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Abstract
Studies of assimilation tend to focus on whether or not members of a migrant group are adjusting to their new surroundings. This article inverts this focus, asking not how migrant groups adjust, but rather how migrant groups use the language of assimilation to explain generation gaps and other exigencies of migration. This inversion sheds light on the ways a migrant group's epistemological assumptions underlie their understandings of cultural identity, and shape how they might respond to dilemmas caused by migration. Building upon ethnographic fieldwork among Samoan migrants in the United States, the article explores how and why community workers use the rhetoric of assimilation to teach Samoan parents how to raise children in the US context.
Acknowledgements
The SSRC International Migration Fellowship enabled me to do the fieldwork for this analysis. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Anne Lorimer, Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj, James Rizzo, and Paitra Russell all helped through comments and conversations to improve this piece. I am also indebted to my two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful interventions were invaluable.
Notes
1. See Gershon 2001 for a more detailed analysis of Samoan migrants’ experiences with government funding.
2. For a discussion of the Samoan diaspora in context with other Pacific diasporas, see Gershon Citation2007.
3. In 1997, Western Samoa officially changed its name to Samoa. For the sake of clarity, in this article I shall refer to (independent) Samoa.
4. Migrants from (independent) Samoa frequently moved to American Samoa and aligning themselves with their American Samoan relatives before travelling to the United States.
5. This was a recent high school graduate who decided she wanted to go to university in New Zealand instead of the United States, and was able to do so because her aunt lived in Wellington.
6. See Ong (2003) for ethnographic examples in which social workers’ practices emerge seamlessly out of neoliberal ideology.
7. My language in this article will reflect this particular nostalgia. Rather than distinguishing between (independent) and American Samoa in my general discussion, I am referring to Samoa as a unified territory in much the same way that my interlocutors in the field would.
8. Douglass Drozdow St. Christian (1997, p. 33) argues that in Samoa people describe the fa'asamoa as a similar utopic possibility. “While Fa'a Samoa is spoken of as a totalizing code, it is a code which is sought after or pursued, rather than adhered to or obeyed. It is, as one informant put it to me, ‘a Samoan's dream of what Samoa should be’, a process of desire, rather than a fixed standard of regulation.”
9. Both American and (independent) Samoa are far more multicultural than Samoan migrants will describe.
10. An exception to this is university students who took courses on Pacific ethnography.
11. Alessandro Duranti (Citation1994: 100–101) discusses how Samoan orators present this idealized totality at the beginning of a formal speech.
12. While people raised outside of Samoa were often accused of being fia-palagi and fia-poto, they too had moments when they criticized other Samoans for being inappropriately Samoan, for being Fobs (Fresh Off the Boat) or freshies. I was especially captivated by the term Fob as a criticism, because when I first heard it being used, it was often evoked in conversations in a way which from my perspective seemed contradictory. My interlocutors raised outside of Samoa would be explaining to me how much they valued being Samoan, and how important this was for them as an identity – a conversation that appears to be an occupational hazard for fieldworkers studying Samoanness. They might then start describing situations in which they felt as though they possessed less than adequate cultural knowledge to understand how to behave properly or speak properly in a given Samoan context. As the conversation gradually shifted to talking about people, these same people would use the term Fob pejoratively, although, if talking about a family member, with a certain amount of affection. I would be puzzled – people were telling me how they wished they understood their Samoan culture better, and then would be criticizing as inept and ineffectual precisely the people who had the knowledge they supposedly desired. When I asked one friend about this, pointing out to her that this seemed a bit contradictory, she agreed. She said that this had always bothered her, because people who used the term Fob were criticizing their own parents and older relatives implicitly, since all their relatives had to learn how to manage when they first migrated. In addition, they were criticizing people who had no way of knowing better, who had just arrived from Samoa and didn't know any better. I should also record that my friend then proceeded to tell me that sometimes her friends would tell her how fobby she was, largely because of the way she dressed (such as wearing hot pink pig-shaped bedroom slippers when she went shopping). Acting like a Fob, or being fobby, is not an accusation reserved only for recent migrants (or even Samoan-born). It can refer to any behaviour in a palagi context in which the person acted according to Samoan assumptions or principles, and thus acted inappropriately or appeared out of place. Intriguingly, both those raised outside of Samoa and Samoan-raised share a common assumption when they criticize someone for being a Fob or fia-palagi – each group is criticizing someone's failure to conform to contextual expectations of appropriate behaviour, failures which emerge out of not knowing the correct way to behave.
13. See Gershon 2000 for a more detailed account of ritual exchanges and migrant ambivalences towards participating in these exchanges.
14. Ochs describes how child-care responsibilities are often distributed among a wide range of care givers, but heavily placed upon older siblings. Adults will monitor children's play, but from a distance. Ochs writes: ‘When the infant is several months old, he or she is left for periods of time with one or more siblings. These older siblings may bring their charges with them to other activities in the village, for example to watch a game or to visit with friends. At four or five in the afternoon, the village is dotted with groups of children holding their younger sibs on their laps or straddled on their hips.’ (Ochs 1988, p. 80) A great deal of children's interaction, and hence knowledge transmission, takes place between agemates and siblings.
15. The Office of Samoan Affairs, where I spent the majority of my time, received outside assistance and funding from three sources–Asian/Pacific Island Hotline, the Juvenile Probation department through its intensive home-based supervision [IHBS] programme, and the San Francisco school system. The Samoan Community Development Center was not as youth-oriented, partially because it received a CDBG grant to help Samoan migrants find housing. This organization was also funded by an MOCYF grant, (Mayor's Office of Children, Youth and Their Families grant, begun under Mayor Agnos) which also encouraged a focus on youth. Soul'd Out, a third Samoan organization in San Francisco, was a church-based organization whose primary activity was providing youth with extra-curricular activities such as sports and Polynesian dance performances. While they were not able to receive city funds during 1998 (partially, but not solely, because Soul'd Out was a religious organization), this organization had regular luaus, fund-raising events in which they offered the paying audience a Samoan dinner and a student performance consisting of dances inspired by various Pacific Islands.
16. For a more detailed account of these training sessions or the role of these Samoan community workers as cultural brokers, see Gershon (Citation2006).
17. This was not the case in the churches I attended in New Zealand. There, any older person was entitled to discipline those who were younger.
18. While using culture to advocate for new forms of discipline was often a successful explanation for the parents, this was not as effective an explanation for the children. As one case worker told me after a gruelling session: The boy fails to understand why his father did this to all of them regardless of his upbringing and the culture. If he was going to be that mean, why have them in the first place. He said that his parents are using the culture as an excuse to their own meanness and stupidity. The boy insisted that he is not buying into this culture concept of discipline.