Tongans use money today for daily modes of equivalent exchange, including financing staples (buying food and paying school fees, as well as purchasing clothes and household supplies). In modalities of sharing, or gift-exchange, cash is employed in ritual presentation at life crisis occasions (birthdays, christenings, weddings, funerals); for weekly and annual church donations; and as rewards for well-rendered artistic performances (dancing and singing at celebratory events or at fund-raising concerts). Cash gifts are always given in the local state currency of the country where the ritual is taking place, regardless of where the giver lives, works, or has travelled from. The money must therefore have the appropriate local form to be immediately useful. When a composite gift of cloth, cash and ngāue—or just of cloth and cash—is made, men and women are both implicated in the labour and love required to prepare the gift. Composite gifts indicate that members of a family—even those not present at the ritual—as invested in maintaining tradition as well as their family’s reputation.

Among Tongans, having money is extremely important for being seen as able to uphold tradition. However, having money with no respect for tradition is considered antithetical to the most basic Tongan ideals of ‘ofa (love) and faka’apa’apa (respect). An important aspect of tradition is making regular church donations and also gifts to clergymen. Adherents of the Free Wesleyan Church of Tonga, as well as other Tongan Methodist denominations in the ethnoscape, present annual donations known as misinale by gifting cash bills in a competitive and public forum (Decktor-Korn 1978).^[3] These cash gifts, amounting to a sum of between a few hundred and several thousand dollars, are a primary way in which large amounts of cash are remitted from diaspora to homeland (Lee 2004). There is a proper aesthetic to the formal gifting of money: it is enclosed in an envelope—usually white—called sila pa’anga, often resting atop a folded textile, and is presented with prayers and other gifts of food and drinks. When gifted during a dance, money is conspicuously tucked inside performers’ necklines, waistbands, thrown into the air above their heads, or strung around their necks in a prepared garland. Wrapping or draping the body in things of beauty and of value predates the introduction of money to Tongan culture (Addo 2003), and to gift money in this way is to honour tradition.