Cultural Diaspora Research Articles

Plant Use Adaptation in Pamir: Sarikoli Foraging in the Wakhan Area, Northern Pakistan.

Simple SummaryIn this cross-cultural ethnobotanical study, the food uses of wild food plants (WFPs) were recorded among two linguistic groups, i.e., the Sarikoli and the Wakhi people, living in the Broghil Valley of North Pakistan. A total of 29 wild food taxa were recorded. We found that the local knowledge linked to wild food plants has been completely homogenized, indicating that the Sarikoli, a cultural diaspora, have gradually adopted the traditional food system of the Wakhi. Moreover, the local knowledge of WFPs is gradually eroding in the two considered communities due to certain socio-political factors. In particular, legal sanctions on accessing natural resources and cross-border movement at the Pakistan–Afghan border are major issues that hinder socio-cultural sustainability among the two groups. Therefore, it is recommended that the legal restrictions be properly revised, and an inclusive policy should be adopted in this regard. In addition, local knowledge on food resources should be reinforced in future development and educational programs.The study recorded the food uses of wild food plants (WFPs) among the Sarikoli diaspora and the dominant Wakhi in Broghil Valley, North Pakistan, to understand their food adaptation, mainly by looking through the lens of food ethnobotanies. A total of 30 participants took part in the study, which included 15 elderly individuals from each ethnic group. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. We recorded 29 WFPs, mostly used as cooked vegetables and snacks. The food uses, as well as the local plant nomenclatures, linked to WFPs of the two studied groups were completely homogenized, which could be attributed to the cultural assimilation of the Sarikoli people to Wakhi culture. We found that although traditional knowledge on WFPs has been homogenized, social change in nearby regions is also threatening the traditional knowledge of the two communities, as evidenced by the smaller number of plants reported compared to that of all other field ethnobotanical studies conducted in nearby regions. Moreover, the growth of legal restrictions and sanctions on accessing natural resources are posing serious challenges to cultural resilience in the valley, and the restrictions on cross-border movement in particular are creating challenges for those who have cross-border kinship relationships between the two groups. We suggest specific measures, such as the promotion of food tourism and educational activities, to protect traditional knowledge and bicultural heritage from further erosion in the region.

Naomi Noble Richard

Naomi Noble Richard

Role of Women in Preserving Indian Culture and Identity in Diaspora

This article focuses on the migration of indentured labor from India to various parts of the world like Guyana, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and Fiji. It aims to analyze the role of women in Indian diaspora as preservers of culture and identity. Indian diaspora, comprised of the ethnic groups that have left Indian borders, is having a sizeable number of women in them. Women from various socio-economic groups, castes, faiths, and classes have emigrated from India. The paper tries to analyze how the concepts of culture and identity operate in a diasporic context. Women, who contribute to half of the world population, have been rarely heard or considered in the historical record of literates and intellectuals. Further it intends to explain the significant role played by the women in the nineteenth century which facilitated transformation of many colonies of British and French Empires. The paper presents a theoretical framework in which the existence of women in small numbers facilitated marriages crossing various social barriers like caste, class and religious boundaries. In this regard, the authors suggest, however, indentured labor and specifically women in Indian diaspora acted as a bridge to maintain their links with their culture, traditions, language, religion and their past which they have left behind. They also ensure the preservation of these relations with India by celebrating Indian festivals like Holi for Hindus and Muharram for Muslims, in their traditional ways. It was women in the family, who played an important role in retaining and promoting their language by insisting on using native language for communications within the family. These women who remain integrated to their language and traditions orally played a vital role as carriers of their culture. The paper also discusses the Indian government’s cultural diplomacy, particularly under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, who has travelled to many countries in recent months to spread Indian culture and identity and reinvigorate their connectedness.

