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Any description of Tongan culture that limits itself to what Tongans see as anga fakatonga would give a seriously distorted view of what people actually do, in Tonga, or in diaspora, because accommodations are so often made to anga fakapālangi. The following account tries to give both the idealized and the on-the-ground versions of Tongan culture.
Among the first published works of Tongan literature, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were 'Epeli Hau'ofa's short stories and Konai Helu Thaman's poetry. Hau'ofa's popular collection of short stories Tales of the Tikongs (1973) was followed by a novel, Kisses in the Nederends , 1987, noted for its satirical style.
Tongan narrative, Tongan mythology, or ancient Tongan religion, sometimes referred to as tala-ē-fonua (meaning, "telling of the land and its people") [1] in Tongan, is the collation of various myths, legends, stories, traditions, characters, creatures, spirits, and gods of the Polynesian islands that now make up the island nation of Tonga.
Tongans or Tongan people are a Polynesian ethnic group native to Tonga, a Polynesian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Tongans represent more than 98% of the inhabitants of Tonga. The rest are European (the majority are British ), mixed European, and other Pacific Islanders .
Tongan has a very rich oral literature and is primarily a spoken, rather than written, language. One of the first publications of Tongan texts was in William Mariner 's grammar and dictionary of the Tongan language, edited and published in 1817 by John Martin as part of volume 2 of Mariner's Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, in the ...
According to leading Tongan scholars, including Okusitino Mahina, the Tongan and Samoan oral traditions indicate that the first Tu'i Tonga was the son of their god Tangaloa. [12] As the ancestral homeland of the Tu'i Tonga dynasty and the abode of deities such as Tagaloa 'Eitumatupu'a, Tonga Fusifonua, and Tavatavaimanuka.
His short film is only a few minutes long, but beautifully captures identity, belonging and holding on to tradition in a modern world.
Not just in Tonga, but throughout the South Pacific is a tradition of passing down land to eldest sons. To obtain their own land, younger sons needed to explore. Tangaloa, the chief Tongan god before the arrival of Christianity, was a younger sibling who created Tonga while searching for land from a canoe. His fish hook accidentally caught on a ...