At the heart of Samoan transnationalism is kinship or āiga which generates the matrix of relationships that extend across national boundaries and form the conduits along which cash, goods and ideas flow. Extended kinship is alive and well in Samoa because it remains crucial to access to land and marine resources, chiefly titles and socio-political status. However, an active and ongoing transnationalism requires an active commitment on the part of kin living abroad to the practices which give transnationalism form.

In expatriate Samoan communities in New Zealand, social and economic factors have reduced the numbers, scale and complexity of occasions for which the extended family is mobilised within the enclave. This in turn has attenuated the competitive pressures that drove social inflation during the 1970s and early 1980s. As economic times got harder for the less-skilled through the late ’80s and ’90s, the primary role of the āiga—a social matrix within which informal exchanges of goods and services occurs, providing some protection from harsh realities of life on the edge of a volatile economy—again became increasingly important. In this respect the role of āiga among migrants can be said to have almost turned full circle in the last 35 years.

The emergence of increasingly organised Samoan communities in overseas nodes, with comprehensive ranges of social activity, may localise the focus of much kin exchange and mobilisation within these increasingly autonomous nodes. The growing influence of people born and raised in these nodes may lead to declining support for activities in ‘home’ communities to which their ties are increasingly attenuated. The declining density of direct relations and number of transactions between nodes may undermine the foundations of transnational Samoa. The recently increased migration flows from Samoa (Bedford, 2007) may renew transnational ties and slow the decline, but are unlikely to reverse the declining number and strength of linkages between ‘overseas’ and ‘home’ nodes over the longer term.

These shifts in āiga organisation in the enclave may, in turn, influence the ways in which kinship is organised in Samoa for, as noted at the outset, migrant enclaves do not constitute discrete, distant communities but rather sites in which modification and experimentation are legitimated by the necessity of finding Samoan solutions to new social, economic and political realities. Those modifications that seem to meet new needs can find their way back into Samoan ‘traditional’ forms, and in the social space between these two settlements a meta-culture emerges which is neither a ‘migrant’ nor a ‘traditional’ culture but a contemporary Samoan one.