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This introductory chapter demonstrates the necessity of pushing beyond the expressive behavior model of the motivations of ethnic and racial groups in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. It argues that while the model can shed light on these motivations, there is clear evidence that such emotive commitments as engendered by transnationalist orientations are rarely sufficient to lead black activists, intellectuals, and politicians to take up the work of advocating for their ancestral homelands in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. The decisions that minority elites make about mobilizing in the foreign policymaking arena on behalf of their homelands emerge from strategic calculations balancing the value of the engagement against the costs accrued in the domestic arena. The chapter also establishes the theoretical context underlying this study, and outlines the research data and methodology used.

This chapter explores two generations of Ifugao mumbaki (ritual specialists) in the persons of Philippines-based male mumbaki Bruno “Buwaya” Tindongan and his son, transnational male mumbaki Mamerto “Lagitan” Tindongan. It also carries important contributions to the text by baki followers, allies, and detractors in the Philippines and in the United States, among them Lagitan's neo-shaman teachers and associates and other Filipino Americans. The chapter contests the discursive confinement of the babaylan in ancestral homelands, emphasizing a Native ritual specialist's multiple emplacements. It also complicates portrayals of land-based ritual specialists as uncolonized and nonmodern. The chapter draws on interviews and ritual participation in Banaue, Ifugao; Bunawan, Agusan del Sur; Quezon City, Metro Manila; Athens, Ohio; Los Angeles, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Queens, New York; Wallingford, Connecticut; and Ontario, Canada.

This chapter analyses three brief, powerful passages, from different environments and different literary genres. These reveal an enduring ambivalence towards Jewish life in ‘exile’, a reluctance to concede that the centuries of Jewish life in foreign lands were devoid of any positive qualities, and even — rather surprisingly — the suggestion that life in exile might have religious advantages for Jews that were not available in the Holy Land. In short, the actual treatment of exile in Jewish literary texts reveals more nuanced and multivalent aspects. The familiar geography of the traditional concept — exile as forced removal from the Land of Israel and the end of exile as return to that land — is occasionally subverted in unexpected ways. Perhaps even more surprising is a revalorization of the concept, in which living in the ancestral homeland is no longer automatically identified as good, and living outside the land as bad. This chapter attempts to illustrate some of the permutations of this central concept through a literary and conceptual analysis of the three pre-modern passages from Jewish literature.