I'm working on Nigerians in London and I have been interchangeably using the term community and diaspora to refer to over 50,000 nigerians who reside in the city of London. I understand that the terms, particulary 'diaspora', have evolved over the past decade and I would like some clarification on their current meaning in Migration.
Many many thanks Daniel. Definitely I have come across some work on African Diaspora and indeed Nigerian Diaspora and I am still studying them. Community is also a complex concept, with or without real boundaries, with its members sharing culture, ideologies and everyday life in common despite the location. However Diaspora as you say has the notion of an exalted homeland which may be returned to. There is a real connection between those in Diaspora and the homeland. There is a general yearning for the homeland although eventual return may never happen. thanks. I will check out Cohen's Global Diasporas too. thank you
Diaspora is a community, but all communities are not a diaspora.
Prof. Fred Riggs defines the diaspora as: “communities whose members live informally outside the ancestral land while maintaining active contacts with it”.Basically this would refer to people who have move out of homelands out of choice and maintain ties back home.The important thing to note here is : choice.
I suggest that you look up the following links for a better grasp :
www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/emeritus/.../diasporas.pdf
lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/.../cho-topia11-30.pdf
www.vso.org.uk/.../Diaspora/diaspora-engagement-position-paper.pdf
www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/docs/research/61819.pdf
assembly.coe.int/Documents/AdoptedText/ta04/EREC1688.htm
Hope that helps.
I discuss both terms at some length in my book, Africans in China. In short, a community is a group of people who share some common sociocultural features and usually interact with each other in various ways. A diaspora constitutes, more or less, a community but is defined more in terms of transnational dimensions, with its members often able to trace their collective origin across boundaries to some other parts of the world.
A diaspora connotes a transplanted community. A community however may consist of a diaspora exclusively or not. For instance, let's say there is a community A in some geographic region A. This community shares some sort of identifying features. Then, members of this community move to geographic regions B and C. The A diaspora then includes sub-group members of A living in regions B and C. So the diaspora includes sub-group members of A everywhere in the world (place B and C and anywhere else). Each sub-group diaspora may also be part of a community in their specific region (here B and C) and consisting of 'A' persons plus others, or maybe just 'A'. Thus, the A diaspora may consist of sub-group diasporas in regions B and C that belong to very different communities. The point being that although all the members of A are part of the A diaspora, they could belong to different communities with different identifying features.
I would also suggest looking at the diaspora information included in the Atlas of Environmental Genography. Here the term diaspora is defined according to ancestral DNA and presents an interesting view of the subject: http://dna.xyvy.info/haplogroup-ethnic-dna/ethnic-diaspora-homeland-population-percentages
http://dna.xyvy.info/haplogroup-ethnic-dna/ethnic-diaspora-homeland-population-percentages
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Geoscience
- Asia
- India