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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
Early cessation of ceramic production for ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga
Ancestral Polynesian society is the formative base for development of the Polynesian cultural template and proto-Polynesian linguistic stage. Emerging in western Polynesia ca 2700 cal BP, it is correlated in the archaeological record of Tonga with the Polynesian Plainware ceramic phase presently thought to be of approximately 800 years duration or longer. Here we re-establish the upper boundary for this phase to no more than 2350 cal BP employing a suite of 44 new and existing radiocarbon dates from 13 Polynesian Plainware site occupations across the extent of Tonga. The implications of this boundary, the abruptness of ceramic loss, and the shortening of duration to 350 years have substantive implications for archaeological interpretations in the ancestral Polynesian homeland.
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
Origin and Significance of a Founding Settlement in Polynesia
Selected prehistoric potsherds from the deepest cultural level of the oldest known archaeological site in the Kingdom of Tonga, within the Eastern Lapita province of western Polynesia, display decorative motifs characteristic of the Western Lapita province of modern-day Island Melanesia, to the west. Most of the stylistically anomalous sherds contain temper sands exotic to Tonga but, in one case, petrographically indistinguishable from temper in a Lapita sherd recovered from the Santa Cruz Islands of Melanesia, and are inferred to record maritime transport of Lapita ceramics into Tonga from Melanesia far to the west. The non-Tongan sherds found on Tongatapu provide direct physical evidence for interisland transfer of earthenware ceramics between Western and Eastern Lapita provinces, and the Nukuleka site, where they occur, is interpreted as one of the founding settlements of Polynesia.
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
Cheap meat
Cheap Meat follows the controversial trade in inexpensive fatty cuts of lamb or mutton, called “flaps,” from the farms of New Zealand and Australia to their primary markets in the Pacific islands of Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Fiji. Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington address the evolution of the meat trade itself along with the changing practices of exchange in Papua New Guinea. They show that flaps—which are taken from the animals’ bellies and are often 50 percent fat—are not mere market transactions but evidence of the social nature of nutrition policies, illustrating and reinforcing Pacific Islanders’ presumed second-class status relative to the white populations of Australia and New Zealand.
eBook