Description
Book SynopsisGovernment bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cultural diversity within their populations. Using culture as a category to process people and dispense services, however, can create its own problems and unintended consequences. In No Family Is an Island, a comparative ethnography of Samoan migrants living in the United States and New Zealand, Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories cultural and acultural become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations.
In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan migrants are minor minorities in an ethnic constellation dominated by other minority groups. As a result, they often find themselves in contexts where the challenge is not to establish the terms of the debate but to rewrite them. To navigate complicated and often unyielding bureaucracies, they must become skilled in wha
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Gershon provides a fine-grained analysis of distinctions within Samoan migrant societies that emphasise second-generation differences and the relationship between more established migrants and those they refer to pejoratively as 'fobs....' Avaluable [contribution]... to the gradually expanding literature on the Polynesian diaspora.
-- John Connel * Journal of Pacific History *
Table of ContentsIntroductionPart I
1. Exchanging While Not-Knowing
2. The Moral Economies of ConversionPart II
Introduction: Some Political and Historical Context
3. When Culture Is Not a System
4. Legislating Families as Cultural
5. Constructing Choice, Compelling CultureConclusionReferences
Index
