ABSTRACT
RECENT LITERATURE ON diaspora, borderlands, hybridity, and exile has taken us ever further from the concept of culture as stable and homogeneous and has opened up new theoretical and research vistas (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Rosaldo 1989). The postmodern world is characterized by vast transnational flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas (Appadurai 1991), as the series of recent symposia devoted to the topic attest (e.g., Harding and Myers 1994; Lavie and Swedenburg in press). As with many new intellectual currents, the first wave of enthusiasm is followed by more critical assessments and efforts at conceptual clarification. Paul Gilroy (1993:205-212) and James Clifford (1994), for example, thoughtfully reexamine the term diaspora by comparing the Jewish and the black diaspora experiences and trajectories. As George Marcus (1994:424) suggests, what we need in this field is theory that constructs our objects so that they may be studied by fieldwork and the more traditional methods of ethnography.
