Voyages To American Suburbs Summary

Globalization has drastically modified how various cultures and societies affect each other. The disturbances caused by globalization have developed several issues among anthropologists, such as, how do we study such complex circumstances? Transnational families and global nationalism in particular, have introduced foreign obstacles for anthropologists, as there is no set, scientific ways to study such realities. With globalization presenting an ever changing world, both single and multi sited field work have its place, as anthropology is not limited by a specific set of rules such as scientific study. How do we study a world of flows? Or as Cathy Small asked:

“What happens, then, when half of the population who belong to one’s ‘cultural group’ live across an ocean and in a

While studying a culture for so long and with such devotion certainly allowed Cathy to gain a better understanding of Tongan life, it also came with downfalls. A potential downfall of spending too much time with a group may result in the anthropologist becoming too invested. This issue can be raised when discussing Small’s book, Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs, as it can be argued that Small neglects to discuss negative developments within villagers as a result of her being too invested within their culture. Global nationalism has brought along a system of ethnography, which must adjust accordingly to the changes in space and time. One way of producing such content is by studying cultures via a hybrid single-site field work, such as the one used by Ulf Hannerz. Hannerz choose specific sites such as Jerusalem, Johannesburg and Tokyo, at which he stayed and studied various individuals. According to Hannerz: “…I was clearly not trying to study the ‘entire culture and social life’ of these three cities. I was merely trying to get to know some number of foreign newspeople stationed