• 1 Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley, The Women Founders: Sociology and Social The (...)
• 2 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People ( (...)
• 3 Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment”, Diaspora, (...)

1Looking at migrants in terms of “diaspora” instead of “ethnic group” involves a radical change of perspectives and interpretations. With the emergence of migration research and “ethnic studies” from the late 19^th century to the field’s burgeoning from the 1970s onwards, the narrow discursive or ideological frame of sedentary populations with national identities resulted in an equally narrow view of emigrants (or immigrants) as moving from nation to ethnic enclave. Those moving, and in the view of conservative contemporaries betraying their nation, were viewed as a problem: “in limbo” between two societies; or, in terms of the frequently cited–but empirically weak–U.S. authors of the Chicago School1 and Oscar Handlin2, they were “disorganized” or “uprooted”. Given this nation-centered frame of reference, it is no surprise that the term and concept of “diaspora” received little attention. Mobile people in a diasporic setting move along known and well-travelled routes between well-connected and dispersed communities which remember or actually have a physical geographic and/or spiritual center. In contrast to this analytical approach, Jewish men and women, who dispersed, have been referred to as rootless, permanent wanderers and as a special race. Application of the “diaspora” label to them implied a seemingly self-evident negative undertone. Reflection on the term resulted in the addition of “the ancient Greeks” to the terminology, involving however a positive connotation of a Hellenistic sphere. Then, in 1990, a scholar of Armenian background, Khachig Tölölyan, launched the journal Diaspora (Oxford University Press) – an implicitly self-reflective step since Armenians have lived as a diaspora for a long time. It is a well established but lesser known diaspora which is less segregated than its Jewish counterpart and less active in scholarly self-reflection3.

• 4 This section is based on classical syntheses and document editions. Haim H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), A His (...)
• 5 Yves Lequin, ed., La mosaïque France: histoire des étrangers et de l’immigration (Paris, 1988), rev (...)
• 6 Alexandre Skirda, La traite des slaves. L’esclavage des Blancs du viii^e au xviii^e siècle (Paris, 20 (...)
• 7 Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, András Róna-Tas (eds.), The World of the Khazars. New Perspect (...)
• 8 Dirk Hoerder, “Trade – Migration – Travel – Cultural Transfer in the East Slavic-Russian Macro-Regi (...)
• 9 Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (London, 1977), p. 79-94
• 10 Under the incursion of “Puritan” Muslims into Iberia, Jewish intellectuals had to flee. An example (...)
• 11 Bernard Lewis, Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery (Oxford, (...)

4After the uprising of Jewish men and women against the then recently imposed Roman rule, and especially against the privatization of commonly held “God-given” land, had been quelled, an out-migration began that was subsequently called exodus, flight, or dispersal. To move from legend to data, those departing need to be analyzed in sociological terms. Few families making their living as agriculturalists left. The poorest – as always – had no means to move and many urban coreligionists stayed. Those departing had to make a living and they established themselves as artisans, merchants or, given the high intellectual development, as scholars and religious sages. Like all migrants departing, Jewish families had to carry or transfer their possessions: small cultivators cannot carry their land whereas craftsmen and scholars can carry their expertise while mercantile families can relocate their networks4. By the 9^th century some 90 percent of the migrants lived in the Muslim Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates (c. 660-1100). As “protected persons” of another religion who were subject to a head tax they could move and pursue their vocations freely. Small numbers moved westward along the Mediterranean and traded and settled in the Rhone River valley and in the interior of what would become France. Parallel moved “Syrian Christians”, who were men and women of a variant of the Christian faith from the same region of origin.5 In Carolingian times, one group, the Rhadanites, managed the slave trade from the Slavic regions, via Regensburg and alpine passes or via Verdun and the Rhone valley, to Muslim Iberia.6 In the East, where the exchange nodes of the East-West/ West-East trade were located, as well as in the transit region north of the Black Sea, the elites of Khazar society converted to Judaism.7 Traders of Jewish religion, jointly with many others, had for centuries been part of Persian and Arab northbound trade to Scandinavia along the Dnepr and Volga rivers.8 Among the migrants a distinct or, from the orthodox rabbis’ view, separatist or dissident group known as the Kharaïtes emerged in either 7^th-century Egypt or 8^th-century Baghdad. Given Muslim expansion and its liberal stance toward other religions as well as its own high level of scholarship, families of Jewish faith migrated to Iberia where they formed communities (the Sephardim) with their own language and social practices.9 They would be expelled in 1492-1496 by the Catholic rulers to subsequently form dynamic refugee communities in North African cities10 and in the Ottoman lands.11 The rulers of the latter invited them due to their high human and social capital as well as for their trading connections. Those who moved by land into southeastern and western Europe or via the Rhone to the Rhine valley and Cologne became a further group with a distinct dialect close to medieval German. Once persecuted and expelled under the increasing Latin Christian hostility, these so-called Ashkenazim migrated eastward often invited by rulers in need of an urban craft and trading population.