DIASPORA CULTURE: THE MAIN METHODOLOGICAL AND TERMINOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF CULTURE LOGICAL COMPREHENSION

The purpose of this article is to justify the necessary of the complex approach to study of the diasporian culture. It is shows that the culture of diaspora usually don`t considered as the original autonomous phenomenon, but only as a small separate marginal part of the native culture. This point of view bases on the outdated ansystem inefficient paradigm of so-called "Island" anthropology. One of the most effective approaches to understanding the essence of culture is theory of dissipative systems. The fact that the theory of dissipative systems not only explains but also proves the naturalness and regularity of the appearance of various branches/ directions of any culture is one of its most important results. Study of the diaspora culture that has been existed during the centuries in another country, it should include research on the entire material sphere of its life, all the artifacts created by its representatives. It is proves the expedience to use iconological method, the approaches of the Actor-Network theory (ANT) and the “Philosophy from below” in this contex. The ANT considers artifacts as active units/ actors of social relations, which make up “sociality”, as well as the principles of "Philosophy from below".

Transnationals’ Search for Home in Bhattarai's Muglan

This article addresses the issue of Nepali transnationals’ search for home as depicted in Govinda Raj Bhattarai’s novel Muglan. The novel presents three types of transnationals as its characters: diasporans, transnational mobiles and transnational outsiders. Throughout the life, all of them go on searching for a home that can provide them comfort, security and peace of mind. But none of the characters can achieve it. The novel presents the reality of Nepali transnational migration that is continued for centuries. For the analysis of the characters and their condition and consequences, the theories of transnationalism and diaspora have been used. Janine Dahinden’s idea of three types of transnational migrants and Steven Vertovec’s discussion on the practice of cultural diaspora have been the main theoretical bases for this study. Both of the theorists claim that the transnationals leave their homeland with the motive of making their home back in the land of origin better than that of the time they leave it. Throughout their stay in the host land, they try to achieve their goal sacrificing everything they have. Some of them try to find their dream home even in the host land. But finally, they cannot achieve their dream in the reality. So, the transnationals remain homeless throughout. Bhattarai’s Muglan gives fictio-realistic expression to this theoretical claim.

The linguistic landscape of Chinatowns in Canada and the United States: a translational perspective

ABSTRACT Chinatowns in Canada and the United States are marked by cultural hybridity, where the translation of various types, verbal and non-verbal, takes place to produce distinct urban meanings. On the basis of an ethnographic observation, this article reveals the role of translation in the signification and imagination of Chinatowns. Cultural diaspora in relation to multimodal translation is designed as a theoretical framework, under which linguistic, aesthetic and cross-cultural tensions are explained. It argues that the urban meanings of Chinatowns are generated through an omnipresent practice of translation enacted by the interplay of text, image and culture across time and space. In the meantime, Chinatowns have evolved from ethnic enclaves into cosmopolitan prototypes for future cities. A translational perspective on Chinatowns incorporates visual semiotics into verbal languages to unpack cross-cultural relations, which informs a great deal about the nature of translation.

Merchants and missionaries: Chinese evangelical networks and the transnational resacralization of European urban spaces

AbstractThis article sheds new light on the diverse modes in which migration and religion intersect in shaping everyday transnational practices by exploring the articulations of religion and business migration in an emerging Chinese‐led transnational mission field. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Wenzhou, Rome and Paris, I show how a large group of transnational Chinese merchants has adopted a vigorous homegrown evangelical Christianity as the spiritual and social anchor of their territorial mercantile culture in diaspora. These merchants have actively engaged in producing religious activities and events that link China to Europe and in resacralizing secular real estate and attaching evangelistic meanings to Europe's historic urban spaces. For rural‐originated migrants who embrace a global hierarchy of places, the evangelical discursive distinction between the mundane and the transcendent spheres finds expression in their perceived opposition between the peripheral local and the modern global centre in the global market economy.

