What's in a name?: Reconstructing nomenclature of prestige and persuasion in late 18th-century Tongan material culture.

Authors

  • Phyllis Herda University of Auckland
  • Billie Lythberg University of Auckland
  • Andy Mills University of Glasgow
  • Melenaite Taumoefolau University of Auckland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15286/jps.126.4.443-468

Keywords:

Tongan naming practices, historical linguistics, Polynesian prestige objects, heliaki, Tongan material culture, feather headdresess, clubs, named mats

Abstract

This paper is a study in the productivity of working across the disciplinary boundaries of material culture studies, historical linguistics and museology to restore the significance of historic names and terminological classifications for prestigious Tongan objects within the wider context of Western Polynesia. The authors trace the nomenclature of radial feather headdresses (palā tavake) both within Tonga as well as through linguistic cognates from elsewhere in Western Polynesia. Aspects of Tongan naming practices of other prestige items are considered, such as ‘akau tau ‘clubs’ and kie hingoa ‘named mats’, as is the Tongan practice of the poetical device of heliaki. We argue for a deeper understanding of objects of Tongan material culture and the historical and social environment that created them by closely “reading” prestige objects from Tonga’s past.

Author Biographies

Phyllis Herda, University of Auckland

Phyllis Herda is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Auckland. She began working in Polynesia in the early 1980s and continues to research, publish and teach on Tongan ethnography, European explorers in Polynesia, 18th- and 19th-century Polynesia art and material culture, Tongan oral traditions and history, gender, disease and colonialism, as well as Polynesian textiles—traditional and contemporary. She is currently leading a research team on a project funded by the Marsden Fund, Royal Society of New Zealand, on art and material culture from Tonga in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Billie Lythberg, University of Auckland

Billie Lythberg is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the junction of museum ethnography and economics at the University of Auckland Business School. Her research interests include Oceanic sciences, arts and oral histories; cross-cultural theories of value, valuables and valuation; sustainability and environmental management; and social innovation. She is co-editor of Artefacts of Encounter: Cook's Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories (University of Otago Press, 2016).

Andy Mills, University of Glasgow

Andy Mills is a Historical Researcher for the University of Glasgow's AHRC-funded project "Situating Pacific Barkcloth in Time and Place" He has previously participated in the "Fijian Art Project" at the University of East Anglia and curated the Oceania Collections at the Horniman Museum. Andy's main research interests are the 18th- and 19th-century art history of Polynesia, with a particular focus on iconography and stylistic chronology, regional stylistic variation and identity, the cultural contextualisation of material style and the history of collecting and museums in Europe.

Melenaite Taumoefolau, University of Auckland

Melenaite Taumoefolau is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Pacific Studies, Te Wānanga o Waipapa, University of Auckland. As well as publishing several articles on linguistic aspects of Tongan, she has co-authored a book on Queen Sālote's poetry where she translated 114 of the Queen's poems into English. She led the national monolingual Tongan dictionary project, which culminated in the publication of the first monolingual Tongan dictionary (2010). Her wider research interests are in Pacific Studies as an interdisciplinary subject, with a focus on Pacific languages and indigenous knowledge.

A Te Alo Lili in low wind conditions with its “arms” in a default position.

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Published

2017-12-25

Issue

Vol. 126 No. 4 (2017): December 2017

Section

Articles

License

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