Cathy A. Small is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University.
Review
"Small's commentaries are graceful, informative, and seasoned by a very deep knowledge of Tongan culture.
This book includes one of the sanest and most convincing arguments that I have read for experimentation in the
writing of ethnography, which is supported by the text itself as an exemplar of a modest, theoretically unpretentious
experiment that works very well indeed."
--George E. Marcus, Rice University
"While a few Californians may be aware of the Tongan immigrant population in their midst, 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 successfully to 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."
--Library Journal
"While a few Californians may be aware of the Tongan immigrant population in their midst, 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 successfully to 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."
--Library Journal
"[The central idea of the book--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."
--The Contemporary Pacific
"Cathy Small's study of migration between Tonga and the United States is at once a masterful case study of
emerging global social relations at the microlevel and a fascinating mediation on the questions migration poses
about the role of the ethnographer. . . . [F]ew authors have managed to document the social and economic effects
of contemporary migration with such well-rendered detail and such sensitivity to migration's consequences for individuals,
families, and communities. 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."
--International Migration Review
"To write a book that is both educational and entertaining is to be at once scholarly, thoughtful, and witty--a
major achievement. . . . Cathy Small understands what migration has meant, and still means in everyday lives, as
she empathizes with the plight of islanders uncertain over their landfall and destiny, and she captures their own
stories beautifully. . . . [O]ne of the most passionate and compassionate books on the South Pacific in recent
years."
--Pacific
"In Voyages, Diaspora is given a human face. . . . Small weaves her stories and analysis with a clarity and
compelling attentiveness to logic that do not sacrifice intricacy and nuance. . . . Voyages is an important and
thoughtful work. It supplies much-needed critical scholarship on a vastly understudied group of American immigrants.
It extensively clarifies with illuminating precision and lucidity the interplay of macro- and micro-levels of transnationalism.
And it breathes fresh air and careful self-reflexivity in ethnographic work without succumbing to capacious navel
gazing. Small's book is a useful complement to the literature on Diaspora and can well find its rightful place
within the scholarship on comparative ethnic studies. Scholars in the fields will learn much from Small's intelligent
braiding of grounded materiality with insightful theorizing. Her style of alternative ethnography can also serve
as a model for those who are interested in moving beyond the conventional methodological boundaries imposed by
social science disciplines."
--Journal of Asian American Studies
"Among the strengths of this immensely readable book is the presentation of aspects of the contemporary Tongan
migration experience through dialogue and life histories...The accessibility of its style and the immediacy of
the texture of everyday experience that it evokes will make it especially appealing to a wide range of students."
--The Australian Journal of Anthropology
Cornell University Press Web Site, February, 2001
Summary
This book documents an instance of one of the most momentous social phenomena of the late twentieth century:
the mass migration of the world's population from agricultural ex-colonies and ex-protectorates to the industrial
world. Cathy A. Small provides the poignant perspective of one extended family and one village in the Kingdom of
Tonga, an independent island nation in the South Pacific that has lost one third of its population to migration
since the mid-1960s. Moving between Tonga and California, Small chronicles the experiences over a generation of
the people who left the village of 'Olunga (a fictitious name to preserve anonymity) and the people who stayed.
She follows successive branches of one family, who settled in California from the 1960s to the 1990s, sketching
a striking picture of Tongan culture in the United States. She then returns to 'Olunga with Tongan emigrants and
their U. S. -born children and shows what has happened to village life and to kin relationships thirty years after
migration began. Throughout the narrative, small examines her own experience as an anthropologist, asking how the
migration of Tongans has affected what she sees and the way she writes.