Defense Strategy of Religious, Pancasila, and National Culture in Indonesian School and Indonesian Diaspora as Anti-Radicalism Efforts

This study aims to analyze the strategy of the Republic of Indonesia Embassy through the management of Indonesian Schools and diaspora in maintaining religious values, archipelago cultural treasures, and Pancasila values. This research was carried out based on the phenomenon that the Indonesian Foreign School (SILN) had planted religious values, in Pancasila and promoted the culture of the archipelago, but the diaspora preferred to live abroad. In addition, the issue of the tendency for radical religious understanding was also a concern for SILN students and the Indonesian diaspora in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the Netherlands as representatives of the Asian, African and European regions. This study uses descriptive qualitative methods the data was collected from diaspora representatives, the head of the Indonesian School, Indonesian School students, and the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while in-depth interviews, questionnaires, and observations were made of the 3 countries. The purpose of the results of this study was to map the suitability of the curriculum with the local environment from the dimensions of religion, Pancasila, and archipelago culture. In the future, the government not only organizes Indonesian Schools Abroad but also Indonesian Madrasas Abroad (MILN) to increase moderate religious values that are not affected by radicalism activities and provide distinctive characteristics of the archipelago culture and are characterized by Pancasila.

Contributors

Contributors

Transcultural Utopias: Exploring the Afterlives of Rabindranath Tagore, Visions of Utopia, and Aesthetic Formulations in Cultural Diaspora Practice

ABSTRACT This article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of the future, continuously engaged with and drawing from the past, in relation to my own creative practice as theatre and film director, curator, and singer-performer, a practice that continuously engages with the resonances of Tagorean utopia. Through three case studies from the author’s creative engagement with Tagore’s utopia, the article explores (1) the building of transcultural utopias in which Tagore and Leonard Elmhirst participated and how Dartington Hall rapidly became a magnet for artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians; (2) Tagore’s opera Tasher Desh (Land of Cards, 1933), a powerful political satire on fascism/free will; and (3) the author’s feature film Life Goes On and the Tagorean construct of the absent-present mother figure.

THE PHENOMENON OF UKRAINIAN DIASPORIC CINEMA IN THE CONTEXT OF CANADIAN MULTICULTURALISM POLICY

The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the genesis and development of Ukrainian cinema in the conditions of being outside the ethnic territory. The author explores cinema as one of the essential aspects of the national and cultural movement of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada from the second quarter of the 20th – to the beginning of the 21st century. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of Canadian multiculturalism and its role in the development of both Anglo-French and Ukrainian cultural traditions. The relevance of this work is related to the current geopolitical, economic and cultural state of Ukraine in the world. Today, in the conditions of military aggression, ethnic genocide, and information chauvinism, which caused a new wave of Ukrainian emigration, it is necessary to take steps to preserve the national heritage and acquaint the world community with the achievements and urgent needs of Ukraine. Therefore, cultural and strategic cooperation between Ukraine and Canada is too important. This publication summarizes the main aspects of the history of Ukrainian and Canadian cinema, formulates standard and distinctive features of Western – Anglo-Saxon, French, and East Slavic – Ukrainian film tradition, analyzes various manifestations of Ukrainian diaspora cinema in Canada, and studies acculturation trends. We included the necessary source base to achieve this goal, containing Canadian and Ukrainian periodicals, the vast majority of which were put into scientific circulation for the first time. Based on carefully studied relevant historiography, the author draws the appropriate conclusions necessary for the entire disclosure of the topic of the scientific article. It is essential to compare the vision of the creative process from the standpoint of historians, cultural study researchers, and artists - actors, directors, and screenwriters who have influenced the development of domestic and foreign cinema. The article's methodology consists of analysis, historical-comparative, and historical-genetic methods. The object of the work is the culture of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, and the subject is the analysis of the history and development of Ukrainian cinema in Canada as a multicultural state. This article attempts to supplement and summarize various aspects of the problem.

Beyond Listening: Systemic Transformation in Fashion Studies and Fashion Collections

