ABSTRACT

Recent studies on ethnic/religious minorities and migrant groups have shown that the latter had a rather important impact on historical change at large. Migrants and diasporas were and are service agents moving between two or more different cultures, as British historian Arnold Toynbee put it. While bringing new goods, ideas and peoples to a variety of regions, diasporas seem to form “fossil societies”: more often than not, they mean to preserve a distinct ethnic, religious or other cultural group identity. Diasporas therefore are innovative as well as fossil-and they serve as agents of transculturation (Toynbee 1957, 217). However, an analysis of the contributions made by minority and diaspora groups has to carefully disentangle the multifaceted relationships between their own myths and their impact on political, economic, cultural and social change.