Ep. 41: Intro and Background to Tongan Coloniality with Ata

Ata and I have just published a paper on Tongan Coloniality which this episode provides a brief introduction to as well as a bit of background behind this research project.  Prior to successfully publishing this paper we were getting blocked within academia when making attempts to discuss Indigenous issues from a Tonga context in relation to global perspectives. Questions of Tongan Indigeneity have regularly been raised due to the dominant idea and definition of Indigeneity based on minoritized people within ancestral homelands, predominantly in settler-colonial nations. Tonga also has a popular narrative of ‘never being colonised’ so this project initially confronted the scholarly audience in Pacific Studies, Pacific Anthropology, and Indigenous Studies in order to be able to eventually do the work we want to and have the conversations we’d like to in that arena. However, this episode is aimed at a broader and more public audience in mind. We explain why we are challenging popular assumptions and ideas directly by drawing from Tongan scholars and scholars of Tonga and the Oceanian region, while making links to ‘Global South Third World’ perspectives. Topics include coercion into British protectorate status, the role of Christianity, capitalism, and nation-state formation. We end with a teaser on Tongan Indigeneity from Ata’s current doctoral research and insights of how critical consciousness is a long-standing tradition in Tonga.

Terms: ASAO (Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania), Cognitive Dissonance (a concept from the field of psychology to identify the mental stress of paradox or contradictions, by altering how one processes information to make a contradiction fit within the consistency or belief one is socialised or accustomed to already, despite evidence from new information that is contrary to it), TRA (Tongan Research Association, formerly the Tonga History Association), Bad Faith (Lewis Gordon draws from Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’ and applies it to anti-blackness such as the bad faith practiced in the modern fears of Black consciousness; we apply it in this podcast in the principle of avoiding personal torment by ignoring evidence that reveals a reality contrary to a cherished belief; related to cognitive dissonance), Wansolwara (Tok Pisin, Bislama, Pijin for the Salt Water Continent of Oceania), Tåsi (Sea or Ocean in Chamorro, the Indigenous language of Guåhan/Guam), Moana (Big or Deep Ocean, Oceania in eastern Oceanic languages from the ‘Polynesian’ region), ‘Uta (plantation or commonly interpreted as ‘the bush’ in lea faka-Tonga), Kolo (town, city, or dense settlement in lea faka-Tonga), Motu (island, at times in reference to ‘outer island(s)’ in lea faka-Tonga), tu‘a (later in time, periphery, outer/outside/marginal, or else in reference to lower ranking people currently also conflated with 17th century British notions of class and interpreted as ‘commoner’).