Influence Structures in a Tongan Village:'Every Villager is not the Same! (original) (raw)
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Language in Society, 2012
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Emergence and Development of Ancestral Polynesian Society in Tonga
Patrick V. Kirch and Roger C. Green proposed that Polynesian cultures today emerged and developed in an ancestral homeland situated in western Polynesia, primarily Tonga and Sāmoa. The archaeological marker for the beginnings of cultural and linguistic divergence from a founding Eastern Lapita base is Polynesian Plainware pottery produced for nearly 1,100 years during the Polynesian Plainware phase. Kirch and Green believe this transition reflects social and economic changes that led to the development of an ancestral Polynesian society. An ongoing debate in Pacific anthropology is whether archaeologists can convincingly identify and explain the historical trajectory of an ancestral Polynesian society. My dissertation evaluates the development of an ancestral Polynesian society in Tonga by identifying three processes that shaped its trajectory: isolation, integration, and adaptation. By focusing largely on undecorated ceramics from several Tongan sites, comparisons can be made within Tonga and across the archipelagos of western Polynesia that have implications for understanding unique island histories. If Polynesian culture developed in western Polynesia then the evidence for social and economic change may potentially be reflected in an adequate assessment of the archaeological record from the end of the Lapita phase into the Polynesian Plainware phase. That includes not only ceramic data but non-ceramic data such as site distribution, settlement patterns, subsistence practices, demographic studies, and geochemical source dataall of which provide a more holistic view of early Polynesian culture in Tonga and aid considerably in how we as anthropologists perceive past Polynesian lifeways and development through time.
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Although Tonga is small and its impact on the global geo-political stage is limited, the way in which the country fits into the contemporary global system has attracted its share of attention. Since Marcus' early and cogent observations on the fact of Tongan transnationalism (1981), a great deal of ethnography has been done both in Tonga and with Tongan communities overseas. In just the last 10 years there have been significant full length ethnographies of contemporary Tongan political economy. Evans (2001) and van der Grijp (1993, 2004), for example, have written extensively on the way that the current Tongan economy is shaped by the world economic system. While van der Grijp is interested in processes of globalisation, Evans' work extends to transnationalism-but more to the manifestations on transnational practice in Tonga than a considered assessment of the Tongan transnational system as a whole (see Lee 2006). More detailed work on remittance practices has also been done (Brown 1994, 1995; Brown and Connell 1993). Others, including Besnier (2004), have written eloquently on the ways in which Tongan economic and linguistic practices have embraced a cosmopolitan view of both themselves and the world, and subtly on shifting engagements with tradition and exchange (Addo and Besnier, 2008).
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With an eye to their own life goals, the native peoples of Pacific Islands unwittingly present to anthropologists a generous scientific gift: an extended series of experiments in cultural adaptation and evolutionary development. They have compressed their institutions within the confines of infertile coral atolls, expanded them on volcanic islands, created with the means history gave them cultures adapted to the deserts of Australia, the mountains and warm coasts of New Guinea, the rain forests of the Solomon Islands. From the Australian Aborigines, whose hunting and gathering existence duplicates in outline the cultural life of the later Paleolithic, to the great chiefdoms of Hawaii, where society approached the formative levels of the old Fertile Crescent civilizations, almost every general phase in the progress of primitive culture is exemplified.
Cognition, algebra, and culture in the Tongan kinship terminology
Journal of Cognition and Culture, 7, 2007
We present an algebraic account of the Tongan kinship terminology (TKT) that provides an insightful journey into the fabric of Tongan culture. We begin with the ethnographic account of a social event. The account provides us with the activities of that day and the centrality of kin relations in the event, but it does not inform us of the conceptual system that the participants bring with them. Rather, it is a slice in time of an ongoing dynamic process that links behavior with a conceptual system of kin relations and vice versa. To understand this interplay, we need an account of the underlying conceptual system that is being activated during the event. Thus, we introduce a formal, algebraically based account of TKT. This account brings to the fore the underlying logic of TKT and allows us to distinguish between features of the kinship system that arise from the logic of TKT as a generative structure and features that must have arisen through cultural intervention.