Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs

By Cathy A. Small

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801477395
• ISBN13: 9780801477393
• Release Date: November 2011
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

WONDERFUL!

This book is so personal, yet anthropological. It gives a great insight to Tongan culture. I had to read it for an anthropology class, and found it quite enjoyable! I recommend it. The end is especially touching.

Nofo'a

Cathy Small has intimate knowledgeable of the culture and people of which she writes. She presents a very problematic but accurate picture of a culture that has emigrated from its source and roots in search of income and opportunity in western cultures. An ethnographical response is natural to this topic because it reads smoothly and allows for humanization of the topic.

Da Bomb

It's hella good for 2nd adn 3rd generations to learn about their culture and history.

A book that informs and also is a helluva good read.

I highly recommend Voyages to anyone who cares about people and families. It's amazing how a non-fiction book about Tongans living here in the US or in their own country can be so interesting to read. But it is! That's because the author helps us see these recent immigrants to the US as people-in fact, as people very much like those of us whose families came here a longer time ago. It even helped me to better understand what motivated my own family to come here a century ago. The book is not technical at all. It is written in style and language that is accessible to everyone. Migrants or immigrants seem to be on everybody's mind these days. Mostly we are led to think of them as a group of "others" who we need to regulate and be suspicious of. This book is important because Small draws us away from this kind of distancing and helps us to understand and be sensitive to the individuals. One can imagine relating to these people-perhaps because Small does and we can relate to her. Since reading it, I find myself seeing and hearing the flow of foreign languages in airports and restaurants, etc. I find myself thinking that these people whom I now am noticing are just like the ones I met in Small's book. That we share a common humanity is a message that we can't hear too often. And Small gives it to us so gently and in such an absorbing way that I think Voyages is a book that should be read very widely.