ABSTRACT
Introduction Emigrants, exiles, and refugees create diasporic communities, islands of homeland culture in alien spaces. Separation divides travellers from those they leave behind. Each new environment such exiles encounter comes with its own ethos and material world at the precise time that materially anchored experiences of ‘home’ no longer are available to them. Their connections become ideational and idealized, products of imagining places, structures, and inhabitants. Such simulacra diverge, often sharply, from how those left behind experience the ‘reality’ of that other place in this other time (e.g. Brannen 2004; Slyomovics 1998).
