ASAO Studies in Pacific Anthropology, v.4. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. xii, 227 pp. (Figures, tables, maps.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-85745-895-7.
Creating a Nation with Cloth provides an excellent insight into how contemporary Tongan women, living far away from their ancestral homelands, experience textile wealth and use it to build up and reinvigorate a network of relationships that spans a huge geographical area. This fourth volume in the series of publications by the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO), is divided into six chapters, preceded by an introduction and completed by a conclusion. The well-written concatenating chapters start with a focus on materiality to move over to the role of women and the financial and identity implications of gifting traditional textile wealth. The book compellingly demonstrates how women, textile wealth and tradition are enmeshed.
The introduction sets out the premises on which the analysis presented in the book is built. Ping-Ann Addo explains how koloa, valuable objects which can comprise barkcloth, fine mats, baskets and coconut oil, are a means for Tongan women to participate in the building of a multiterritorial Tongan nation strewn geographically over New Zealand, Australia and the United States.
In the first chapter entitled “Migration, Tradition, and Barkcloth. Authentic Innovations in Textile Gifts,” the focus lies on the technologies of making barkcloth, including the use of innovative materials in both Tonga and one country of the Diaspora, New Zealand. The concept of “pragmatic creativity” (50) which the author had first introduced in an earlier co-authored publication with Heather Young Leslie (Introduction: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovations in Pacific Cloth), is applied to account for design and material innovations initiated by commoner Tongan women who in so doing effectively shape their multiterritorial nation. The second chapter, “Gender, Materiality, and Value. Tongan Women’s Cooperatives in New Zealand” turns to the social agency of women in diaspora who make and gift koloa. Addo argues that Tongan commoner women engage creatively with modernity by tapping into financial support opportunities from the government, local councils and arts bodies to create and use objects that are valued culturally. Chapter 3, “Women, Roots, and Routes,” recounts case studies of three Tongan women, tracing how they perform their traditional gender roles as “culture workers” (93) when exchanging koloa. Coined by Patricia Hill Collins (From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism, Temple University Press, 2006), the notion of culture workers reflects, according to Addo, women’s active engagement in the definition of their gender, femininity and position in kin groups and society as a whole. The fourth chapter, “Gender, Kinship, and Economics. Transacting in Prestige and Complex Ceremonial Gifts,” moves away from the materiality of exchanges, to consider the relationship between women’s identity and their kin on the one hand, and ceremonial gift-giving and reciprocation on the other. Consequently the author examines how Tonganness is practiced globally. In section 5, “Cash, Death, and Diaspora. When Koloa Won’t Do,” Ping-Ann Addo chooses the specific case study of a funeral to examine the challenges engendered by exchanging koloa between multiple locations, especially when these valuables are exchanged alongside cash. She concludes that “Money generically bespeaks good Tonganness, but koloa materialises appropriate Tongan womanliness” (165). Finally, chapter 6 looks at the central role of the church in the competitive gift-giving of both cash and koloa. Churches in general, but the mainstream Methodist churches specifically, are channelling the flow of textile and cash wealth by operating as the recipients and the transferors and thus giving Tongans the opportunity to distinguish themselves on a personal level, while also respecting traditions. In her conclusion, Ping-Ann regroups her work around two themes: the movement of people and the movement of things. She also suggests that her own research would be enhanced by studying how dwelling somewhere affects the sense of identity of second-generation Tongans in the Diaspora. It would in a sense contribute to testing her conclusion that the exchange of valuables in this continuous movement of people is effective in providing Tongans a renewed sense of being at home.
Through careful ethnography, the publication articulates the processes at play when large amounts of barkcloth and mats are exchanged and gifted over long distances within the contemporary Tongan ethnoscape. In dealing with the gift-giving activities of contemporary Tongan women, this important study engages in a nuanced way with the theory of the gift in Oceania, and the exchange of textile wealth in particular. Ping-Ann Addo’s work also contributes to the studies of modernity and globalization and Diaspora communities. Her careful analysis teases out the different attitudes and shifts of views towards material culture of commoner and chiefly women in the twenty-first century. To explain these variations, historical events—generally dating no earlier than the nineteenth century when the modern kingdom was being shaped—and sensibilities are taken into account. Regretfully, no attempt was made to unravel the relationship between mats and barkcloth. Are there occasions when fine mats are preferred over barkcloth or vice versa? However, this book adds considerably to the understanding of how material culture works in a contemporary society and how women can bind geographically scattered communities through the movement of these valuable objects, which are the products of female activity.
Fanny Wonu Veys
National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, The Netherlands
pp. 656-657