Diasporas: maintaining cultural identity

Individuals generally speaking gain their cultural identity through means of religion, nationality, ethnicity and also cultural practices. Cultural practices can include language, music, sport, literature, art, popular culture, mass culture, costume and even food. Rules of social engagement also forms part of ones cultural identity, including etiquette, manners, gender, values, laws and norms. Diasporas can be used to maintain aspects of cultural identity.

A diaspora can be defined as dispersed networks of ethnically and culturally related peoples. The concept is concerned with ideas of travel, migration, scattering, displacement, homes and boarders. It commonly, relates to displaced persons, wanderers, forced and reluctant flight. However they are no longer characteristically produced by forced dispersal and reluctant scattering. Today, they can include business people, foreign students and academics, retirees and long term cultural tourists.

Members of diasporic groups can be dispersed widely, even into remote locations, but still pick up news from home on a satellite dish or cable in those places where they are more concentrated or in cases where homeland news and information transmission is undeveloped, suppressed or radically contested, they may access video letters, websites or special delivery orders flown in on a regular basis. Alternatively, they might rent a movie or popular television series which has come to their local store along with fine capillaries of distribution which emanate from their place of ethnic origin, or even from one of the new centres of diasporic media production now springing up in the west. Diasporas create ‘a place where social issues are discussed and debated, especially because socio-political policies, processes, and tactics affect various nations, social classes, and genders differently’.

These are people on the global frontier looking for a connection with their places of origin rather than with the community in which they now live. National boundaries have now lost their sharp edges and are beginning to blur. Groups are now able to remain connected to their cultural roots and share a sense of community that once would not have been possible. Many people wish to learn about their culture because they want to recapture the power to name themselves.

Cultures, nations and identities are constantly being redefined in both real and virtual life, actively constructed and maintained through various media and the sciences. Diasporas are simply a way of utilising technology to enable the development of cultural identity for individuals no matter where in the world they reside.