• 12 Harry C. Schnur, “Jüdische Ehe und Familie im Mittelalter”, in Willy van Hoecke and Andries Welkenh (...)
• 13 Quoted in Ben-Sasson, Jewish People, p. 463; note the expected time lag of one generation in the ac (...)

5In light of this diversity, the label “Jewish diaspora” creates numerous conceptual problems: specific socio-cultural groups departed whilst others remained. These high-standing migrants transferred Judaism’s religious-intellectual center from Jerusalem to Baghdad with other centers in Cordoba and Cairo. Furthermore, groups of people converted and joined the communities of the migrants’ descendants. Given the culturally and linguistically diverse host societies, a diversified range of Jewish communities of different languages and everyday practices emerged in most parts of Europe, North Africa, and segments of Asia. The paths these well-educated men and women travelled,12 all the while extending their networks, were trading routes. Since, like all other migrants, they had to earn their living, they used their geographical links and trading knowledge – a core socialization of urban people in the cities of ancient “Syria”. Less well-endowed co-religionists settled along the routes as small traders, feeder or distribution lines in modern parlance, or as artisans supplying both the religio-cultural community and their neighbors of other faiths. Hebrew served as a unifying language for the religious savants of the different variants of the religion, as well as for the scholars who were multi-lingual and wrote in (Muslim) Arabic and (Christian) Latin and other languages. As a result linguistic diversification did not undercut the communication between segments of the diaspora and specific localities. Unity and diversity were braided. According to learned advice around 1300 CE, migrants should “closely observe the established burghers” so that their children could blend in with established society even if marriage practices remained endogamous.13

• 14 The timeline of the study of diasporas might well be extended further into the past: the mercantile (...)
• 15 References to this diaspora suffer from a culturalist bias – Hellenisms as a Greek-inspired culture (...)
• 16 Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London, 2000); Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser Ottanelli (e (...)

8One central aspect of diasporic existence has been said to be “statelessness”. But this is a problem-laden definition. Does, from the establishment of the state of Israel, the “Jewish diaspora” need to be renamed? When diasporic Hellenism emerged,14 the ancient Greek city-states still existed and the macro-regional and imperial, if brief, rule of Alexander, called “the Great”, had a major influence on its spread.15 And, in modern usage, the term – Polish, Scottish, Italian, German diasporas – refers to states of origin.16 Furthermore, the study of diasporas has been Mediterranean or Atlantic centered. The many trading diasporas in the Indian Ocean World have usually not been mentioned (see below).

• 17 These might be labelled “Romans proper”, i.e. Italian-born men and women, in distinction to those w (...)
• 18 Similarly, in the 8^th century Muslim migrant-soldiers living in the Iberian societies remained in c (...)

10The Roman rulers who quelled the Jewish struggle for self-determination (“rebellion” in the language of the rulers) around 70 C.E. were migrants; those who rebelled were the residents. Roman expansion, once it extended beyond the Apennine Peninsula, involved military officers with troops composed of ever more cultural groups, and administrations of Roman prefects with a limited number of Roman personnel spread thinly over the whole Mediterranean littoral as well as throughout the Danubian and Gallic provinces.17 Given the issues of cost, personnel, and culture, this tiny immigrant administrative elite cooperated with resident elites who secured their position through their acquiescence and participation. Like diasporic merchants who relied on local suppliers and producers, the administrative newcomers needed to rely on local elites’ understanding of the annexed region’s laws, customs, and languages. They remained connected to the core by thin lines of communication and a shared belief in empire. This “imperial apparatus” never covered the incorporated territories blanket-like as an undifferentiating birds-eye view would suggest. Rather it consisted of nodes of rule and urban culture thereby resembling other diasporic communities. The military aspect of this diasporic spread, usually rendered as widely dispersed “Roman” camps along a limes or a river like the Danube, is far more complicated. From the early decades (certainly no later) of the Common Era, the legions were many-cultured. Camps in Egypt, for example, had Celtic legionnaires and Syrians were stationed at both the Rhine River and Hadrian’s wall in the north of England. These soldiers remained in contact with their regions of origin and, once allowed to marry, included their fami-lies. Upon their return, they carried back cultural knowledges and material goods.18 The “Roman” military presence, with its interconnected centers and camps of rule, consisted of many localized and often overlapping and interacting diasporas.

