Expertise Series. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. xi, 192p. US$22.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8014-7805-5.
Facing the dilemmas of grant writing for the National Office of Samoan Affairs in California, Gershon opens the book by reflecting back on the experience. Gershon explains her initial grant writing with this office in the United States was unsuccessful because, as she later realized, she relied too heavily on culture, as she had learned to do after a year and a half of fieldwork among Samoan migrants in New Zealand. Her interlocutors in California were not convinced this strategy was persuasive; they had learned to focus on Samoanness as an ethnicity or minority status. Through this reflection Gershon opens the central theme of the book: the role of culture in government bureaucracies. She analyzes the consequences of being a culturebearer among Samoan migrants managing government bureaucracies. This research explains that differential access to social mobility available to Samoan migrants in the United States and New Zealand reflects not only the construction of culture, but also the different histories of dominant minorities in each nation.
Gershon ethnographically grounds terms such as culture and system by examining a historic moment of neoliberal reform of government bureaucracies from 1996 to 1998. Through participant observation and interviews with Samoan migrant-based churches and families, complemented by similar methods among Samoan community workers and their clients, Gershon shows the reader the complexities of interactions among migrants and government bureaucrats as they manage multiculturalism and often times use terms like culture and system in different ways.
This book shows not only how Samoan migrants manage the demands of their families and churches in creative and strategic ways, but also how, as both community workers and clients, Samoan migrants manage bureaucracies and government systems. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 (including chapter 1 and chapter 2) deals with “the project of being Samoan” (15) in a context where migrants often have to manage the contradictory demands of capitalist exchange and Samoan ritual exchange, traditional Samoan churches and evangelical churches, and more generally cultural and acultural systems. In these chapters, Gershon focuses on how Samoan migrants employ economic, social and communicative strategies to keep these spheres, or social orders, distinct.
Part 2 focuses on how Samoan migrants navigate government bureaucracies. Using a comparative framework, the book shows how different social, political and economic trajectories are forged in an ethnoscape marked by the historical legacies of the dominant minorities in each nation. Chapter 3 uses “classic” ethnographic understandings about roles, models of self, and village political systems to show how these form an epistemological foundation for Samoan migrants that impacts their communication with government bureaucrats in the United States. Gershon argues that these miscommunications are not the result of a culture clash but of a clash in reflexivities. Chapter 4 examines taken-for-granted assumptions about the nuclear family lurking in legislation designed to accommodate Polynesian extended families in New Zealand. Chapter 5 examines how Samoan community workers and their clients engage with assimilation rhetoric in the United States. She argues that when community workers enter the homes of Samoan migrants they are not acting in a Foucauldian manner aimed at controlling populations, but are instead acting as neoliberal instructors demonstrating to their clients how to distinguish between orientations to families and government and encouraging them to be choice makers.
Gershon analyzes this material in order to make two overarching theoretical arguments. First, responding both to the demands of her fieldsites and to anthropological debates over the culture concept, Gershon suggests that scholars need to account both for how the cultural and the acultural are constructed. Samoan migrants are a particularly well-suited people with whom to examine this theoretical intervention because, as the author notes, Samoan migrants are constantly differentiating between what is marked as fa’asamoa, “the Samoan way,” and that which is not, and thus considered acultural. Gershon further demonstrates how the acultural does more than naturalize hegemonic social orders: it provides opportunities for Samoan migrants to disentangle from Samoan social orders marked as cultural.
The second theoretical intervention Gershon outlines is a focus on reflexivities. Breaking with the anthropological tradition of reflexivity referring to the ways in which the subject position of the researcher affects ethnography, Gershon suggests a deeper awareness of how people’s “reflexive engagement with their own contexts is a crucial component for how and why people interact in ways that they do” (7). Gershon demonstrates how Samoan migrants and government bureaucrats, acting as social analysts, clash not in culture but in reflexivities.
This ethnography creatively weaves Samoan ethnography and kinship studies with theoretical approaches to systems, bureaucracies and community work in order to answer a “commonplace problem: How do people navigate contexts in which multiple social orders exist simultaneously?” (170). The book accomplishes this by shifting attention away from defining cultural worlds to looking at ways people act as social analysts and construct spheres as cultural or acultural, and thus how differences are made cultural. The book is strongest when it provides examples of the ways people navigate multiple social orders; for example Gershon describes a training session for juvenile probation case managers, one of whom was her Samoan interlocutor. She analyzes how miscommunications unfold and at times how her interlocutors strategically manage these miscommunications; this analysis sheds light not only on bureaucracies but also on the social lives of her interlocutors.
Because the chapters bring together a wide range of data, from the domain of ritual exchange to systems theory, in a clear and creative fashion, this ethnography will be valuable to undergraduates and scholars of the region, as well as to those interested in kinship, bureaucracy, policy, migration studies, neoliberalism and applied/engaged anthropology.
Jessica A. Hardin
Brandeis University, Waltham, USA
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