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Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs 2nd edition by Small, Cathy A. (2011) Paperback
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July 2, 2025
This is basically the third ethnography book I've ever read and, as I assumed, I continue to love the genre. People are wonderful things and it seems so intuitive to me that however we learn of broader sociological conditions and an understanding of the way that the world is, our most basic understandings come from inductive reasoning that starts at the individual level. Small does an incredible job at this low-level description of Tonga from the people that live in it. There is so much to glean from the family that she enters, stories that seem so familiar to me as a child of immigrants born in the US, tensions within families whose factors seem universalizable to humanity, and the effects that globalization has brought to the family structure. While there is an apprehension from Small about our ability to generalize larger sociopolitical theories from the one case study of Tonga, I am fully on board with her conclusions on globalization and migration which she makes at the end of the book.
I really, really, really think that you, whoever is reading this review (it's just me isn't it 😭), ought to read this book. Tongan culture and lifestyle is incredibly interesting to learn, especially when those things are explored through real life people. The changes that the island goes through, the family structure as many leave for industrialized countries, the way that traditions evolve and change as a response to globalization, all this is so fascinating. Nothing is radical in these findings; I would think that the type of person reading this book in current year (right now 2025) already knows about how globalization and neoliberal world policies have changed countries in the Global South as well as the countries where many have immigrated to and fro'. But the book has done an amazing job at making clear through Tongan example these ideas, including: the motivations of the immigrants (not, as the American Dream suggests, due to seeking individual movement in life opportunities or from a myth of the rugged individual), the ways that globalization and introduction of international markets have changed the economy of countries in the Global South, the development of the international family, and the future of those countries as the international family changes and potentially grows more and more distant, both culturally and in kinship.
I want to mention the more academic side of the book, which I personally found equally interesting if not more so. As an ethnography that was written close to the turn of the century, Small grapples with the practices and theory of her discipline as the world has changed and become more interconnected. There is a deep amount of reflexivity here, in both the ways that the discipline sees itself and its goals as well as in Small herself and the book she has written. I think I like this quality just in the same way I like it in Philosophy. The subject of inquiry is not just in what the discipline is oriented to study but includes the subject itself. Just as philosophy takes care to look into how arguments are made, what the nature of philosophy is, and what factors affect the types of arguments Philosophy makes, so too does anthropology. I find this fascinating and deeply enjoyable. I'm not sure if others are of similar mind but if you think you are, you should read this book. To be honest, even if you aren't you should read this book.
This reflexivity is found throughout, which invariably brings into focus the ethnographer's own position in the story. We are reminded that these stories are filtered through her informants (which itself is mentioned as a holdover from past ethnographer praxis), through her, and finally through us. I was often struck whenever she must remind herself of how her deeply seated biases change her interpretation of events from how her informants think because I must similarly be reminded! This is not a flaw of course. To acknowledge the ethnographer's positionality is a core part of the discipline's praxis; it is simply conceptually impossible to remove this from the ethnographer's experience and data, so better acknowledge and take in what it can reveal to us rather than ignore. And I am glad that Small has done so, as those revelations are throughout this book.
I really, really, really think that you, whoever is reading this review (it's just me isn't it 😭), ought to read this book. Tongan culture and lifestyle is incredibly interesting to learn, especially when those things are explored through real life people. The changes that the island goes through, the family structure as many leave for industrialized countries, the way that traditions evolve and change as a response to globalization, all this is so fascinating. Nothing is radical in these findings; I would think that the type of person reading this book in current year (right now 2025) already knows about how globalization and neoliberal world policies have changed countries in the Global South as well as the countries where many have immigrated to and fro'. But the book has done an amazing job at making clear through Tongan example these ideas, including: the motivations of the immigrants (not, as the American Dream suggests, due to seeking individual movement in life opportunities or from a myth of the rugged individual), the ways that globalization and introduction of international markets have changed the economy of countries in the Global South, the development of the international family, and the future of those countries as the international family changes and potentially grows more and more distant, both culturally and in kinship.
I want to mention the more academic side of the book, which I personally found equally interesting if not more so. As an ethnography that was written close to the turn of the century, Small grapples with the practices and theory of her discipline as the world has changed and become more interconnected. There is a deep amount of reflexivity here, in both the ways that the discipline sees itself and its goals as well as in Small herself and the book she has written. I think I like this quality just in the same way I like it in Philosophy. The subject of inquiry is not just in what the discipline is oriented to study but includes the subject itself. Just as philosophy takes care to look into how arguments are made, what the nature of philosophy is, and what factors affect the types of arguments Philosophy makes, so too does anthropology. I find this fascinating and deeply enjoyable. I'm not sure if others are of similar mind but if you think you are, you should read this book. To be honest, even if you aren't you should read this book.
This reflexivity is found throughout, which invariably brings into focus the ethnographer's own position in the story. We are reminded that these stories are filtered through her informants (which itself is mentioned as a holdover from past ethnographer praxis), through her, and finally through us. I was often struck whenever she must remind herself of how her deeply seated biases change her interpretation of events from how her informants think because I must similarly be reminded! This is not a flaw of course. To acknowledge the ethnographer's positionality is a core part of the discipline's praxis; it is simply conceptually impossible to remove this from the ethnographer's experience and data, so better acknowledge and take in what it can reveal to us rather than ignore. And I am glad that Small has done so, as those revelations are throughout this book.
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