In This Issue

Diaspora 6:3 1997 In mis Issue Baumann reviews two new books on Tibet and its diaspora, welcomes diaspora theorists' emerging recognition of the latter, and reflects on the attempts to sustain salient features of Tibetan culture—primarily art and religion—in diaspora, analyzing modifications , innovations, and failures in areas ranging from painting to monastic life. After offering a panoptic narrative of the adoption of the term and concept of "diaspora," beginning with early Christians, who conceived ofthemselves as members of a dispersed community, as sojourners, and as seeds disseminating the religion, Baumann then traces the adoption ofthe term by African American historians, political scientists, Indologists, historians ofreligion, and Tibetologists, and offers a detailed account of what he argues are the still-indispensable meanings of the word in Judaism. He ends by turning from the Judaic to the Tibetan model of diaspora and sketching their ability to illuminate each other, as well as other diasporic phenomena. Foner argues that the uniqueness of contemporary transnationalism , and perhaps also the resistance to assimilation ofnew transmigrants , have been exaggerated. She shows that "immigrants in the last great wave" of migration in 1880-1923 "maintained extensive ... transnational ties and operated in what social scientists now call a transnational social field." She offers evidence of remarkably high rates of return to the homeland, and of repeat migration, by Jews and especially Italians. Countering the belief that current racism against immigrants of color is unique, she points to the intense racism directed against white ethnics, who were thought to belong to several distinguishable races. Like transnationale today, earlier migrants participated in the ideological and political landscape of their homelands, and they were not ignored by homeland governments. While technological innovations, greater tolerance in hostlands, and changes ofscholarly perspective have made transnationale a more visible and positively regarded force today, and have enabled their greater quotidian involvement in homeland life, Foner notes some factors that may yet facilitate their assimilation. Markowitz investigates the emerging ethnodiasporan identities of Georgian and Jewish youth in Russia following the collapse of 275 Diaspora 6:3 1997 the USSR. She offers an account of the changing meanings of nationality, citizenship, and two inflections of Russian-ness that form the matrix in which the teenagers she studies develop their own conceptions ofidentity. For the "Jewish" teenagers, these selfdefinitions range from an exclusive Jewishness that in the future may impose the need to emigrate to Israel, to strategically nurtured multiple identities that do not overpower or subsume each other, finally to a view that Jewishness is "compatible with or inconsequential to their Russianness." Georgian youth, who are newcomers , hope for a brief sojourn that will prevent their becoming a nativized diaspora; they hold a view of their identity as fixed, by their own culture and history and perhaps by Russian exclusion. Stratton reconsiders the changing meanings of "diaspora" by focusing on the Jewish experience, which encompasses quite different classical, modern, and postmodern phases. He points to the tensions between a classical religious conception of diaspora as galut; a politicized modern conception of diaspora as aspiring for a homeland; and a post-Holocaust diasporic reality that, after the establishment ofIsrael, offers non-Israeli Jews a world in which the meanings of both diaspora and the nation-state have changed yet again. Criticizing what he sees as William Safran's ahistorical paradigm of the Jewish diaspora, Stratton notes that Zionism has valorized the "homeland" and devalorized diasporajust as "in many Western countries ... the rhetoric of diaspora has been valorized." In addition, Stratton explores the varying permutations ofmatriarchal and patriarchal tropes that anchor the rhetorics ofboth homeland and diaspora. Vertovec identifies three general meanings of the term "diaspora " as it has been used in recent scholarship produced by many disciplines and about many groups. He discusses diasporas—and especially South Asian religious diasporas—as social forms, as types of consciousness, and as modes of cultural production. He points to changes in the meanings, relationships, and practice ofreligion and culture as diasporas experiment with disassociating them from each other; the differences between syncretic and hybrid identities, on the one hand, and multicultural competence, on the other; and the shifting relationship between structure and agency in diaspora. 276 ...