Asian Refugee Women: Adapting Female Lifestyles

ENThe research on Asian Muslim women's adaption to host society: techniques, changing lifestyles and sociocultural reasons thereof showed the multitude of intersecting identities the interviewed female participants use to change, remake and adapt their everyday practices in order to make their living in hosting Lithuanian society. To be a part of Lithuanian society, Muslim women have to tone down their religious and ethnic ‘markers’, and sometimes even to sacrifice or adjust their usual practices to culturally and traditionally different environment. These women construct their belonging around different sociocultural categories: race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, womanhood, familial role. At the same time, they build transnational belonging through transnational bonds, relating families, relatives, friends and countrymen around the globe. Belonging practices of Asian Muslim women are expressed by dress and headwear as well as behaviour practices led by culturally inherent religious norms. By living in hostile environment, Muslim women have to adapt their lifestyles to new societal norms and they choose between three different strategies depending on situation: expressing their discontent, ‘tattling’; engaging and taking part in the sociocultural life of host society, building a dialogue and communicating with host society or living in the state of temporality/transition and even leaving the host country. These three ways of behaving in new circumstances can be paralleled with Hirschman and Kinnvall & Nesbitt-Larking (that correlate with each other) adjustment models: voice or expression of discontent, closure or essentialism; loyalty, dialogue or engagement and retreatism or exit. Asian Muslim women living in Lithuania tend to choose several of these strategies or gradually switch from one strategy to another according to situation.