Diaspora

Question 1

What is the meaning of diaspora?

Answer 1

In 1961, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary dispersion (as of a people of common national origin or of common beliefs” and “the people of one country dispersed into other countries.” “diaspora” as a concept is almost absent from the social sciences lexicon before the 1960s…

Question 2

According to William Safran,the American political scientist, what are the categories that make a population a diaspora

Answer 2

diaspora” to minority expatriate communities whose members shared several of the six following characteristics: their or their ancestors’ dispersion from a “center” to at least two peripheral foreign regions; persistence of a collective memory concerning the homeland; certainty that their acceptance by the host society is impossible; maintenance of an often idealized homeland as a goal of return; belief in a collective duty to engage in the perpetuation, restoration, or security of the country of origin; and maintenance of individual or collective relations with the country of origin.

Question 3

What are the diaspora categories that Robin Cohen in his 1997 Global Diasporas, use?

Answer 3

Cohen produces a list of nine “common characteristics of a diaspora” coupled with a typology that distinguishes diasporas according to their primary identity: victim (Jews, Africans, Armenians, and Palestinians), labor (Indians), trade (Chinese), cultural (the Caribbean), and imperial (British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese).

Question 4

oxymoronic definitions - modernity to be revised

Answer 4

oxymoronic definitions These are rooted in the appearance of postmodern thought in the 1980s and are the heirs of various currents critical of modernity, notably the works of Michel Foucault. In France they crystallized around the philosophers Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Modern societies, which are characterized by a belief in reason, progress, universality, and stability, are confronted by emerging postmodern societies dominated by doubt, fragmentation, the end of great narratives of truth and science, racial mixing, and fluid identities

Question 5

oxymoronic definitions

Answer 5

stress reference to a point of departure and maintenance of an identity in spite of dispersion, postmodern thought instead gives pride of place to paradoxical identity, the noncenter, and hybridity

Question 6

Ethnicities are defined against lived and imagined experiences, as well as against perceived notions of “homelands” and “cultures” (Appadurai 1991). Explain.

Answer 6

Images of the host countries and homelands travel across boundaries through transnational networks that blur boundaries between nations. These images also affect people’s real lives. As an example, Arjun Appadurai describes the plight of the women involved in the sex tours in Asia. Here, women make money by catering to Western ideas of Asian women. These images of Asian women affect gender politics not only in these bars but also worldwide. Because images travel through these ethnoscapes so easily, he states that scholars must incorporate the links between imagination and social life into ethnographies.

Question 7

Define ethnoscapes

Answer 7

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