Kinship, Nation, and Paul Gilroy's Concept of Diaspora

Abstract

In the literature of traditional anthropology, “community” and “culture” have been privileged units of analysis and have often been considered to be isomorphic with well-defined national or ethnic territories. Recent anthropological attempts to understand constitutions of community and identity in a transnational, postcolonial, and global economic context have questioned this easy relationship between culture, community, and place and have focused on how social worlds can be webbed together across transnational space (see Appadurai, Gupta and Ferguson). Among the many contenders for an analytical concept accountable to the complexities of culture and economy in a transnationally interconnected world are such notions as “the deterritorialized nation state” (Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton), “ethnoscapes” (Appadurai), “borderlands” (An-zaldua), and “diaspora” (Hall; Gilroy, “Cultural Studies”; Safran; Tololyan). Each of these concepts calls into question the “natural” bond that anthropology historically has presumed to exist between community, culture, and place.

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