Far from being displaced by modernity, the exchange of women's textile valuables of little practical value but enormous ritual significance is increasing in importance in Tonga and amongst Tongan migrants in the industrial West. The dwindling production of and increasing demand for these textile valuables have prompted entrepreneurs to open pawnshops, where customers who are monetarily poor mortgage valuables and customers lacking in exchange networks buy unclaimed valuables. Pawnshops convert valuables into commodities and transform the social relations among those involved. However, the one emotion that underlies traditional exchange, shame, remains central to the transactions, albeit in unevenly distributed fashion. The transformation of textiles from gift to commodity displays both rupture and continuity with pre‐modern forms of exchange, continuity operating at the level of emotional subjectivities. Our analysis foregrounds objects, on the one hand, and emotions, on the other, as shaping the course of cultural and social history. Résumé Loin d’être supplanté par la modernité, l’échange des textiles féminins sans grande valeur pratique mais de signifiance rituelle considérable augmente en importance à Tonga et parmi les immigrés tongiens dans les pays occidentaux industriels. La production décroissante de ces textiles précieux et leur demande croissante ont motivés des entrepreneurs à ouvrir des monts‐de‐piété, où les clients manquant d’argent mettent à gage leurs textiles précieux et où les clients dépourvus de réseaux de fournisseurs achètent ceux qui restent non réclamés. Les monts‐de‐piété convertissent ces objets précieux en commoditiés et transforment les relations sociales entre les personnes concernées. Néanmoins, la honte, une émotion qui sous‐tend les échanges traditionnels, continue à occuper une position centrale à ces transactions, bien que de façon non équilibrée. La transformation des textiles en commoditiés présente aussi bien des aspects de rupture que de continuité avec les formes d’échanges pré‐modernes, où la continuité s’opère au niveau des subjectivités émotives. Notre analyse met en valeur le rôle déterminant des objets d’une part et des émotions d’autre part dans le cours de l’histoire sociale et culturelle.
Robin Cohen begins his list of the features of diaspora with following: 'dispersal from a traditional homeland … [and] the expansion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions' (Cohen 2008,161). Labor for money is often cited as a main reason for emigration of Tongans overseas and to nodes in the Tongan diaspora. A decidedly transnational economy has resulted for members of this ethnoscape with Tongans traveling overseas from their homeland to earn and remit cash, thus enabling themselves and their families to purchase Western goods and other trappings of modernity. Because most remittances are sent directly to relatives in the homeland, I would add that the desire to fulfill abiding duties towards kin regardless of where they are located is an equally salient feature of modern diaspora. For people from the Kingdom of Tonga who have family ties connecting them to large diasporic communities like that dwelling in Auckland, New Zealand, the idea of laboring for money cannot be divorced from 'on-the-ground' efforts to maintain good social relations in communities in which social interactions are often public and usually highly scrutinized.
Micro-enterprises are typically classified as businesses with fewer than six employees and very small amounts of financial capital. Focusing on black immigrant women's micro-entrepreneurial ventures in Boston, this paper explores how non-economic forms of capital are crucial to the survival of micro-enterprise, in large part because of customer choices to patronize businesses they trust and to support proprietors whose identities and values they share. The richness of social and cultural capital and local information-controlled by minority immigrant women micro-entrepreneurs-can easily go undetected by mainstream lenders, training programs, and policy-makers. Other features that go unnoticed include the fact that the proprietors and patrons of micro-enterprises can often be highly skilled and educated and that innovative business moves are often embodied in already-existing processes of reciprocity and exchange. With implications for how funding can be infused into communities deeply connected to informal economy processes in U.S. cities, the paper argues for support for community-based processes of local development, economic growth, and social justice that are rooted in the communities that need them.
Wealth transfers are key to the “how” and “why” of contemporary global population migration. For example, remittances are much-analyzed and fiercely-debated transfers of wealth from migrant populations to their home countries. Yet wealth can be transferred in the opposite direction – from homeland to hostland – and in various different forms. Using an ethnographic approach to understanding the impact of migrant’s (micro) decisions on wider (macro) global practices, this paper records, compares and contextualizes the global movement of things carried, left behind, pined for, and (re-)created by transmigrants. It seeks to nuance our understandings of the “who” of contemporary migration by tracing the role and cross-cutting paths of traditional wealth from the Kingdom of Tonga between groups of Tongan migrants who live in, and move between New Zealand, Australia, the United States and Hawai‘i. The case study illuminates Tongan women’s choices about carrying and creating objects of value that reify homeland gender and labor practices, while also affording them a role in impacting global wealth transfers that both entwine and eschew cash remittances. <strong></strong>
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