ABSTRACT
While some anthropologists researching the fascinating story of Hadrami Arab migration started off studying the Hadrami homeland of Hadramawt in Yemen, my own interest was first sparked during fieldwork in the Red Sea Hills in the Sudan, in 1993-5. At the end of my fieldwork, which happened to be close to Suakin and just across the Red Sea from Yemen, I started to realize that some of the people I had come to view as part of the Beja ethnic group bore typical Hadrami last names. At that time some of my colleagues at the University of Bergen had just began studies of Hadramawt and Hadrami societies, the first being an anthropologist, but most of them historians. I came to realize that the history of Hadramawt during the last one and a half century bears one striking similarity to my own country, Norway, namely massive waves of emigration, which in the case of Norway relocated more than a third of our population to North America in a few decades. The Norwegian exodus was partly for the same reason as the Hadrami migration; in both cases the population faced hunger and possible starvation in a homeland which provided meagre sources of livelihood.