• 19 The people of the province of Noricum, of Celtic culture.

11In the Roman Empire local customs remained in place, local languages continued to be spoken in everyday life, and imperial religion mixed with local gods and goddesses. “Empire” in this incarnation has been analyzed in terms of a federation of semi-autonomous provinces or of self-governing cities with a center in the capital city, a uniform overlay of legal codes (in contrast to everyday ones), and a program of urbanization. If the designation “empire” is replaced by “Roman presence” among (annexed) peoples of other cultures, the diasporic aspect immediately comes to the fore. The frequently emphasized Roman roads were the lines of communication to the center and to other diasporic nodes. As with the Jewish diasporic communities from Africa to Iberia and the Rhine or elsewhere each of the Roman centers evidenced dynamics and cultures of its own. The Gallic, Noric19, Syrian, African and other “Romans”, socialized in and dispatched from the center (as well as communicating with it), nevertheless followed different amalgams of religions and different dress codes. Both “Jewish” and “Roman” were statements of identification and belonging rather than culturally essentialist designations.

• 20 The renaming of the relocated empire as “East Rome” or “Byzantium” was an interest-driven invention (...)
• 21 At the time this religion had many variants. In its accession to power it lost its communal charact (...)
• 22 This interpretation is based on Dirk Hoerder, ‚Kelten‘ und ‚Römer‘, 500 v.u.Z.-500 u.Z.: Romanisier (...)

12This “diasporic approach to empires,” as it might be called, permits a more sophisticated analysis and comparison. As in the case of the Jewish intellectual core’s relocation from Jerusalem to Baghdad, Rome’s center of gravity shifted from Italy to the eastern Mediterranean where far more material amenities were available and where intellectual life was more intense. In a first step, Roman ruling families changed to African-Syrian culture and a new emphasis on the Sun as God when the Severus family acceded to the throne from the 190s C.E. on. Next, an emperor shifted the capital city from Rome to Byzantium/ Constantinople in the 330s. The cultural changes and relocations notwithstanding, the “Roman Empire” and its institutions showed continuity20 – with one exception: an emerging religious diaspora, also originating in Palestine, came to enter the imperial institutions and the empire became Christian.21 The vast Empire’s armies and ruling personnel had become many-cultured with a diaspora-like system of communication between top and intermediate provincial elites living in a conglomerate of societies/ cultures. “Roman” became a kind of brand-name.22

• 23 The Atlas historique. L’histoire du monde en 334 cartes, sous la direction de Georges Duby (Paris, (...)

15The concept of “diaspora”, detached from its single-lane connection to Jewish and statelessness, allows us to deconstruct relationships of power, empire, and institutionalization – as well as the historical master narrative which the victors’ ideologues and institution-centered historians established.23

• 24 Some of these moved by land routes either through France to the French-Mediterranean ports or via R (...)

17At the same time as men and women of many cultures but of the same Christian faith – if in multiple variants –moved from an abundantly resourced Palestine, men and women from Scandinavia departed from an agriculturally impoverished landscape. The long shorelines of the Scandinavian region had encouraged the development of a high level of nautical skills. The understanding of these out-migrations as an integral multi-directional whole has been fragmented by a scholarship specialized according to region of destination: “Vikings” sailed along Western Europe’s coasts (as well as in the north to Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland or New-Found-Land); “Varangians” moved across lakes and rivers deep into Eastern Europe; and Normans conquered Normandy and the isles later called “British.” These moves could be interpreted in terms of the establishment of ethnic enclaves or realms of rule separate from each other. However, the migrants’ seafaring ways, their evident interest in the wealth of others, and their need for jobs led to further moves. In this way, the Varangians continued to Constantinople, those from the British Isles and Normandy24 moved on to Sicily and Palestine and, from there, to Constantinople where these west-south moving Scandinavians met with their east-southbound co-ethnics. Communication networks connected the migrants along routes that were mainly waterways and via occupations consisting of – in addition to mariners – aggressive waterborne soldiery, state-builders, and soldiers in distant armies. After Varangian men had begun to serve in the East Roman rulers’ armies, underemployed or disgruntled Normans in England learned about the labor demand and moved to take jobs in this labor market segment in Constantinople.

