ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we review the key social science strategies used to examine cross-border linkages and transnational migration and discuss their merits for empirical research on diaspora formation. As Roger Brubaker noted, most early discussions on diaspora ‘were firmly rooted in a conceptual “homeland”’ and were ‘concerned with a paradigmatic case, or a small number of cases’ (Brubaker 2005: 2). Today, however, the concept encompasses a proliferation of meanings and applications. Influential thinkers like Paul Gilroy (1993) and James Clifford (1994) have paved the way for a decidedly non-essentialist understanding of diaspora, which focuses on migrants’ cross-border linkages, flows and circulation, and practices of establishing social and symbolic ties. Rather than relying on notions of fixed connections to places, identities and cultures, we now see diasporas as communities that are constantly negotiated and constituted (Faist 2010). The negotiations involved reveal that ethnicity is not a stable category, but one that relies on the social practices of people who organize their membership of a group and evaluate their experiences of it according to what they consider to be ‘ethnic’. Because understandings of ethnicity vary across time and space, people by no means agree on ethnic sameness and otherness and, although diasporas may bring together individuals and offer them sources of community feelings, not all migrants from the same country of origin are equally included in diasporic life. In a study of Peruvian associations in the United States, Paerregaard (2010) observed that some organizations are open to all Peruvians who want to come together – for example, to play football, dance or engage in traditional folklore – whereas others select their members according to their regional origin or socio-economic status. Thus, it is important to focus more attention on the power relations and inequalities in the countries of emigration and immigration that coalesce in the diaspora.
