poetics and politics of Tongan laments and eulogies

Abstract

The aesthetic and political importance of oratory in Tongan laments and eulogies is the focus of this article. A series of historic poetic texts are presented as frames for an interpretation of the politics of prestige and power. These socially realized cultural constructions of emotion illustrate how written texts that are essentially oratorical are interpreted and explained in the oral tradition; how they impose knowledge about social order through an aesthetic medium that helps to create the shared values of the society; and how this essentially aristocratic art form serves as a mechanism for social distancing and control and the elevation of selected chiefly lineages. Spatial, temporal, and sound boundaries are related to social hierarchy, and poetic metaphor is shown to foreground and background the political importance of individuals and society. [poetics, politics, aesthetics, oratory, social structure, lament, eulogy, Tonga, Polynesia]

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.