A gift of koloa remains a feature of diasporic ceremonial exchanges because its immediate reciprocation underscores the faith of those who also gave money. They believe that they can trust the receiving family to reciprocate cash in the future. As Kaeppler has suggested, koloa does indeed assure others of the continued sustenance and renewal of the kin group (Kaeppler 2000). Maintaining good social relations with kāinga members who live in close proximity can be challenging, but trying to do so over the many miles between homeland and diaspora, or even between diasporic sites, can be daunting. If, like Nunia’s family, the initial recipients of a gift are living far from Auckland when other families celebrate their next ritual, temporal and physical distance between rituals can make balanced and timely reciprocity of cash gifts almost impossible.

Thus, in diaspora, both gifts of money and cloth become fraught with much anxiety for both givers and recipients. The long-standing prescription of answering gifts with appropriate countergifts, even after costly and often sudden events such as funerals, is thrown out of sequence if only cash gifts are accepted. When people who give gifts receive no reward or material recognition for their material expenditure, the givers’ feel disrespected and their family economics may also be adversely affected. In material terms, lay people—friends and other kin members who are not professionals like ministers and undertakers—receive no substantial public recognition for their material show of support. By accepting only cash Nunia’s fāmili upset the sense of on-going, long-term, culturally-salient reciprocation, hence their fear of censure. A great deal more than koloa may be lost by refusing a gift that a diasporic dweller has taken pains to prepare and present to a homeland-based Tongan family; as Nunia said, ‘a lot of face’ is lost. A decision to reciprocate only some or even none of the gifts brought to a funeral is said, by some Tongans, to be the prerogative of oneself and one’s family (Decktor-Korn 1978; James 2002; Kaeppler 1978b). Whether in diaspora or homeland, there seems to be little historical precedent for not succumbing to established pressures to gift cash, koloa and food at life crisis rituals.

Making gifts of cash in the context of times of ritual crises constitutes a symbolically important aspect of a generalized modality of sharing. It also assures continued prosperity for kin groups.^[5] Sharing money, helping a close relative to meet the costs of a child’s education, or giving cash at a kinsperson’s life crisis event is also a basic performance of tauhi vaha‘a which Poltorak describes as a cultural value shared by Tongans and which emphasises the importance of caring for the ‘space between’ or the ‘relatedness’ of people (Poltorak 2007, 12). Explaining a dialectical variant of the same concept, Ka’ili describes the same phenomenon, which is also known as tauhi vā, as operating transnationally and involving ‘reciprocal exchange of economic and social goods’ (Ka’ili 2005, 92). Sending money primarily from diasporic branches of the family to relatives in the homeland, is thus an important aspect of tauhi vaha‘a /tauhi vā for it demonstrates willingness to support family materially. To upset this long-standing convention of Tongan exchange, whereby respect for kin and tradition is shown through the obvious and public bi-directional flow of gifts, is to challenge the very notion of Tongans constituting a common culture. It also engages Tongans in a dialogue about how Tonganness can be expressed given the challenges and possibilities presented by living in diaspora. As Matory cautions diaspora scholars to recognise: ‘selective reproduction, meaning transformation, and meaningful reinterpretation of past cultural forms’ involves ‘commemoration [which] is always strategic in its selections, exclusions and interpretations’ (Matory 2006: 163)

It remains to be seen how Tongan families will continue to finance and provide for each other through ritual exchange in the diaspora if the immediate reciprocations demanded by gifts of koloa are slowly made obsolete. Writing about Maori tangi, funerals, Sinclair states that such rituals are inevitable, yet regulating and familiar (Sinclair 1990). Funerals give life in an (immigrant Tongan) ethnic community in New Zealand a sense of spatial and temporal continuity because participants must perform roles, revisit the history of their social relations and consciously perform tauhi vā or tauhi vaha‘a. No Tongan can control his or her rank, but the esteem within which a fāmili, and consequently a kāinga, is held can be positively or negatively affected through shared public assessments of an individual’s attention to kinship matters like funerals (Kaeppler 1978b).

Tradition, in the form of kinship matters, will always concern families who are dispersed throughout the Tongan ethnoscape and for whom money makes staying connected—by phone, internet, courier mail and plane trips—increasingly manageable. However, as things that regenerate people culturally, cloth remains the symbolically potent material value with which many modern Tongans navigate the waters between upholding tradition and experimenting with modernity in the diaspora. As Tongan families continue koloa exchange, they construct these navigations as performances of anga faka-Tonga, even while money remains an important medium of Tongan daily and ceremonial exchange.