• 25 Whether these troops came with “train”, i.e. with women and children and service personnel, is not (...)
• 26 Based on Hoerder, “Trade – Migration – Travel – Cultural Transfer” (forthcoming 2015). Simon Frankl (...)

19Men and women from several local societies in the Baltic region, with high ship-building skills, sailed eastbound through the Gulf of Finland and up the Narva, Neva, and Daugava rivers to Lake Peipus and Lake Ladoga where they founded trading nodes in the 7^th century. From there they connected southward across lakes, rivers, and portages via an eastern route, down the Volga River to the Persian and Arab realms as long-distance-merchants. In the Caspian Sea’s ports they interacted with merchants from West Central Asia’s Samarkand, Isfahan, and Sogdian cities – the western terminals of the trans-Asian “silk route” caravans as well as those from the Indian Ocean’s littorals. Along a second, western route, following the Dnepr, “Varangians” settled (rather than traded) and established rule over the resident Slavic-speaking populations. Two centuries and several intermingling generations later, from their capital Kiev the “Rus’” began armed forays to, as well as trading connections with, the Roman Empire in its Byzantine version. Varangian-Rus’ merchants arrived every spring and camped during the summer before Constantinople’s gates. In the 980s the Kievan Prince Vladimir supported Basileios II (976-1025) against a revolt of large landowners. His army of some 6,000 men,25 originally from Sweden, had helped him to regain his throne following which the men needed a task as well as wages. After quelling the landowners’ revolt, they remained in the East Roman emperor’s service as Varangian Družina or Palace Guard.26

• 27 The introduction of primogeniture and intermarriage of the conqueror families’ younger sons and dau (...)
• 28 Lucien Musset, “L’aristocratie normande au xi^e siècle”, in Philippe Contamine (ed.), La noblesse au (...)

20Others sailed from Scandinavia in a westerly southbound route through the North Sea. Nobles with their dependents, some discontented with a reorganization of their home societies, settled as invaders and state-builders along the continent’s shores: in mid-10^th-century in northwestern France (“Normandy”), England and Wales, and in Sicily and southern Italy from 1103 to 1194. They imposed their rule – far less oppressive than that of their Varangian co-ethnics – over local populations and merged with or replaced local nobilities. Sequential migrations of adventurers and settlers who intermarried locally and accepted local languages resulted in new populations and cultures. As rulers they improved political structures by reforming traditional systems of taxation and administration and by reducing the burdens of the peasantry. While the communication lines to societies of origin remained intact and a memory of a common ancestry was present, these armed migrants – like the Varangians in Kiev – did not form “classic” diasporic communities. Instead, through mingling with local subdued societies, in a process of ethnogenesis they became a new people.27 The process involved both colonizing and diasporic aspects.28

• 29 A voluminous older literature – often with an undertone of men’s “heroic exploits” – has dealt with (...)

21From these new military and population bases, some Normans sailed further southward and into the Mediterranean. In Sicily, at first a stopover on the way to the Holy Land, they took control of the Muslim society and established the kingdom of Sicily in 1072. Arab-Islamic and Scandinavian interaction and cultural conversion transformed local practices. From the 11^th century, these “Mediterranean Normans” were augmented by military migrants from England, sometimes called “refugees” because they were discontent with the rule established in 1066. Most of them travelled on to Constantinople to join the Palace Guard or the army. Byzantium’s generically-called “Normans” thus came from among the Varangian-Rus’, from among descendants of Norman migrants-immigrants in Sicily, and from recent Anglo-Norman emigrants. Some of the latter, using the diasporic information and travel networks, may even have arrived earlier since, on one occasion in the first half of the 10^th century, the Palace Guard proposed its good wishes to the emperor in English (“enklinisti”). Mention of Constantinople in Icelandic sagas demonstrates that the northwest-trans-European and trans-Mediterranean connections entered popular memory.29

• 30 The trading networks from Scandinavia and Jutland to England and the cities along the Rhine, not di (...)

