Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories "cultural" and "acultural" become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations.

Ilana Gershon is Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. She is the author of The Breakup 2.0, also from Cornell.

Gershon provides a fine-grained analysis of distinctions within Samoan migrant societies that emphasise second-generation differences and the relationship between more established migrants and those they refer to pejoratively as 'fobs....' Avaluable [contribution]... to the gradually expanding literature on the Polynesian diaspora.

Donald L. Brenneis, University of California Santa Cruz:

No Family Is an Island is innovative, ethnographically and comparatively rich and compelling, and theoretically subtle and invigorating. Ilana Gershon has an imaginative and sophisticated sense of problems—and of those sites, events, and practices that provide particularly revelatory points of entry into wrestling with those problems. This book is a major contribution to the Samoan literature, to the ethnography of neoliberalism in situ and in practice, and to the anthropology of bureaucracies and of policy. It is a remarkable achievement.