Cultural knowledge is often discussed as something just below the level of conscious awareness: a bodily or mental habitus that suffuses and constitutes the self. Anthropologists, Malinowski first among them, have long played with the differences that exist between what people say they do and what they in fact do, finding particular depth and importance in the latter. However, local peoples' engagements with the institutions and promises of modernity often make it harder to accept this claim about the centrality of subconscious cultural knowledge, as culture itself becomes an object of reflection, critique, and debate. Ilana Gershon's multi-sited, ethnographic account of Samoan migrants in diaspora provides an important analysis of the ways in which cultural knowledge is transformed as it becomes more objectified.

Focused on Samoan migrants in New Zealand and the United States during the mid-1990s, Gershon tracks the ways in which people attempt to draw distinctions between what is for them “cultural” and “acultural,” between fàasamoa (the Samoan way), on one hand, and capitalist projects of accumulation or neo-liberal projects of personal accountability on the other. Dislocated from the kinship, religious, and political structures of Samoan villages, migrants have to develop new knowledge practices for the presentation and dissemination of Samoan culture. In an importantly comparative analysis, Gershon pays particular attention to the presentation of Samoan-ness in community organizations that have to compete for grant money from New Zealand as opposed to the United States. Samoan culture can be labeled as “culture” for New Zealand granting agencies that model minority rights and community institutions on the example of the autochthonous Maori. But in order for community organizations to find funding in the United States, the same Samoan culture has to be labeled as a “race” or “ethnicity” on par with categories like “African American” or “Hispanic,” with youth who are “at risk.”

Using extensive material from interviews with Samoan migrants, community workers, and state representatives, this ethnography deftly tracks between many different perspectives on the use and circulation of cultural knowledge. This includes the ways in which Samoan migrants and the families they left behind learn to navigate with a lack of knowledge, as when migrants dodge phone calls from home, and families back home remain ignorant about the actual state of migrants' bank accounts during requests that they contribute to Samoan village ritual events. Gershon examines ways in which community workers have to be able to represent Samoan-ness as a unique way of being in the world while also dealing with the demands by the state that they translate Samoan-ness into just one among many cultural inflections on universal problems. She also explores ways in which the welfare state's emphasis on youth has transformed the orientation of Samoan families from one around a brother-sister dynamic of deference and respect to one grounded in a parent-child dynamic of instruction and care. This book is a major contribution to the understanding of the role of culture in migration, and also makes important interventions into contemporary debates about neo-liberalism, kinship studies, Christianity, and the anthropology of the Pacific Islands.