday lives of immigrants.

The Culture of Women's Housework : A Case Study of Bihar, India

This study examines gendered housework in India, particularly in Bihar. The perspective adopted in the study was in part derived from the data but also from sociological literature published both in Western countries and in India. The primary attention is therefore paid to modern and traditional aspects in housework. The aim is not to compare Indian practices to those of Western societies, but rather to use Western studies as a fruitful reference point. In that light, Indian housework practices appear to be traditional. Consequently, traditions are given a more significant role than is usually the case in studies on gendered housework, particularly in Western countries. The study approaches the topic mainly from the socio-cultural perspective; this provides the best means to understand the persistence of traditional habits in India. To get a wide enough picture of the division of labour, three methods were applied in the study: detailed time-use data, questionnaire and theme interviews. The data were collected in 1988 in two districts of Bihar, one rural and the other urban. The different data complement each other well but also bring to light contradictory findings: on a general level Biharian people express surprisingly modern views on gender equality but when talking in more detail (theme interviews) the interviewees told about how traditional housework practices still were in 1988. In the analysis of the data set four principal themes are discussed. Responsibility is the concept by which the study aims at understanding the logic of the argumentation on which the persistence of traditional housework practices is grounded. Contrary to the Western style, Biharian respondents appealed not to the principle of choice but to their responsibility to do what has to be done. The power of tradition, the early socialization of children to the traditional division of labour and the elusive nature of modernity are all discussed separately. In addition to the principle of responsibility, housework was also seen as an expression of affection. This was connected to housework in general but also to traditional practices. The purity principle was the third element that made Biharian interviewees favour housework in general, but as in the case of affection it too was interwoven with traditional practices. It seems to be so that if housework is in general preferred, this leads to preferring the traditional division of labour, too. The same came out when examining economic imperatives. However, the arguments concerning them proved to be rational. In analysing them it became clear that the significance of traditions is also much dependent on the economics: as far as the average income in India is very low, the prevalence of traditional practices in housework will continue. However, to make this work, cultural arguments are required: their role is to mediate more smoothly the iron rules of the economy. Key words: family, gendered housework, division of labour, responsibility, family togetherness, emotion, economy of housework, modernity, traditionality

Women and Marital Breakdown in South India : Reconstructing Homes, Bonds and Persons

Women and Marital Breakdown in South India: Reconstructing Homes, Bonds and Persons is an ethnographic analysis of the situation of divorced and separated women and their families in the South Indian city of Bangalore. The study is based on 16 months of anthropological fieldwork, i.e., participant observation and life history interviews among 50 divorced and separated women from different socio-religious backgrounds in their homes, in the women s organisations and in the Family Court. The study follows the divorced and separated women from their natal homes to their affinal homes through homelessness and legal battles to their reconstructed natal, affinal or single homes in order to find out what it means to be a person within hierarchical gender and kinship relations in South India. Marital breakdown impacts on kin relations and discloses the existing gender relations and power structure through its consequences. It makes the transformability of relational personhood as well as the transformability of relational society and culture visible. Although the study reveals the painful history of women s ill-treatment in marriage, family and kinship systems, it also demonstrates the women s rejection of the domination; and shows their ability to re-negotiate and promote changes not only to their own positions but to the whole hierarchical system as well. The study explores the divorced and separated women s manifold dilemmas, complicated legal battles, and endless arrangements when they have to struggle with the very practical problems of supporting themselves financially, finding and making a new home for themselves, and re-arranging relationships with their kin and friends. As marital breakdown fundamentally transforms the women s relational field, it forces them to recreate substitutive relations in a flexible way and, simultaneously, to re-construct themselves and their lives without a ready or positive cultural or behavioural template. This process reveals the agency of the divorced and separated women as well as shedding light on issues of gender and the cultural construction of the person in South India. This topical study explores the previously neglected subject of marital breakdown in India and shows the new meaning of kinship in South India.

Choosing the Arranged One, Arranging the Chosen One – Imagining an Indian Modernity: Reconciling Love, Marriage and Family On and Off the Screen

This is a study on the changing practices of kinship in Northern India. The change in kinship arrangements, and particularly in intermarriage processes, is traced by analysing the reception of Hindi popular cinema. Films and their role and meaning in people´s lives in India was the object of my research. Films also provided me with a methodology for approaching my other subject-matters: family, marriage and love. Through my discussion of cultural change, the persistence of family as a core value and locus of identity, and the movie discourses depicting this dialogue, I have looked for a possibility of compromise and reconciliation in an Indian context. As the primary form of Indian public culture, cinema has the ability to take part in discourses about Indian identity and cultural change, and alleviate the conflicts that emerge within these discourses. Hindi popular films do this, I argue, by incorporating different familiar cultural narratives in a resourceful way, thus creating something new out of the old elements. The final word, however, is the one of the spectator. The “new” must come from within the culture. The Indian modernity must be imaginable and distinctively Indian. The social imagination is not a “Wild West” where new ideas enter the void and start living a life of their own. The way the young women in Dehra Dun interpreted family dramas and romantic movies highlights the importance of family and continuity in kinship arrangements. The institution of arranged marriage has changed its appearance and gained new alternative modes such as love cum arranged marriage. It nevertheless remains arranged by the parents. In my thesis I have offered a social description of a cultural reality in which movies act as a built-in part. Movies do not work as a distinct realm, but instead intertwine with the social realities of people as a part of a continuum. The social imagination is rooted in the everyday realities of people, as are the movies, in an ontological and categorical sense. According to my research, the links between imagination and social life were not so much what Arjun Appadurai would call global and deterritorialised, but instead local and conventional.