Table of Contents
Robin Cohen begins his list of the features of diaspora with following: ‘dispersal from a traditional homeland … [and] the expansion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions’ (Cohen 2008,161). Labor for money is often cited as a main reason for emigration of Tongans overseas and to nodes in the Tongan diaspora. A decidedly transnational economy has resulted for members of this ethnoscape with Tongans traveling overseas from their homeland to earn and remit cash, thus enabling themselves and their families to purchase Western goods and other trappings of modernity. Because most remittances are sent directly to relatives in the homeland, I would add that the desire to fulfill abiding duties towards kin regardless of where they are located is an equally salient feature of modern diaspora. For people from the Kingdom of Tonga who have family ties connecting them to large diasporic communities like that dwelling in Auckland, New Zealand, the idea of laboring for money cannot be divorced from ‘on-the-ground’ efforts to maintain good social relations in communities in which social interactions are often public and usually highly scrutinized.
The transnational Tongan economy is intricately intertwined with the Tongan kingdom’s economy through sending remittances, informal export of local goods which include ritual foods and textiles, and through the movement of people between communities in the Tongan ethnoscape (Lee 2004). Members of the Tongan diaspora remit cash and goods valued between 40 and 50 per cent of Tonga’s GNP. These valuables are primarily categorised between family members as gifts (Brown 1998; Lee 2004). Indeed gifts that Tongans present to one another at ritual events such as funerals, weddings, and to other life crisis events generally constitute some combination of food, modern wealth (cash) and textiles (known as koloa and constituting traditional wealth). Sometimes, one kind of wealth is deemed more desirable than the other. Recent ethnography of Tongan exchange emphasizes the increased use of cash as gifts in ritual exchange (Addo 2004; Evans 2001; James 2002). This paper examines the case study of a funeral held by diasporic Tongans, members of a family who requested that condolence gifts brought to the event be only in the form of cash—textiles were not preferred. My analysis of the case reinforces Cohen’s statement: the reality that Tongan families have made a practice of venturing from the homeland into diaspora in order to increase their access to cash. It also illuminates the extra-monetary expenditures which transnational Tongans (those who travel regularly or maintain active social and economic ties between homeland-based and diasporic communities) have to bear in order to perform rituals and otherwise ‘be Tongan’. Moreover, it highlights how diasporic Tongans, as well as homeland Tongans interacting with each other negotiate modernity, the value of wealth and their social status.
Life crisis moments like funerals are times when the reputation of family is brought to the fore and it can be affected by how the family deals with gifts presented at the ritual. During my fieldwork in Tonga (2000–01), a family with whom I had grown very close tragically lost a daughter and her infant child in a car accident in Auckland, New Zealand, the city with the largest Tongan diasporic community. This was a difficult time, not least because of the death of a close relative, but also because travelling to host a funeral in New Zealand, a country where most of the deceased’s immediate family did not live, would be costly in terms of time and money and could thus adversely affect the family’s ability to maintain its reciprocal social relations. To circumvent the need to spend time reciprocating traditional wealth items like textiles, the family spread the word that they would be accepting no textile gifts, only cash gifts. The reason for their anomalous request was that they anticipated their time in Auckland would be limited, thus preventing them from reciprocating the textiles properly; cash would, and could, be reciprocated later, in accordance with modern customs. Their sentiments were made known via Tongan radio announcements and by word-of-mouth in both Tonga and in Auckland. One widely-held perception was that the family was trying to shirk tradition; another was that it was just inevitable that, with the increasing use of cash in gift exchange, in both Tonga and in the diaspora, money was finally beginning to show signs of replacing koloa faka-Tonga (women’s valuables) in ritual presentations in diaspora. While this latter concern cannot be accurately answered—Tongan women’s practice of koloa-making shows no trends toward either boom or bust (Addo 2007)—it is important to engage with analyses of traditional wealth with those of state currencies and their roles in contemporary Pacific societies. To this end, I address the question raised a decade ago by Melanesianists: why does cash seem to be replacing traditional gifts in the Tongan diaspora, but never eclipsing them (Akin and Robbins 1999, LiPuma 2000)? I ask: what can we learn from observing cultural practices in which exchange of traditional wealth incorporates money such that the gifting of cash throws intangible wealth, such as social relations, into relief?