In their First Word essay, “Listening as a Radical Act,” Erica de Greef, Shayna Goncalves, and Angela Jansen (2021) argue for the importance of listening as a means to overcome our legacies of colonization. Without listening, it is too easy to assume that “fashion” is inherently capitalist and modern, created by genius designers (artists) in Western fashion capitals (Paris, London, New York) and that everything else is just a pale imitation. The way I have stated this might seem like an exaggeration—surely it can't be that bad in fashion studies—but as the authors have pointed out from their own diverse perspectives, it really is that bad. Too many people have experienced the study and curation of fashion as a devaluing gauntlet.The first book I can think of that explicitly questioned the colonial underpinnings of fashion studies, Re-Orienting Fashion (2003), was published less than two decades ago. In 2016, the book's primary coeditor and member of the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF), Sandra Niessen, reappraised the state of the discipline:As a historian of fashion, dress, and the body with expertise on African dress and fashion (Akou 2011), contemporary Islamic fashion, and working-class histories of dress in the United States, I agree with Niessen: We have made some progress, but fashion studies as a discipline has hardly been transformed. This is disheartening, especially when I think about the cultural importance and tremendous creativity of sartorial expression in many African and African diaspora cultures. As a graduate student, I never had to justify the value of studying African fashion because my advisor was Joanne Eicher (2022). Most beginning scholars are not that lucky.Listening is critical for decolonizing fashion studies, but it is not enough. Like art history, the study of fashion is about material culture; it cannot be fully understood through images alone. Fashion studies is also about people and places that support fashion practices— photographers, bloggers, designers, makers, fashion magazines, models, retail stores, etc…. Scholars can (and do) study contemporary practices, but what about the histories behind them? How do we know that African fashion changes? What is happening now that is different from ten or fifty years ago? As explored in Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices (McGregor, Akou, and Stylianou 2022), one of the reasons that fashion studies is so mired in Eurocentrism is because fashion collections in museums so rarely include examples of fashion from Africa or from other non-Western cultures. Instead, traces are scattered in other kinds of collections—categorized as art, trade goods, and “ethnographic” artifacts. For example, in my own study on the history of Somali dress, I did not find a single artifact in a fashion collection; everything was held by museums of art and natural history. Similarly, collections of African art in museums often include elements of dress such as textiles, jewelry, and masks, but rarely do curators attempt to include contemporary fashion or to represent individual fashion designers in their permanent collections.Transforming museums—whether by pulling these traces of fashion histories back together or by making fashion collections more inclusive—will not be easy. It is not easy for museums in Europe and North America to build trust among potential donors in Africa and the African diaspora, especially when so few curators are people of color. It is not easy for museums (anywhere) to justify their budgets when governments and nonprofit organizations have so many other pressing needs to address. Wealthy funders can have interests that are sharply different from scholars and museum visitors; sometimes they resist the most basic reforms.Just like African scholars and makers of fashion deserve to be heard, African fashion deserves to be seen in museums. True, systemic transformation of fashion studies and fashion collections will be a tremendous challenge. Listening is essential, but change is going to be limited until we change how we curate and access collections.

Gender and Racial inequality in James Baldwin’ Go Tell It on the Mountain and Claude McKay's, Home to Harlem comparative study.

Abstract
 In both Southern African literature and African American literature, racism is a big problem. The two are different, though, because the former were more resolute and brave in their fight against racism, which was covered by the "apartheid" law. While the latter were more passive and suffered from an identity crisis due to the overwhelming presence of whites, the former were due to many years of oppression, torture, and subjugation. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the gender and racial inequality in the literature of the African-American writers James Baldwin and compare the novels "Go Tell It on the Mountain" with Claude McKay's "Home to Harlem" with similar themes. In their novels, the two novelists are endowed with a great insight with which they write of difficulties that all humans encounter through a perceptive view of the stubborn, heart-breaking dilemmas that plague individuals of all races. Baldwin was considered a traitor to the black race for failing to face racism, and Richard Wright referred to him as a "fag." The writer Baldwin did not stick to the skin colour of his friends to look for a tangent between their lives and the history of racism in the United States. McKay was deeply interested about the culture of the black diaspora as a result of his strong dedication to black consciousness. McKay explores Harlem's wonder, excitement, and boundaries by recognising other places where the black community thrived in 1920s black America when he depicts black life and community concepts. Gender and Racial inequality are definitely our primary concerns. Both novels considers as a literary depiction of the reality of an expansive African diaspora in the early 20th century.

