STATE, CLASS AND CONVERSION IN COMMODITY PRODUCTION: GENDER AND CHANGING VALUE IN THE TONGAN ISLANDS

Abstract

In Tonga before contact, only production for use existed. In addition to utilitarian goods, production for use included goods made for presen tation to others, those for exchange through gift-giving, and those made as validations of status and status changes. In the course of the 19th cen tury some of these customary presentation goods or gifts became tribute. The term indicates goods or services given in fulfilment of tax obligations, in order to continue using the land or other resources (Amin 1976, Krader 1975). Taxes and rent are, thus, somewhat fused and are termed tax-rents (Skalnick 1981). Certain goods and services came to be systematically extracted from the nonchiefly kindreds (and some tradi tional chiefly kindreds1) without regard to the reciprocally understood and previously enacted control over subsistence by the direct producers. Before contact, Tongan society was stratified into chiefly and non chiefly orders, but the division of labour was not class-based (Gailey 1980). Tensions in precontact Tongan society involved attempts by par ticular chiefly groups to extricate themselves from kin-associated obliga tions and to consolidate control over nonchiefly and other chiefly peo ple's production. There were struggles within the chiefly order over the basis of social authority, superior kinship or coercion through conquest (Gailey 1985, forthcoming). Tonga was perhaps unique in Polynesia for the absence, by the time of contact, of a pervasive sacred justification for donations to the paramount chiefs. With the arrival of Wesleyan Methodist missionaries in the 1820s2 came an ideology in which hierarchy was presented as immutable, God given. At first the high-ranking chiefs catechised by the missionaries were reluctant to admit that nonchiefly people had souls. But when the utility of a non-kin-based ideology of hierarchy became clear, those chiefs who sought to establish permanent tribute relations, based upon a

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 — 4 citations exist upstream.

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