Global, Transnational, and Diasporic Communities

André Levy

Email:

Office hours: Thursday, 16:00-18:00, (Mandel, room 319).

Focusing on Morocco-Israel complex relationships as an ethnographic site, students in the course will discuss developments in anthropological thought regarding minority groups, ethnicities, diasporas-homelands and other interrelated concepts. The discussion about anthropological thinking over groups that demarcate themselves, or being demarcated by others as "external" minorities, is crucial to anthropology as it sheds essential light on some advantages and blind spots of the discipline's theories.

Requirements and grades:

  1. Attendance in all the meetings.
  2. Active participation in class discussions (10% of the final grade).
  3. Critical reading of weekly papers and chapters.
  4. Class presentation of one of the items from the reading list (20% of the final grade).*
  5. Class presentation of the outline of the final assignment (20% of the final grade).*
  6. Final assignment (50% of the final grade).*

*Detailed and specific instructions will be presented during the class meetings.

Reading list

Note: all articles from the journal "Diaspora" are to be found in:

Introduction: anthropological premises.

No reading

Ethnicity

Barth, Fredrik

1969 Introduction. In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. F. Barth, ed. Boston: Little Brown

Identity and Ethnicity

Cohen, Ronald

1987 Ethnicity: Problems and Focus in Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology. 7:379-403.

Hall, Stuart

1991Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. In A.D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization, and the world-system: Contemporary conditions for the representation of identity, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, pp. 41–68

From Ethnicity to Diasporas

Demetriou, Madeleine

1999Beyond the Nation-state? Transnational Politics in the Age of Diaspora. The Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism Bulletin 16(Winter):17-25.

From Migrant to Transmigrate

Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton Blanc

1995From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration Anthropological Quarterly. Vol. 68, No. 1, pp. 48-63

Diasporas: Definitions

Safran, William

1991Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora 1(1):83-99.

Cohen, Robin

1997“Introduction”, in his: Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Diasporas: Anthropological Prism

Levy, André

2000Diasporas through Anthropological Lenses: Contexts of Postmodernity. Diaspora 9(1):137-157.

Diasporas: Critical Perspectives

Clifford, James

1994Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9(3):302-338.

Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin

1993Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 693-725

Diasporas: Second Thoughts

André Levy

2005 The Diaspora that Turned into a Center: Contemporary Jews in Morocco.” In: Levy, André and Alex Weingrod (eds.) Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places. Pp. 68-96. Stanford University Press.

Tölölyan, Khachig

1996 Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment. Diaspora 5(1):3-36.

A Few Examples

Gosh, Amitav

1988The Diaspora in Indian Culture. Public Culture 2(1):73-78.

Pattie, Susan

1994At Home in Diaspora: Armenians in America. Diaspora 3(2):185-198.

Vertovec, Steven

1996 Three Meanings of "Diaspora," Exemplified among South Asian Religions. Diaspora 6(3):277-299.