ABSTRACT
Throughout my account I have suggested that ethnicities and homelands have to be considered as multifaceted, historically contingent and socially constructed entities. In the case of Jews, Parsis, Sindhis and Sikhs, for example, it is unclear to what extent their religions, historical experiences or assumed common ancestries jointly or separately are mobilized to determine their collective identities over time. There also may be wide differences between selfdescriptions (the emic dimension) and characterizations by outside observers (the etic dimension). This is true too of homelands or the looser idea of home. As we saw in Chapter 3, for Africans of the ‘first diaspora’, home was Guinea, Freetown, Liberia or the emblematic idea of Ethiopia. Now ‘new’ African diasporas aremore likely to identify with their post-colonial independent states – like Nigeria, Ghana or Zimbabwe.
