Kinship cloth and community in Auckland, New Zealand: Commoner Tongan women navigate transnational identity using traditionally-styled textile wealth

This dissertation examines how tu'a (commoner) Tonga women use traditional cloth to produce and reproduce culture in the Tongan diaspora, particularly in Auckland, New Zealand. Ngatu is a barkcloth form that belongs to a larger category of textiles called koloa. Conventionally made from bark, but now also made from synthetic fibers, ngatu retain their centrality in ritual and daily life in a way that traditional men's wealth has not. Moreover, the exchange of ngatu actively constructs Tongan diasporic identity. By investigating how commoner Tongan women in New Zealand and the Tongan islands employ koloa as ritual gifts, I attempt to illuminate the Tongan diasporic perspective on issues related to gender, cultural identity, and the production and exchange of material culture.; The contemporary role of diasporic Tongan women in identity discourses has yet to be theorized. I show how women manipulate traditional cloth forms and technical practices in order to bolster their ability to fulfill family and cultural duty in ways that are imagined to be central to Tongan identity. Furthermore, Tongan women in New Zealand use their roles as textile makers as a way to participate more fully in the Tongan ethnoscape. Through Auckland City-sponsored community development schemes that Tongan women produce ngatu-styled barkcloth from a synthetic fabric base, thereby participating in Auckland's pan-Polynesian Identity.; While economic and social remittances constitute a primary mechanism through which migrants remain connected to their homeland relatives around the world, I argue that Tongan women in diaspora use the production and exchange of koloa to maintain relations with the homeland in distinctive ways. Rather than see the continuation of koloa exchange as a distasteful burden, I suggest that Tongan women in diaspora actively value the obligations and opportunities it creates. Indeed, the very symbolic and physical durability and potentiality of koloa enables diasporic Tongan women to distinguish themselves as proverbially "good Tongan women," even when they are far from Tonga itself. By gifting forms of valuables that are not widely deemed necessities for ritual exchange in the diaspora, these women seek to bolster their status both in the communities where they live and back "home."...