In my experiences conducting fieldwork in Tongan communities in the Kingdom of Tonga and in Auckland, New Zealand, Tongans often discursively liken cash to cloth. For example, my informants frequently used the statement ‘our koloa are like your money’ when trying capture, for me—a Westerner—the value of their koloa. Such statements mask both the role koloa is made to play as a key symbol and the cultural knowledge that money is ranked below koloa as a ritual valuable. Money is a form of wealth, but koloa is ‘what one treasures’ (Herda 1999). Koloa constitute plaited mats, painted barkcloths, machine-made quilts and lengths of store-bought coloured fabric. Moreover, koloa are said to regenerate people culturally after the emotional and social rifts caused by life crisis moments and family disputes (Kaeppler 2000). Koloa also have long-standing meaning in Tongan society as bodily adornment, the spoils of war and the social possessions to which only highly ranked people had access (ibid.). They continue to constitute durable forms of wealth with which rule is legitimated and with which unions and unity of high-ranking lineages through weddings and births are cemented (Herda 1999; Kaeppler 1978a; Schneider and Weiner 1989). Koloa are quintessential gifts and marketable commodities: they can be exchanged as gifts at rituals, or sold or pawned for quick cash in both Tonga and abroad (see Addo and Besnier 2008). Koloa sent overseas constitutes important ‘contraflows’ to cash and other valuables sent from the diaspora to Tonga (James 1997).

Traditional wealth production and exchange embody gendered knowledge. Koloa connect key aspects of ‘ulungānga faka-Tonga, knowledge of Tongan culture and traditions, which are among the things that Tongan women, especially, are charged with teaching children (Young Leslie 2004). In a brilliant discussion of the genealogical link to Pulotu, ‘the world of the spirits’ and the ‘source of life and death’, Filihia states: ‘When women fabricate koloa, the mana of Pulotu is woven into their mats and hammered into their barkcloth, thus making these goods valuable items to be treasured’ (Filihia 2001,387).

Men produce and gift objects called ngāue (Kaeppler 2000) or ngoue (Churchward 1959) that are the products of their farming activities. These include yams and other root crops, as well as livestock, especially pigs. In ceremonial exchange at life crisis events, koloa and ngāue/ngoue (today, often replaced by store bought luxury foods like tinned corned beef and bottled soft drinks) are reciprocated similarly with respective gifts of koloa or food. Probably because they are drawn from other families’ valuable daily provisions, the practice is to reciprocate these gifts of food or of cloth in kind, and to do so soon after the ritual. Typically, whether in diaspora or homeland, koloa is reciprocated within days of a funeral. In ritual exchange, gifts of money are usually reciprocated in close to equivalent amounts, but during a later ritual at which the recipient in the former exchange is also involved.^[1] Money became associated, very early, with male activities since men were the first to engage in cash-related trade with Westerners (Addo and Besnier 2008). However, cash money is not a traditional wealth item for men; it remains a palangi (foreign) valuable.

Just as koloa itself belongs to two transactional orders (or types of economic exchange)—that of the gift and of the commodity—so too, money straddles the traditional economic sphere of the gift. To use Akin and Robbins’ terms, money is regularly deployed in relationships defined by modes of sharing, as well as modes of equivalent exchange (Akin and Robbins 1999).^[2]