22In this case, elements of the concept of “diaspora” help to understand and integrate the multiple migrations of the men and women from the nordic Baltic societies. But the migrants’ establishment of communities did not resemble those of the mercantile(-religious) diasporas30 or those of the imperial-administrative examples. The diasporic settlements became realms of rule with an intermingling with the resident populations of different cultures even if in hierarchical settings. The migrants heading for Constantinople’s diasporic community were limited – and limited themselves – to the single labor market segment of military service, particularly in the well-paid and renowned palace guard. Still, to call them a “military diaspora” would be too narrow since they settled and built communities. The findings also indicate how diaspora formation is inseparably connected to other forms of migration – colonization schemes and labor market insertion.

• 31 This section is based on Dirk Hoerder, “Crossing the Waters: Historic Developments and Periodizatio (...)
• 32 Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, 2006).
• 33 Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe. Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise (...)
• 34 Such arrangements were common along many sea routes. Foreign merchants in Muslim Arab port cities s (...)
• 35 From the East African coastal commercial centers, in which numerous diasporic Asian and Arab mercha (...)

23Diasporas of traders emerged in many parts of the world. Once mariners had succeeded in decoding the patterns of the monsoon winds, they had established networks along the littorals of the Indian Ocean and the Southeast Asian seas. From the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula Hadhrami merchants established trading connections to, and settlements, in regions with tradable merchandise from the 2^nd millennium BC.32 Centuries later, Gujarati merchants in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent made their living as trade intermediaries between Africa, Arabia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and India’s Malabar and Coromandel Coast ports.33 In the port cities merchant cultural communities lived clustered in their own quarters under their own rules, using their own language, and following their particular religious beliefs. Authorities of the respective state merely regulated practices of exchange and intervened in cases of disputes between foreigners and residents.34 In these arrangements, the diaspora was defined by occupation. This mercantile diaspora (resembling the Jewish case) was usually internally differentiated by culture-of-origin but accorded legal-administrative status as one “foreign” trader community rather than as multiple distinct ethno- or religio-cultural communities.35

• 36 Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas. The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 (New (...)

24The complex bureaucracy of the Chinese Empire with its well-developed record-keeping provides information on the communities of traders and travelers (or of Buddhist monks) spread throughout the Empire, each with its own network of communication, exchange of personnel, cultural practices, and interaction with “the Chinese” (i.e. the many-cultured subjects of the respective emperor). From the Empire, as a legal-institutional entity, no imperially recognized diaspora emerged. Given its size and productivity, outward-bound external contacts across the seas were unnecessary. However, from the early 15^th century, the Court, for political reasons (raison d’état), sent out vast naval expeditions as far as Aden and East African ports. The fleets under the command of admiral Zheng He carried up to 28,000 people and were self-supplying. The diplomatic mission consisted of spreading knowledge about China as the Empire of the Middle. However in the mid 1430s the Court’s conservative faction decided to end this external diplomacy for fear of “foreign” influences.36 The seven expeditions between 1405 and 1433 had connected to existing overseas traders from mainly southern (Fujian) ports living in port cities in Southeast Asia.

• 37 Teobaldo Filesi, China and Africa in the Middle Ages, transl. D.L. Morison (London, 1972); Michael (...)

25At first, China’s long-distance trade had been mediated by colonies of foreign merchants – 120,000 were said to live in Guangzhou (Canton) in 878 C.E. – but after the start of the 11^th century Chinese merchants and shipbuilders increasingly participated. Their small trading diasporas along the sea-lanes initially consisted of sojourners, whose duration of stay was governed by the length of the monsoon periods, and subsequently permanent residents. Long-term “head guests,” for example in Siam under the Ayuthia dynasty (1350-1767), expected deference from short-term co-residents and, before returning home, often brought in younger “new guests” who remained bound to them by debt and the advanced cost of passage. Chain migrations established kinship communities. When the Ming dynasty, with the end of the naval expeditions, curtailed overseas trade after 1433, merchants furtively formed permanent diasporic communities in Malacca, Manila, and Batavia, and traded with all of the Southeast Asian World, Nanyang in Chinese. Westward, their involvement in the Indian Ocean trade extended to East African ports where small communities were created.37

• 38 See Dirk Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur (eds.), Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspe (...)

