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Inventing health: Tradition, textiles and maternal obligation in the Kingdom of Tonga.
Thesis information
Author:
Young Leslie, HeatheAdvisor(s):
Esterik, P. VanDegree:
Ph.D.School:
York University (Canada).Year:
1999Full Abstract
This dissertation offers a localized, symbolic analysis of the tropes which organize mothers' everyday practice on the Tongan atoll called Kauvai, with particular attention to the language, meanings and practices associated with 'health'. I argue that as mothers, women are active agents in the invention of Tongan culture, figure in the production of a national image of traditional modernity and mediate a structural tension between the roles of sisters and wives. The role of the Tongan mother has yet to be theorized, and I examine her position, and the insights the Tongan mother can provide the analysis of maternal work.;Roy Wagner's theory of the symbolic, instrumental creation of culture, which he called "invention", is evident in the emergence of a system of Tongan governance which is equally traditionally Polynesian and modern. It is also evident in the classification of faito'o fakatonga [traditional illness treatments] as a competitor with biomedicine, and in the emergence of a local understanding of health, which prioritises appropriate social relations and traditional Tongan cultural practices, identified as anga fakatonga.;Insofar as Tongan health promotion and medical services include a strong focus on maternal child health issues, mothers are placed at nexus points between 'modern' medicalized ways of perceiving bodies, food, hygiene or risks, and the future generation, the children. As mothers therefore, women are key figures in the interpretation of medical and modernizing messages and directions for social practice. Despite the government's official adoption of Western models for representing health, at the level of everyday life in the village, 'health' is played out differently from the illness treatment and prevention focus associated with biomedicine. Locally, traditional practices, including notions of kinship, gendered roles of motherhood and traditional behaviour, counter the orthodox emphasis of biomedical health, and replace it with a more locally meaningful trope of 'living well, according to anga fakatonga---the Tongan way'.;As mothers, women are significant to the production of a national image of traditional modernity, insofar as it is their duties as mothers, in addition to their kinship obligations which motivate much of the production of ceremonially significant textiles used to create and maintain the ties which bind together everyday and ritual life in Tonga.;Mothering helps to mediate the structural tension between sisterly and wifely roles, insofar as the one person a father's and mother's side have in common is the child. Women emphasize their maternal obligations, as a means of juggling the multiple calls on their textile wealth, personal labour and time. But in addition, examining mother's practices demonstrates the way in which textiles, sometimes called women's wealth, act to signify the obligation of the entire maternal kindred, through life and death.;Finally, mothers in Tonga are 'good mothers', but their practice and priorities differ from a germinal feminist formulation (Ruddick 1989) for theorising mothering. For mothers on Kauvai, duty to Family is a dominant trope, and traditionalism acts to protect, not ensnare the Tongan commoner woman.
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