Government 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 what Gershon
calls "reflexive engagement" with the multiple social orders they
inhabit. Those who are successful are able to parlay their own
cultural expertise (their Samoanness ) into an ability to subtly
alter the institutions with which they interact in their everyday
lives. Just as the cultural is sometimes constrained by the forces
exerted by acultural institutions, so too can migrant culture
reshape the bureaucracies of their new countries. Theoretically
sophisticated yet highly readable, No Family Is an Island
contributes significantly to our understanding of the modern
immigrant experience of making homes abroad."
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