Kai and kava in Niuatoputapu: social relations, ideologies and contexts in a rural Tongan community

Abstract

The work which follows is essentially a personal ethnography: personal in that it embodies my own experience of living with Tongans in Tonga for three years, ethnographic because it is descriptive of what I have observed and inferred about contemporary Tonga over a period of eight years. Although the work deals partially with ecology (people’s relationship to their environment), demography, settlement patterns, local government, economic production, distribution, and consumption, the ideology and practice of kinship relations, the contexts and social uses of food and kava, status achievement, inferred social values, humour, wit, and aspirations, the ethnography is by no means exhaustive nor complete. Instead, I have concentrated on several themes, namely, the transformation of ideologies drawn from other cultures and historical eras; the communication of these ideologies through the medium of food and kava transactions; and the importance of social context for the manipulation of different ideologies and the achievement of status.