Abstract:
This thesis is about tivaivai, which are unquilted quilts made and used by Cook Islands women in the Cook Islands ceremonial economy. They are the paramount form of valuable in ritual exchanges during kinship ‘life’ events, and other public gifting events, which draw people together via translocal and transnational kin and wider social networks. How Cook Islands women use tivaivai as the gift and/or as decoration in these ceremonial arenas is part of the way Cook Islanders do economy as a local model of livelihood (Gudeman 2001, 2008). Such a model is founded on the material and nonmaterial aspects of the base, as in the priorities dictated by a group’s cultural framework. This is an expanded, more encompassing notion of economy, and necessarily moves beyond standard Western economic theory and the centrality of the market. I argue that tivaivai are semiotic media of value (Turner 2006b, 2008; cf. Graeber 2001), so they are iconic valuables, and indexical symbols of the structural properties of the Cook Islands system of social relations. As such weighted valuables, tivaivai are models of and models for how to be a Cook Islands woman and mother. As the gift and as decoration of ritual venues, tivaivai materialise the key values of kinship and aro‘a (love) which orientate the way Cook Islanders exist and act in the world, so tivaivai are the access to and axis of prestige as mana for women. This relationship among value, values, and valuables is also important, because as such weighted valuables, tivaivai dignify the gifting of lesser valuables in a ritual complex, which is deployed in the various types of Cook Islands ceremonial events to transform people and objects. These lesser valuables include envelope wrapped money and food. I argue that the gifting of envelope wrapped money is as much about the reality of living in a capitalist political economy like New Zealand and the formulation of subaltern strategies to get by and prosper in New Zealand, as it is about the display of Cook Islands values, womanliness, mothering, and the pursuit of mana.