The Kingdom of Tonga, the only remaining Polynesian Kingdom, is a constitutional monarchy. The current monarch, King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, is the heir of a dynasty that goes back at least a millennium. A recently born democratic movement is shaking the roots of this political system. The majority of Tongans, though, do not think of democracy as the panacea for solving the problems connected with their status of non-industrialized country. Tongans feel a sense of ‘fitness’ between the Tongan cultural and historical milieu and their monarchy personified by their king.
Over a period of three years, the PI will investigate the Tongan conceptions of social relationships and how these same ideas are actively used in generating political actions. The budding democratic movement that characterizes the current political situation in the Kingdom of Tonga, the linguistic choices that Tongan, a Polynesian language, allows and Tongans make in expressing spatial relationships, and the "radiality" (the identification of objects from and toward a specified center) that structures Tongan mental representations of spatial relationships, make the Tongan linguistic and cultural milieu the ideal environment in which to carry out this project. In particular, this project seeks answers to the following general questions that contribute to several major areas of theory and long-standing concern in cognitive anthropology: 1) How are social relationships represented in language and mind? 2) What is the relationship among the representations of spatial relationships and the representations of social relationships? 3) Can this relationship be characterized as a "cultural model?"
Building on his previous investigations of the mental and linguistic representations of spatial relationships and other Tongan knowledge domains such as navigation, religion, and kinship, the PI hypothesizes radiality as a Tongan cultural model. Linguistic, ethnographic, and social networks data will be collected and analyzed to test the stated hypothesis over three years, including six months of fieldwork in Tonga.
A variety of methods will be employed for the collection of the data in the field: participant observation, unstructured and structured interviews, questionnaires, and experimental tasks. An innovative database called "Digitized Tonga" will also be used in the field. This database will be upgraded after each residence in the field and is a necessary tool for the successful acquisition, storage, and analysis of the data.
Graduate and undergraduate students will be actively involved in the project. The students will gain training and experience in data collection in the field, data storage, data analysis, and data dissemination. New Web based teaching material will be developed.
Intellectual Merits: the possible finding of supporting evidence for radiality as a Tongan cultural model will contribute to research on the architecture of the mind, to the ethnography of Oceanic cultures, and to the understanding of political action/s as rooted in preferred knowledge representations.
Broader Impacts:
the way in which a traditionally hierarchical society like the Kingdom of Tonga
is coping with newly introduced democratic ideas has implications for similarly
situated cases around the world. We are all aware of the number of issues generated
in societies struggling to handle changes from a "traditional" hierarchy
–either local or imposed by colonial powers–to new forms of government
including democracy. The findings of the proposed project will be significant
for many other situations in which these issues are debated. Despite the large
and extensive literature available, rarely has research been conducted over
the breadth of data and through the methodology that is proposed for this investigation.