ABSTRACT
An earlier generation of scholars meant by the term diaspora a handful of identifiable ethno-national communities, scattered around the globe, which remained in continuous, long-term contact with one another as well as with their real or putative homeland (Armstrong, 1976; Cohen, 1997: 185). That homeland constituted the hub of ethnic diasporas. Settlements abroad were the spokes. Thus understood, a diaspora was a geographical structure that characterized middleman minorities, not all minorities or all immigrants (Cohen, 1971). Middleman minorities are historic trading peoples that undertake commercial functions wherever they reside, who resided in host societies for generations without assimilation, and who maintained their ethno-national identity and separateness (Light and Gold, 2000: 6-8). Earlier scholars thought that only middleman minorities had or could have diasporas because only middleman minorities had the cohesiveness to endure diasporas without assimilation into host societies (Kieval, 1997). Recently, the term diaspora has been widened to include groups that have no historical identification as middleman minorities. Current research on transnationalism (Lever-Tracy and Ip, 1996; Lie, 1995; Chik, 2000) returns to many of the concerns that animated older research on historical diasporas, but, by emphasis upon globalization, opens the field of study to groups that are not historic middleman minorities.
