In this monograph, her second on Tonga, Helen Morton Lee reports the results of an extensive research project centered on the Tongan community of Melbourne, Australia, and touching on several other overseas Tongan communities. Although the research is concerned with people of all ages, it is focused more on younger people growing up in the diasporic Tongan community. The work is an extension of Lee’s earlier work on children and youth in Tonga itself.

Ultimately, the book is about the impact of migration of Tongans into new cultural milieus on Tongan notions of identity. For younger people growing up outside of Tonga, albeit inside a Tongan community, Tongan identity is as ambiguous as it is important. For most of the book, Lee presents an almost overwhelming variety of people’s perspectives on identity and their experiences of life in the diaspora. Repeating the varying accounts presented in the monograph is neither possible nor desirable in this review; indeed, so untamed is the material marshaled in the work that I am unsure that I would offer a précis if space permitted. The bottom line is that people struggle with new cultural forms and with each other over identity, and although most Tongans think being Tongan is important, little consensus exists on the details of that identity.

The most interesting part of the monograph for me is Lee’s use of chat room- and email-generated discourse. Although the status of such discourse might be somewhat clouded by the lack of attachment to an easily identifiable source (i.e., people are not necessarily directly or practically responsible to others for what they have to say), the discourse is nonetheless important. Not only do participants in the study get space in the text but the use of first-person narrative is also successful and, at times, compelling.

The research consultants’ voices are one of several ways in which experiences and perspectives are presented throughout the volume. Also, throughout the book, Lee offers observations on contextualizing and contributing factors to identity formation but little in the way of conclusions. Indeed, the concluding chapter of the work is entitled “Looking Forward” and expressly states the author’s unwillingness to offer conclusions except to suggest that change is inevitable. Although this may be justified by the monograph and the research on which it is based, I found it profoundly disappointing that a scholar of such obvious rigor and talent as Lee could not, or would not, draw some kind of conclusion. If you will indulge me, I will spend the rest of this review on this issue, and I do so not because Tongans Overseas is a weak monograph but, rather, the opposite.

In the context of the debates that have raged over postmodern critiques of the social sciences, a grudgingly respectful reaction to the death of the master (and even minor) narrative has occurred in the form of an empiricism that dares not end in conclusion. Certainly, plenty of recent work on Tonga is sophisticated empirically, theoretically, or both, but it steadfastly fails to yield even an empirical generalization, let alone a conclusion (beyond the observation that conclusions are passé). Although I have sympathy for the philosophical foundations of this position, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the results. The problem is not, as so many Jurassic-period colleagues claimed, that a postmodern position means that everyone’s conclusions are of equal standing. Rather, the difficulty lies in practices developing within the discipline that lead to this dearth of conclusions. Throughout my reading of Lee’s monograph, I wanted to know how many people were experiencing what, when, and with whom? At the risk of raising the specter of Durkheim, is there nothing that can be said of variation within a culture or community other than that it occurs? Surely patterns of variation are still worth describing, assessing, and analyzing. Unfortunately, in this book, Lee does rather too much of the first task and not nearly enough of the latter two, and in this, Tongans Overseas has far too much company of late.