Meanwhile, in recent years the category of diaspora has emerged conspicuously as a rival or at least as a supplement to earlier analytical approaches to migrations. In contrast to the political, economic, and demographic issues that loom largest in scholarship on migration, diaspora studies focus attention more on the social and cultural dimensions of large-scale migrations, and particularly on the experiences of expatriate communities and their descendants in relation to both homelands and host societies. The associations of diaspora studies with contemporary identity politics are clear, and they have sometimes led diaspora scholars into unnecessary debates – founded on a dubious politics of inclusion and exclusion – concerning which groups qualify for diaspora status. Nevertheless, the diaspora perspective has brought insight to processes of social and cultural interaction through deployment of concepts like syncretism, hybridity, creolization, and transculturation to problematize popular assumptions concerning assimilation and conversion.