Definitional Issues
The term diaspora, whether applied to Armenians or other social formations that do not live in their homeland, has had many definitions and applications throughout its history. At its simplest and least precise, it has referred to all dispersed people, whatever the cause, size, organization, or duration of dispersion. By this definition, even the small, ever-renewed contingents of young Armenian scholars who studied Greek art and science in Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, and Caesarea from the fourth to the sixth centuries c.e. were a diaspora. At various times, the term has been used to refer to groups or colonies of expatriates, exiles, migrant populations of elite émigrés, prosperous merchant diasporas and impoverished labor diasporas, border-crossing transnational nomads, clusters of refugees, and communities of guest-workers, as well as all sorts of ethnics, not to mention oppressed minorities (e.g., “the queer diaspora”; Patton and Sanchez-Eppler, 1999). At its...
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Tololyan, K. (2005). Armenian Diaspora. In: Ember, M., Ember, C.R., Skoggard, I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29904-4_4
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