Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora

Addo, Ping-Ann

Hardcover

Series: Asao Studies in Pacific Anthropology, Book 4

AnthropologyGeneral Gender StudiesWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 0857458957
ISBN13: 9780857458957
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: Jun 1 2013
Pages: 252
Weight: 1.08
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation- fonua-which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the multi-territorial nation, the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.

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