With high expectations of performing a funeral to honour society’s expectations, this family’s pride was also at stake. Nunia, the younger sister of the deceased woman, stated:

Nunia’s father later told me that his fāmili was willing to take risk ‘losing face’ in order to minimise the logistical challenges, and the monetary and cloth wealth costs of doing a traditional reciprocation, i.e., one involving the presentation of cloth, food and prayers, for each teu. Furthermore, the funeral was for both Malia and her young child, each of whom belonged to their respective fathers’ lineages and therefore, ritually speaking, to a different fāmili. Accepting only cash gifts would mitigate Nunia and Malia’s family’s obligations to immediately reciprocate numerous and costly gifts to two kin groups.

However, on the night of Malia and her baby’s wake, Malia’s fāmili was gifted with several traditional presentations of koloa. In the dim basement of an Auckland Methodist church, I listened and watched intently as the spokesperson for Nunia’s family announced his thanks for one teu and subsequently relayed the grieving fāmili’s decision not to accept koloa on this occasion. On hearing this, one member from the gifting family picked up the envelope of money and handed it to the representative, then the women visitors picked up the koloa they had already laid down in front of him and left. I had also noticed one woman leaving the wake with her arms laden with koloa. Her koloa had obviously been refused. After hearing that the gift would not be accepted, she returned to her car, opened the trunk and practically dumped the koloa into it. Other visiting mourners would not be so easily deterred. Despite such obvious signs of distress about the refusal of koloa, another woman mourner found a way for the kāinga to accept her fāmili’s gift of koloa. I present an excerpt from my fieldnotes:

Two of Malia’s sisters who had been seated nearby took Teuila’s textiles into another room and they later analysed Teuila’s motivations this way: ‘She was being generous. It’s like she just wanted someone to take the koloa from her, like if you offered me [some] chocolate and I didn’t want to accept it, but you were going to give it away anyway, so you offer it to the person sitting next to me…’ Another sister said: ‘She was showing that she was liongi [in mourning] to the [family members] and the others with him.’^[4] This second response revealed that the sister was well aware of the operation of roles at the funeral, rank being the principle governing who must gift and thus who receives and must reciprocate. Sensitivity to her own role and ritual ranked status permeated Teuila’s sense of right and proper actions at this funeral and so she proceeded with her gift presentation. Similarly, Rupp reports on kokorozukai, a category of Japanese gifts generally given out of gratitude, for example to doctors for healing a sick family member or for delivering a healthy baby. According to Rupp: ‘it is not possible to bring these gifts to the hospital, where there is a sign that reads: ‘We humbly ask that you refrain from kokorozukai’ [so] patients simply send their gifts directly to the doctors’ residences’ (Rupp 2003:163). In Rupp’s example, presumably, the gifts are not refused.

In Tonga, just as in Japan, gifts already refused in one context may be accepted in another to save face for both givers and recipients. So, by ensuring that the gift moved on to another person at the ritual, Teuila fulfilled her duty in commemorating Malia’s death. The counter-gift would have to be embodied in future gifts given by Nunia’s famili members. The anthropology of Tonga is quite rich in analysis of Tongan gifts and countergifts (Addo 2004; Evans 2001; Gifford 1929; James 1997, 2002; Small 1997; van der Grijp 1993). These authors concur that, once accepted, an appropriate material gift must be reciprocated. To gift koloa is often termed ‘mole [lose] koloa.’ Even though the family did not reciprocate, they still engaged in exchange and were thus indebted to others. As Nunia said, they risked ‘losing face’. They risked ‘paying’ for an easier funeral process with the esteem one would otherwise have in others’ eyes following the ritual event. As a member of their kāinga, extended family, Teuilia might have been trying to dispel any negativity associated with Nunia’s famili’s anomalous exchange practices.

Friends and relatives also presented ngāue—food mostly in the form of store-bought frozen meat and root crops—to Nunia’s fāmili in Auckland on the night before the wake. Some of this food went towards a light meal prepared for visitors at the wake. In all, Nunia’s fāmili received NZ$8,800 in condolence gifts from visitors to the Auckland funeral. This sum did not even begin to cover their initial outlay for their plane tickets from various parts of Tonga and Australia to Auckland, the expense of feeding the hundreds who attended, and the cost of countergifts (constituting cloth and store-bought food) to the six or seven Methodist ministers who visited during the night of the wake and the one who officiated at the burial. Still consumed by grief, Nunia’s fāmili returned to Tonga indebted monetarily, yet grateful for the great amount of spiritual and monetary support they received for dealing with their sudden double loss.