Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas

Abstract

Using an exchange model, this article examines two ethnic groups, mobilized and proletarian diasporas, in a broad range of modernizing polities. The salient dimensions of myth, communications networks, and role differentiation permit one to distinguish these groups analytically over a long time period, and to subdivide the mobilized diasporas into archetypal diasporas and situational diasporas. The latter are politically detached elements of a great society, whereas the “homeland” of the archetypal diaspora is symbolically significant as a major component of the diaspora's sacral myth. Because internal resentments and the pressures of the international environment tend to undermine the value of a diaspora to the dominant elite of a slowly and unevenly modernizing multiethnic polity, these polities (Russia and the Ottoman Empire are examined closely) exhibit a succession of mobilized diasporas. Rapidly modernizing polities, on the other hand, tolerate mobilized diasporas, but turn increasingly for their unskilled, transient labor to groups which are more distant culturally and in physical appearance from the dominant ethnic group, and which, therefore, are increasingly disadvantaged and restive.