Tongan barkcloth, made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, still features lavishly in Polynesian ceremonies all over the world. Yet despite the attention paid to this textile by anthropologists and art historians alike, little is known about its history. Providing a unique insight into Polynesian material culture, this book explores barkcloth's rich cultural history, and argues that its manufacture, decoration and use are vehicles of creativity and female agency. Based on twelve years of extensive ethnographic and archival research, the book uncovers stories of ceremony, gender, the senses, religion and nationhood, from the 17th century up to the present-day. Placing the materiality of textiles at the heart of Tongan culture, Veys reveals not only how barkcloth was and continues to be made, but also how it defines what it means to be Tongan. Extending the study to explore the place of barkcloth in the European imagination, she examines international museum collections of Tongan barkcloth, from the UK and Italy to Switzerland and the USA, addressing the bias of the European 'gaze' and challenging traditional gendered understandings of the cloth. A nuanced narrative of past and present barkcloth manufacture, designs and use, Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth demonstrates the importance of the textile to both historical and contemporary Polynesian culture.

Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about ‘women’s wealth’. These exchanges were generated by Annette Weiner’s (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronis?aw Malinowski’s classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that women’s production of ‘wealth’ (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a central role in Trobriand matrilineal cosmology and social organisation. This volume brings the debates about women’s wealth back to the fore by critically revisiting and engaging with ideas about gender and materiality, value, relationality and the social life and agency of things. The chapters, interspersed by three poems, evoke the sinuous materiality of the different objects made by women across the Pacific, and the intimate relationship between these objects of value and sensuous, gendered bodies. In the Epilogue, Professor Margaret Jolly observes how the volume also ‘trace[s] a more abstract sinuosity in the movement of these things through time and place, as they coil through different regimes of value … The eight chapters … trace winding paths across the contemporary Pacific, from the Trobriands in Milne Bay, to Maisin, Wanigela and Korafe in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, through the islands of Tonga to diasporic Tongan and Cook Islander communities in New Zealand’. This comparative perspective elucidates how women’s wealth is defined, valued and contested in current exchanges, bride-price debates, church settings, development projects and the challenges of living in diaspora. Importantly, this reveals how women themselves preserve the different values and meanings in gift-giving and exchanges, despite processes of commodification that have resulted in the decline or replacement of ‘women’s wealth’.

The author describes Tongan barkcloth or tapa, its decorative patterns, techniques of manufacture and decoration, and methods of use.