Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
155
could, however, be used in other
disciplines, such as public health and social
work, that focus on understanding,
designing
and
evaluating
societal
responses to substance abuse and mental
illness.
Kathryn S. Krase
LIU Brooklyn, New York
Waltraud Kokot, Christian Giordano,
Mijal GandelsmanTrier
(eds.) (2013),
Diaspora as Resource: Comparative
Studies in Strategies, Networks and Urban
Space
, Lit Verlag: Berlin.
It is a difficult task if not an impossible
mission to present a comprehensive review
of a volume based on presentations held at
an international conference at the
University of Hamburg--
Diaspora as a
Resource
. Thirteen chapters covering a
wide panorama of world diasporas,
exposing various methodological and
theoretical perspectives. As emphasized by
the editors and a few participants, since the
1990s the term ‘diaspora’ has been applied
to various groups of migrants or ethnic
origin, to all types of ‘transnational
dispersion’ (Toloylan p.30). When I
studied Israeli emigrants in New York,
during the 1980s, I did not consider them a
diaspora (Shokeid 1988). It was a
designation and an identity reserved for the
few ‘classical’ groups, such as Jews and
Armenians who have lived in organized
communities in dozens countries for
centuries. In any case, as Khachig
Tölöylan suggests, every diaspora consists
of at least three categories of people: those
wholly assimilated into their hostland’s
society; people who are claimed diasporans
but who differ from their neighbors only at
symbolic
occasions
when
they
acknowledge that they possess a different
identity as well; the core diasporic
membership, committed, activist, even
militant, and who desire to sustain and
renew diasporic identity and its difference
from that of the hostland’s majority.
The leading theme of the conference
and the volume that came as consequence
of its discussions intended to explore
diaspora as a resource for the parties
engaged; the participants as individuals
and groups, the homeland and the hostland.
A
few
chapters
present
the
contradictions observed in the apparently
homogeneous diasporic groups. Janet
Landa developed a theory about the
Chinese middlemen group in Southeast
Asia as a club-like arrangement
membership. Under the conditions of
contract uncertainty they will not randomly
enter into transactions with anonymous
traders. They use symbols of identity (such
as eating rules) to economize on
information cost of selecting their trading
partners, as well as erecting barriers of
entry against outsiders. In contrast, Ina
Baghdiantz McCabe argues for flexible
identities as observed among Julfan
Armenians who joined the hostland's
administration, converted to Islam, though
they still collaborated with their ethnic
network. A similar approach is presented
by Christian Giordano in the case of the
Chinese diaspora in Penang who share a
long-standing collective consciousness, yet
this does not necessarily imply a
transnational feeling of empathy and
solidarity. This against the often taken for
