They are written in Dutch, English and Indonesian. Sri Ikana 57, Surabaya 60286, Indonesia. Islanders of the South is an ethnography of the kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. This is the first book which examines the interplay of Polynesian and Western ideas within contemporary social and economic practices. An analysis of the kinship system, with its economic, political and ideological dimensions, is intertwined with a discussion of Tongan attitudes on life and death, marriage and divorce, social rights and obligations, migration and remittances.
Later chapters deal with the crucial questions of land ownership and the circulation of gifts.
The aim is to investigate how Tongans live together and how they experience their relationship to nature and to one another. A large number of genealogies, biographies and case studies help convey this aspect. The author raises doubts about this ideology of progress by referring to aspects of nature and culture in Tonga which are disappearing or are in danger of doing so.