26Again the question arises: What kind of diaspora or diasporas emerged? First of all, this “Chinese” diaspora was not at all generically Chinese but originated in the ports and their hinterlands of the two southern provinces. They were distant from the imperial center and its officials and also had their own regional version of the Chinese language. This contained variants that differed between port cities (“Cantonese”) and even between rural villages from which transport laborers and artisans were recruited. Thus, applying the name of the Empire, “Chinese”, to the diaspora is problematic. Secondly, migration was mostly male and, after the (monsoon) seasons’ sojourning phase, communities emerged for multi-annual or permanent settlement. Since men wanted the company of women and since artisanal production required couples or family units, the migrants formed lasting partnerships with local women, “secondary families” in cases where they had left the “first family” in their community of origin. Thus long-distance connections, language, and production were southern Chinese while the children were socialized towards their mothers’ culture. A genuinely mixed diasporic community emerged, varying – again as in the Jewish case – by culture of insertion. Only wealthy merchants could afford to migrate with their family and they increased the diasporic community and its ties to the culture of origin by bringing in servants, warehouse workers, craftsmen, and other dependents. To raise and educate their children in home-culture (rather than generic Chinese-culture) ways of life they hired nannies from Guangdong or Fujian cities, so-called amahs who developed their own travelling and job-market networks and might be said to have formed a “sub-diaspora” within the larger southern Chinese diasporic communities.38 This Southeast Asian “Chinese diaspora” was “stateless” since the Empire did not permit either emigration or foreign trade and did not protect its subjects abroad. In the Spanish colonial period, the Manila “Chinese” extended their mercantile contacts across the Pacific to Spanish America and, like all trading diasporas, seized opportunities as they occurred. The Empire and the diaspora were two distinct, if closely related, entities.

27These cases add to the spectrum of diasporas: they were primarily seaborne and thus movement could be fast. Merchants formed communities in the port cities that were expanded by artisans and, occasionally, by the later addition of wives and children. As regards the aspect of commerce these widely linked communities resembled the Jewish diaspora and, in fact, connected with it since the Rhadanite merchants traveled the sea routes of the Indian Ocean and to the China Seas. They were stateless in the sense that no state backed them but in port cities their quarters had rights of self-administration and they endured far less discrimination than Jews in the West European ghettos. Such wide-ranging connections have been studied under the concept of “trade emporia.” This approach emphasizes the impact of capital investment and collective trading rather than the cultural capital and networking of the mercantile migrants. A diaspora-approach keeps human agency in view and the many migrants who moved with only their human capital.

• 39 Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton (eds.), Towards a Transnational Perspectiv (...)
• 40 The following discussion is limited to scholarship in the Atlantic world since, for linguistic reas (...)
• 41 Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-National America”, Atlantic Monthly, 118 (1916), p. 86-97; Horace M. Kal (...)
• 42 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves. A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, (...)
• 43 Fernando Ortiz, “Del fenómeno de la transculturación y su importancia en Cuba”, Revista Bimestre Cu (...)
• 44 Everett C. Hughes, “The Study of Ethnic Relations”, Dalhousie Review, 27 (1948), p. 477-482, and E. (...)

29Over time, the study of the Jewish diaspora may well have had an impact on traditional nation-to-ethnic-enclave interpretations of migration, i.e. from China to Chinatowns or from Italy to Little Italy. However, nation-socialized historians confined migrants to an essentialized national identity: bounded ethnic groups. As late as the 1990s, three anthropologists undercut the reification of international borders by introducing the paradigm of transnational lives.39 Reflecting what many researchers had been describing without ever theorizing cross-border moves, the concept was quickly and widely adopted. This conceptual innovation was, on closer observation however, a reintroduction. In fact, from the 1910s numerous scholars in several countries40 had proposed alternatives to nation-state-centered approaches and, in their conceptualizations, had gone beyond the trans-“national” which keeps the nation at the core of the interpretation. In the U.S., at the height of the “Americanization” projects, two scholars developed the term “transnationality” and a concept of plural societies in the 1917 and the 1920s respectively41. In Brazil, Gilberto Freyre analyzed the multiple African and European origins of the country’s society and theorized that societies emerge from many cultural influences.42 In Cuba, Fernando Ortiz went further by conceptualizing the process of “transculturation” in which Native Peoples, Africans, Chinese, and Europeans had merged into one society framed by the plantation economy.43 And in bi-cultural Canada, Everett Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes had noted that in no society did in-migrants ever face one single homogeneous society or nation.44 Although Freyre’s and Ortiz’s Portuguese and Spanish language studies were available in English by the end of the 1940s, the core of the White Atlantic academic community refused to take note of any of these approaches and remained welded to the “disorganized and uprooted immigrants” view of society whilst considering the Jewish experience separately. Given public opinion and politicians’ attitudes such narratives were more readily accepted.

