Creating a Nation With Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora (Asao Studies in Pacific Anthropology)

Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation - fonua - which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building.