8 - Radiality and the Tongan kinship terminology

Summary

Introduction

Tongan social events such as first birthday, marriage, and funerals are deeply intertwined with one's world of kin. The persons central to these events are kin of various kinds and the events serve to define and redefine core kin relations and relations between kin such as the fahu relationship. This chapter begins with the ethnographic account of a first birthday in Tonga. The events of that day highlight the interplay between the formal properties of kinship expressed through a kinship terminology and how the meaning of those kin relations are played out and reconstructed in the context of a family celebrating the first birthday of a daughter.

The ethnographic account provides us with the activities of that day and the centrality of kin relations in those events, but it does not inform us of the conceptual system that the participants bring with them as culture bearers to this event. Rather, it is a slice in time of an ongoing, dynamic process linking behavior with a conceptual system for kin relations and a conceptual system for kin relations with behavior. The events of the day are a co-production of the dynamic and the static; of kinship as it is lived and kinship as it is conceptualized. To understand this interplay we need not only the ethnographic account but also an account of the underlying conceptual system that is being activated during this event.