Voyages

In Voyages, Cathy A. Small offers a view of the changes in migration, globalization, and ethnographic fieldwork over three decades. The second edition adds fresh descriptions and narratives in three new chapters based on two more visits to Tonga and California in 2010. The author (whose role after thirty years of fieldwork is both ethnographer and family member) reintroduces the reader to four sisters in the same family—two who migrated to the United States and two who remained in Tonga—and reveals what has unfolded in their lives in the fifteen years since the first edition was written. The second edition concludes with new reflections on how immigration and globalization have affected family, economy, tradition, political life, identity, and the practice of anthropology.

Voyages is a valuable contribution to the literature on immigration and on Asian Americans. Its clear, informal prose style also makes it an ideal book for undergraduate or graduate classes in anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, or Asian American studies., Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs provide[s] valuable ways of thinking about migration, the nature of difference and flexible and sometimes transient identities....Small's book is full of experiential moments and turning points – expected and unexpected – in the lives of potential and actual migrants., Most Americans are unaware that the United States is a major terminus for the people of Tonga, an island nation in the South Pacific. Small examines Tongan migration to the United States in a transnational perspective, stressing that many of the new migrant populations seem to successfully manage dual lives, in both the old country and the new. To that end, she describes life in contemporary Tongan communities and in U.S. settings., The central idea of Voyages—that Tonga and all Tongans exist at this moment in time in a transnational space—comes through vividly and powerfully, and the durability of this image is testimony to the success of Small's experiment in ethnographic writing.

Cathy A. Small is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of My Freshman Year (as Rebekah Nathan), also from Cornell.