Travel Motivations
Samoan ‘Malaga’ — Traveling to See, Represent & Reaffirm Family
For many traditional cultures around the world, travel is much more than leisure and recreation.
by Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto, Stephen Pratt, and Dawn Gibson
A Growing Diversity of Travel Motivation
Tourism is not just a leisure and recreation-based activity. People travel for all sorts of reasons other than to escape their supposedly mundane home lives for excitement in a faraway land.
For example, volunteer tourists, working holidaymakers, international students, seasonal migrants, expats, and religious pilgrims often merge leisure activities with periods of some form of work or study. Along with the diversification of travel and tourism, our social relationships have also expanded across ever-larger distances, which is also creating new motivations for travel.
There is, therefore, no clear line between leisure travel and other forms of mobility.
Traditional Travel in the South Pacific
The dispersed geography of the islands of the South Pacific has made long-distance travel and migration a fact of life long before the arrival of palagi (Europeans).
In Samoa, people travel away from their home islands for migration, education, employment, visiting friends and relatives, and cultural obligations, in addition to seeking leisure and recreation.
This great diversity can be seen in the Samoan beach fale (a kind of vacation hut) tradition, that is often part of people’s visiting friends and relatives (VFR) travel activities. Traditional fales are used for a combination of leisure, socializing, and ceremonial activities, while modern ones with air conditioning serve international clientele.
Indigenous forms of travel do not always align well with conventional definitions of tourism used by Western academics. In particular, Western understandings of tourism often overlook the importance of community, culture, and traditional obligations in shaping why and how people travel.
They also often fail to recognize that tourists are not just those coming from more developed countries to less developed ones.
To present a broader perspective, our research investigated whether Samoans considered their travel to be a form of tourism or something else.
Samoan ‘Malaga’
For the Samoans who participated in our study, modern ‘tourism’ is considered a palagi concept. They feel that the word ‘tourism’ does not capture the range of activities, meanings, and motivations that describe why they travel.
Instead, Samoan’s suggest that a better expression is found in the Samoan word, malaga.
Malaga has various meanings including ‘movement’, ‘travel back and forth’, and ‘migration’. It is also the polite alternative for alu (go) and sau (come), which refers to both visiting and returning with no set time duration.
In Samoa, the word malaga is used to represent travel to and from diverse social spaces and places (va) to pay respect and to demonstrate and maintain kin relationships. This is undertaken through both domestic and international travel.
Malaga thus challenges conventional Western understandings of tourism as mostly leisure-based, as well as Western understandings of migration as unidirectional and permanent.
There is a significant amount of mobility among Samoan residents. Almost three in five Samoans have traveled internationally, and four in five Samoans have traveled domestically beyond their island.
While many travel for education and business purposes, the most common motivation is to visit friends and relatives (VFR). However, they practice a specific type of VFR — fa’alavelave (traditional obligations).
Fa’alavelave is typically centered on special events, such as village chief installations, weddings, funerals, christenings, significant birthdays, and extended family reunions. The most recreational and enjoyable forms of fa’alavelave are weddings and birthdays.
International travel of this sort is often sponsored by extended family and diaspora organizations. Older Samoans, who often have more time to travel, are more likely to attend a fa’alavelave event.
In Samoan society, the elderly are highly respected. Their participation in traditional obligations is given high significance, both from the receiving kin and the extended family they represent.
The ability of older Samoans to travel, however, also depends to some extent on the inability of younger Samoans to travel. Because younger Samoans cannot always get away from work, they will often pay for their older relatives to represent their families.
The Samoan malaga VFR trips are about establishing, reaffirming, maintaining, and expanding familial bonds. But they are also a recognition that these peoples are coming from the same place, or ‘land’.
Land for Pacific Islanders, and in this case Samoans, is the center of their collective identity. It is the source of their genealogical roots and defines their roles, responsibilities, and heritage, both individually and collectively.
Family is what drives this sense of identity. As such, their travel and mobility are almost entirely viewed and defined from this perspective.
The Samoan case demonstrates how local communities in traditional societies in the developing world often have had a high degree of travel and mobility.
How and why they travel is just not what is traditionally thought of as ‘tourism’ in more developed economies, where traditional obligations are generally much weaker.
Although they vary from one culture to the next, family bonds are universal. And a better understanding of this form of travel provides considerable insight into the nature of human mobility across the planet.
This article is based on:
Gibson, D., Pratt, S., & Iaquinto, B. L. (2020). Samoan perceptions of travel and tourism mobilities — the concept of Malaga. Tourism Geographies, 1–22. doi:10.1080/14616688.2020.1780632
Please see the original article for a complete list of research references.
About the Authors
Dr Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include mobilities, sustainable tourism, backpackers and cultural geography. He is on the steering committee of AusMob (Australian Mobilities Research Network).
Professor Stephen Pratt is the head of the School of Tourism & Hospitality Management at the University of the South Pacific. His research interests include sustainable tourism development (economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts of tourism), tourism in small island states and film tourism. Steve is co-creator of The Travel Professors channel on YouTube.
Dr Dawn Gibson is a Senior lecturer at the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at the University of the South Pacific. She is currently undertaking research into food tourism, Pacific Island tourism mobility, agritourism, dark tourism in the Solomon Islands and resident and tourist perceptions of overtourism. She has an avid interest in education, especially as it relates to tertiary Learning, Teaching and Quality (LTQ).
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