Introduction: Diverse Aspects of Diaspora Culture in the Era of Re-Migration

Introduction: Diverse Aspects of Diaspora Culture in the Era of Re-Migration

Leveraging African Spirituality and Popular Culture betwixt Africa and the African Diaspora

Ama McKinley’s article, ‘Beyoncé Serves African Spirituality in “Lemonade”’ in The Huffington Post (2016), depicts Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as ‘an artist of the Earth, using her stage and global influence to teach about the human condition, using symbology and language that is sacred and pronounced beyond a few approved circles’. This view partly epitomizes the resilience of African spirituality in the diaspora, where Beyoncé in ‘Lemonade’ invokes so much of the Yoruba tradition, grounded in African tradition, by offering a musical and visual journey through the African diaspora. African spiritualities touch on and imbue every facet of life and thus cannot be separated from quotidian, mundane thought. This article explores African spirituality as mostly concerned with the pursuit of cosmic balance and human flourishing through a matrix of worldviews, belief systems and ritual praxis. We employ Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s music albums Lemonade and Black is King; and Ryan Coogler’s movie Black Panther to explore the intersectionality of African spirituality and popular culture in the African diaspora. We demonstrate how and to what extent the religious, moral, sociocultural and popular imaginaries linked to indigenous African worldviews and the African diaspora are continually contested and negotiated.

Kevin Dawson, Under currents of power Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

Kevin Dawson, Under currents of power Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

About Africa and about yourself in it (Russian wives of Africans in the literary space)

The article is devoted to the history of the creation and analysis of literary works created by Russian compatriots living in Africa today. Educated women who left the USSR/Russia is not alien to literary interests. Their works are autobiographical. But these are not only autobiographies of the individual, These women write a biography of" Russian " Africa against the background of large-scale socio-political and socio-cultural processes and events of the twentieth century, creating a unique stylistic atmosphere of the described era and continent. Women's existence and life description in the conditions is an independent and at the same time dependent segment in the general culture of the Russian diaspora. The most important part of the migration process is social and household adaptation. And how successful this process is depends on a number of factors, one of which was the need to master new cultural skills and attitudes, combining them with everyday practices exported from the Homeland. Their prose works also reflect a nostalgic sense of waiting for the Motherland. At the same time, their works are an artistic heritage on topical issues of the life and culture of compatriots in Africa, the moral and spiritual foundations of their time, which they generously share with new generations of Russians The artistic prose and journalism of Russian women permanently residing in Africa are interesting and significant as a full-fledged source for historical, cultural, sociological, and anthropological research.

Transcultural character of the religious life of diaspora culture (on the example of the Armenian diaspora in Ukraine)

Transcultural character of the religious life of diaspora culture (on the example of the Armenian diaspora in Ukraine)

Topology of the sacred and agency

On the background of resurging interest in ‚sites of power’, on both sides of the Atlantic, this essay presents a feature, sometimes marginalised in their theories: ‘agency’. It is understood that the recognition of the relation between ‘topography’ and ‘agency’ is required, to understand the dynamics of such sites, as experienced and codified in cultures and religions. This essay focusses on the ‘sites of water’ as important archetypes of Bantu African and Brazilian Diaspora cultures and religions. On the assumption of ancient formative connections of the Bantu with the Afro-Asiatic cultures, to which the Hebrew belongs, corresponding reports and concepts from the Bible are included in this analysis, disclosing systematically interesting features on this matrix by ‘archaeology of culture’.

Archaeology of Historic Kormantse and the Colonial Trans-Atlantic Encounter

ABSTRACT Today, the name “Kormantse” (alternately Coromantee) continues to evoke significant pride in numerous African diaspora societies who claim descent. Scholars have sometimes cast such heritage claims as based on an “imaginary” reference population. However, Kormantse was a real place populated by real people. This paper reviews an archaeological research project at Historic Kormantse located in coastal Ghana (Gold Coast); the project’s main objective was to examine residents’ cultural responses to the trans-Atlantic colonial encounter. We sought to explain the processes by which settlement populations negotiated their survival since European contact in the sixteenth century. Archaeological traces reflecting exchanges, trade, occupations, burial practices, resistance, and technology are examined here as indices of the community’s identity and responses to changing conditions. The challenge of fully explaining Kormantse’s role in African diaspora cultures is also discussed. While Kormantse diaspora cultural signatures are real, not imagined, our understanding of them remains elusive.