• 45 Dirk Hoerder, “To Know Our Many Selves”: From the Study of Canada to Canadian Studies (Edmonton, 20 (...)
• 46 Dirk Hoerder, “Transnational – transregional – translocal: transcultural”, in Carlos Vargas-Silva ( (...)

30Reorientation began in Canadian scholarship where, in the context of the debate about a bi-cultural and bi-lingual society in the 1960s, “the ethnics” demanded – and were accorded – inclusion into the master narrative. In response, as well as in continuity, to several earlier open-minded studies of immigrant acculturation, Canadian interdisciplinary scholarship posited ethno-cultural interactions rather than closed groups, porous borders rather than dividing lines, and researched continuing connections to the respective culture of origin as well as the stepwise adjustment to the receiving society. Though focused on immigrants this might have been a diaspora-studies approach.45 Canadian – and subsequently other – scholars increasingly realized that migrant men and women did not move as generic nationals but with a socialization in a particular region and locality. They did not move “transnationally” but – as Ortiz had argued half a century earlier – transculturally. They did not carry national identities (in blood or genes or, for that matter, minds) but identifications that could be adapted and changed.46

• 47 Usability of the term “pioneer migrant” has been severely limited by the U.S. mythology of “pioneer (...)

35Potential migrants evaluate their range of options in terms of destination, whether in relation to a spatially concentrated ethnic area or dispersed diasporic ones, and in respect of accessibility when it comes to their own and their community’s knowledge. Local-regional spaces of departure and arrival are connected by: information flows, the prerequisite for a migration decision; connecting routes facilitating or, at least, permitting travel; and settled migrants’ backward linkages to family and community, loved ones and friends. Unless they are the very first to select a destination not previously targeted by kin and friends, migrants47 select spaces in which a community of their culture or, more precisely, a community in the process of acculturation exists. This could be composed of co-ethnics, co-religionists, and/or “co-professionals” – merchants, artisans, and laborers. Once routes have been established, connectivity increases – or decreases when conditions at the destination deteriorate. If routes are easy to travel and a “migratory” or “diasporic” discourse emerges, selection of destinations is, on the one hand, narrowed to the known, and, on the other hand, expanded by distance traversed and ease of departure. All of these “new” insights of the dichotomous emigration-immigration historiography were part of the definition and study of diasporas.

• 48 Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, To Be Slave in Brazil, 1550-1880 (4^th ed.; New Brunswick, 1994); Steph (...)
• 49 Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg (eds.), The African Diaspora. Interpretive Essays (Cambridge (...)

37Building a diaspora or an ethnic community requires agency. With few exceptions forcibly displaced migrants do not have this option. The deported prisoners-of-war, mentioned above are one case, slaves are another. Slave diasporas very rarely emerged and few ethnic communities could develop since slave-traders purposefully mixed their human commodity to prevent cultural coherence and, thus, collective action. Exceptions were the Angola-Brazil connection48 and free Africans or bound African-origin mariners in the Atlantic World.49

• 50 Allen F. Roberts, “La ‘Géographie Processuelle’: Un nouveau paradigme pour les aires culturelles”, (...)

38To understand the spatial complexities of diasporic moves, Allen F. Roberts has discussed migrants’ locations as “spaces” in a “progression” of steps rather than in terms of fixed “territories.” Such “processual geographies” combine macro-region of origin as an ecumene with multiple ethnoscapes and smaller transculturalisms that translate into a network of spaces. His example, the Mourides from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, who originated in Asia, follow Senegalese Islamic soufi beliefs, and live in places as distant as Los Angeles. The concept of “scapes” – the conceptual version of a social space – permits migrants to develop a flexible understanding of communities, families, and individuals in their several local, regional, state-wide, and global extensions. Such landscapes of migration, migrationscapes, vary over time according to changing economic, political, social, and religious options and restraints as well as according to composition of the migrant community and individual as well as collective aspirations. Diasporic geographies are flexible.50

• 51 Dirk Hoerder, “Transnational – transregional – translocal: transcultural”, op. cit.

39Research on diasporas requires a transcultural approach and could provide a major impetus to the study of resident societies which, though fixed into nation-state borders, are transcultural polities whose inhabitants-citizens are part of processual geographies. States add – or subtract – groups, and emerge from métissage and translocal-transregional interactions. Research on migrants and on residents needs to be transculturally comprehensive.51