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"Material culture Tonga."
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Creating a Nation with Cloth
Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation-fonua-which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the \"multi-territorial nation,\" the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.
eBook
Marking indigeneity : the Tongan art of sociospatial relations
\"This book explores how Tongan cultural practices conflict with and coexist within Hawaiian society\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Stone architecture, monumentality and the rise of the early Tongan chiefdom
Monumental construction is commonly associated with the rise of complex societies and frequently supported the ceremonies and ideologies that were instrumental in the creation of the new social order. Recent fieldwork at Heketa in eastern Tongatapu recorded stone-built platforms for houses and seats, and a three-tiered tomb and trilithon. Tongan tradition and archaeology combine to show that these were the setting for new ceremonies instituted by the emergent Tu’i Tonga lineage in the fourteenth century AD as they laid the foundations of the early Tongan chiefdom. Key to their success were activities that emphasised the sacred origins of the living Tu’i Tonga, including the drinking of kava and the presentation of first fruits to the chiefs.
Journal Article
Ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Zimbabwe: people, pots, structures and scientific mementoes
In the 1970s, I began an ethnoarchaeological study into types of structures, pottery and population numbers in rural areas of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). This study extended to every major linguistic cluster in Zimbabwe, including Kalanga and Matabele, and provided a background to different macro-identities in the material-culture record. In the process, I acquired various ‘scientific mementoes’ for my personal use. These mementoes ranged from axes, beadwork and pottery to doors, drums, thumb pianos and ritual objects. Here I provide some background to Tonga and Korekore items collected from the Zambezi Valley, as well as from Central Shona in the Runde and Buhera areas and Ndau villages near Chikore Mission. The larger project encompassing these diverse areas had three goals: to clarify excavated features uncovered at Great Zimbabwe and Leopard’s Kopje Main Kraal; to estimate prehistoric populations based on the ratio of structures to people; and to record different ceramic traditions. At the time, the minimum household throughout the country comprised a kitchen, sleeping room and granary. Although low, a ratio of four people per household provides an average for estimating prehistoric populations. For ceramics, collections were sufficient for stylistic analyses but because of modern market forces, frequencies of functional types are not relevant to archaeological assemblages. Even so, these field data help to elucidate the human context for the kind of pottery fragments archaeologists often study. Conclusions such as these informed later research but original field data appear here for the first time.
Journal Article
Determinants of innovation in the handicraft industry of Fiji and Tonga: an empirical analysis from a tourism perspective
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of innovation in handicraft industry of Fiji and Tonga. Design/methodology/approach – Data for this study was collected via face-to-face interviews with handicraft sellers in Fiji and Tonga. In total, 368 interviews were conducted in Fiji and Tonga out of which, 48 was from Tonga and 320 was from Fiji. Findings – The results of this study show that eight factors; namely, value adding, design uniqueness, new product development, cultural uniqueness, advanced technology, experience of owner, ability of owner to adapt to trends in market and quality of raw materials have significant impact on level of innovation in handicraft industry of Fiji and Tonga. Originality/value – To date, none of the existing studies have examined determinants of innovation in handicraft industry of the Pacific Island countries. This is a pioneering study that examines determinants of innovation in handicraft industry of Fiji and Tonga.
Journal Article
TAPUA: \POLISHED IVORY SHRINES\ OF TONGAN GODS
This paper investigates the tapua—close relative of the Fijian tabua—a secretively sequestered supreme form of godly embodiment in Tonga and argues that the tapua is ancestral of the tabua. The symmetrically crescentic form of tapua is a more salient feature of the objects than the material used to make them. Strong links between tapua and gods receiving the first-fruits demonstrate the likelihood that the object originated as a token plantain presented as a crop fertility offering.
Journal Article
When gifts become commodities: pawnshops, valuables, and shame in Tonga and the Tongan diaspora
Far from being displaced by modernity, the exchange of women's textile valuables of little practical value but enormous ritual significance is increasing in importance in Tonga and amongst Tongan migrants in the industrial West. The dwindling production of and increasing demand for these textile valuables have prompted entrepreneurs to open pawnshops, where customers who are monetarily poor mortgage valuables and customers lacking in exchange networks buy unclaimed valuables. Pawnshops convert valuables into commodities and transform the social relations among those involved. However, the one emotion that underlies traditional exchange, shame, remains central to the transactions, albeit in unevenly distributed fashion. The transformation of textiles from gift to commodity displays both rupture and continuity with pre-modern forms of exchange, continuity operating at the level of emotional subjectivities. Our analysis foregrounds objects, on the one hand, and emotions, on the other, as shaping the course of cultural and social history. /// Loin d'être supplanté par la modernité, l'échange des textiles féminins sans grande valeur pratique mais de signifiance rituelle considérable augmente en importance à Tonga et parmi les immigrés tongiens dans les pays occidentaux industriels. La production décroissante de ces textiles précieux et leur demande croissante ont motivés des entrepreneurs à ouvrir des monts-de-piété, où les clients manquant d'argent mettent à gage leurs textiles précieux et où les clients dépourvus de réseaux de fournisseurs achètent ceux qui restent non réclamés. Les monts-de-piété convertissent ces objets précieux en commoditiés et transforment les relations sociales entre les personnes concernées. Néanmoins, la honte, une émotion qui sous-tend les échanges traditionnels, continue à occuper une position centrale à ces transactions, bien que de façon non équilibrée. La transformation des textiles en commoditiés présente aussi bien des aspects de rupture que de continuité avec les formes d'échanges pré-modernes, où la continuité s'opère au niveau des subjectivités émotives. Notre analyse met en valeur le rôle déterminant des objets d'une part et des émotions d'autre part dans le cours de l'histoire sociale et culturelle.
Journal Article
Materialising the king: The royal funeral of King Tāufa`āhau Tupou IV of Tonga
The arrival of the body of King Tāufa‘āhau Tupou IV, in Tonga on 12 September 2006, prompted complex funerary rites modelled on those of the previous monarch, Queen Sālote. Instead of looking at how funerals reinforce kinship ties or what the effective cost is of the objects exchanged, I concentrate on the presented objects, which formed the focal point of the funerary rites. In doing so, I engage with Keane (2005: 184) who asserts the relevance of semiotics in answering the question: ‘How can we both understand things and do full justice to their materiality?’ I argue that traditional prestigious objects (barkcloth, mats, baskets and coconut oil), ‘modern‐times’ valuables (flower garlands, flower baskets, and crocheted bed spreads), and contemporary objects (cakes wrapped in cling film, screens with chocolate, plastic baskets filled with bags of crisps, chocolate and sweets), materialise qualities the deceased king embodied as a descendant of a mythical ruler, as the fourth king in the modern Christian dynasty and as a contemporary ruler who reformed both education and economy. A consequence of materialising qualities is that they become contingently bound up with other qualities (Keane 2005: 188). I thus concentrate on those objects where the bundling of qualities is realised visually, examining how barkcloth, fine mats, baskets and coconut oil embody female generative power, protecting, controlling and linking qualities. It is the qualities of the objects bundled in the matter of the objects themselves that make some objects matter more than others.
Journal Article
From Tongan Meeting House to Samoan Chapel
While evidence for a strong, long-standing, and direct connection between Sāmoa and Tonga before European contact is well known, this paper provides a case study of Sāmoa-Tonga interaction by indigenous agency. It shows that the Samoan fale āfolau (long house) is convincingly interpreted as an historic introduction from Tonga, with Samoan modification, which served as an early Christian chapel design. A Tongan origin for the fale āfolau is an especially contested viewpoint in present-day Sāmoa, where many consider it to be a truly indigenous design.
Journal Article