Making maps

Yesterday, as my students first guffawed and then sighed, I laboured with a fading marker pen over a dirty whiteboard in an effort to draw a map of 'Eua, the diamond-shaped, Manhattan-sized island which is the southernmost inhabited piece of Tonga, and almost the closest inhabited island to New Zealand.

Along with 'Iliasa Helu, I am leading an 'Atenisi expedition to 'Eua this weekend, and my drawing, with its childish lines and smudged names, was the only detailed map of the place most of the students had ever seen. 'Eua is notorious for its limestone sinkholes and caves, out of which huge banyan trees often grow, and into which reckless visitors occasionally vanish. "I think we need a local guide" one of the students said, after frowning at the vague details I had drawn on the board. "And we need a map that makes sense."

If only I had known yesterday that I am part of an exhibition dedicated to mapmaking being held at an art gallery on Auckland's fashionable Karangahape Road. I could have tried to impress my truculent students by telling them that curators Rachel Wilson and James Wylie had taken an interest in the psychogeographic film I've been making about the Great South Road with Paul Janman, and had decided to show maps and footage from the half-finished project in the RM gallery.

Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to check my e mail yesterday, and so didn't get Paul's report about the exhibition Wylie and Wilson have called Exanded Map. I'm chuffed, nevertheless, that I've managed to get my name, however briefly, onto the wall of a gallery, despite never being able to the master the art of the stick person portrait at Drury Primary School art class.

My students are no strangers to map-making. A month or so ago I decided to enliven my Creative Writing paper by summouning a taxivan to the 'Atenisi campus and piling them into it. As the driver steered randomly through the mid-morning Nuku'alofa streets, scattering packs of pigs with his horn and cursing at a fat noble in an SUV, I gave an improvised lecture on Iain Sinclair, JG Ballard, and the practice of psychogeography, which I summed up in the maxin 'Get lost'. I got the bewildered taxi driver to leave us beside Nuku'alofa's quarry, a place where strapping young palm trees rise through the smashed windscreens of classic American and British cars. "This is the end of the line" I told my confused charges. "This is the graveyard of modernity. Forget about those war films you see, where tanks and jeeps and the bodies of marines lie ruined on a tropical beach: these are today's casualties of war." "It's not the end" Tevita Manu'atu, 2012 dux at 'Atenisi, replied, in an indulgent voice. "It's a new beginning". Perhaps he was right: recyclers were busy amidst the ruins, building small piles of healthy organs - unrusted carburretors, intact radiators   - pulled from the diseased bodies of Valiants and Fords.

After we had found our way through the ruins of modernity to the Nuku'alofa waterfront, where we drank Fanta and hailed another taxi, I asked my Creative Writing students to create 'psychogeographic maps' of our journey, and of Nuku'alofa in general. Forget spurious notions of accuracy and objectivity, I told them, as I handed out the felt pens and crayons. Draw with your subconscious and your pineal glands. Think about Sinclair's heroic epic walk along the M 25, that ring road that isolates London more surely than any wall, think about the semi-secret military installations he spotted through air that made his eyes water, the lungfuls of truck exhaust that almost saw him resort, like a climber in the Himalyas, to bottled oxygen. Tevita was the first to finish his map. He had drawn, with a firm, unfailingly accurate hand, the allotments, plantations, churches, and roads of his home village on the weathercoast of Tongatapu.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Whitsunday in Halano

Last weekend we moved from Halano, a suburb on the western edge of Nuku'alofa, to Fasi, an area just east of the city's centre. Located inland from Sopu, or Soap, a suburb that got its name because Taufa'ahau, Tonga's first modern king, liked to bathe beside its now-vanished beach, Halano was an uninhabited swamp until Nuku'alofa's population began to grow in the decades after World War Two. Unable to secure plots of dry land, new arrivals from the countryside poured millions of pieces of crushed coral onto the reeds and stagnant water, and created a series of precarious islands, which they covered with small houses and pig and chicken pens, and connected with rough paths that eventually swelled into roads.

Water and earth still compete for hegemony in Halano, and when we arrived last February days of rain had drowned the roads and arked the iron-roved houses and huts. As pigs wallowed delightedly in vast black pools where food scraps floated like rotten lilies, many Halanoans were holing up in the Wesleyan and Catholic churches which rise, fort-like, in the heart of their community.

Even when the rainy season ends, and the sagging motorbikes and windowscreenless utes that go up and down Halano's roads stir up dust rather than dirty water, there are reminders of the suburb's past. Over the past few months my wife has covered Aneirin with litres of foul-smelling insect repellent, laid wire grilles across our downstairs windows, so that they look like pages in a child's maths exercise book, and kept a silk net hanging like a great soft spider from the ceiling of our bedroom. Despite all these efforts, mosquito swarms as thickly dark as coal smoke have periodically invaded our house, tormenting her and also covering our cheerfully oblivious son with bites. Our neighbours, who seem to have acquired immunity to the beasts, have sometimes asked whether Aneirin has chicken pox, because of the red raised spots on his arms, legs, and - if the invaders have been particularly successful - face. It was the mosquito menace as well as a cheaper rent which lured us east to the upstairs section of 'Opeti Taliai's home in an older and reliably dry part of Nuku'alofa.

We will miss Halano. The place seemed more like a village than the suburb of a capital city, and we were quickly absorbed into the intricate and ornate system of ritual exchanges that is the bedrock of Tongan traditional life. Neighbours would introduce themselves with baskets of breadfruit and plates of corned beef wrapped in taro leaves and soaked with coconut juice, and all the children of the suburb soon learned our child's strange Celtic name.

A couple of weeks ago Louisa, who lived across the road from us in Halano, invited us to Whitsunday, an old English festival which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ's disciples in the aftermath of his ascent to heaven. Whitsunday is largely obsolete in Britain, but in Tonga it sees thousands of Free Wesleyan children donning white tupenu and white jackets, tying little ta'ovala to their waists, and heading down to their local church, where they gather near the pulpit and read passages from the Bible. The photos at the top of this post shows Aneirin dressed up in the tupenu, jacket and ta'ovala that Louisa made for him, and wandering, confusedly but fearlessly, towards the pulpit of Halano's Free Wesleyan Church. The first photo shows Aneirin in the grip of another of our neighbours, an 'Atenisi graduate and Anglican Minister with the typically Tongan name of Sekatoa, or Sector. Sekatoa's daughter Miriam got in on the act.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Low-flying UFO spotted in Suva

While I have been hiding out on 'Eua Island, Paul Janman has taken his cheesecutter hat, which increasingly resembles a flying saucer, to Fiji, where the World of Islands film festival has provided the opportunity for a gathering of some of the Pacific's most important and outspoken artists and intellectuals, in defiance of the strictures of Commodore Bainimarama's philistine regime.

I hope soon to interview Paul by phone about his experiences in Suva, but in the meantime keep an eye on that unidentified low-flying object...

Zen and seasickness

Last week I introduced my Creative Writing students to haiku, and to something of Zen Buddhism, the religion which has been closely associated with the writing of haiku. I explained that I’d had a somewhat troubled relationship with both Zen and the haiku artform.

Intrigued by the writing of Richard Von Sturmer, and by his earlier contributions to New Zealand film and music, I enrolled, a few years ago, in a short course in meditation at the Auckland Zen Centre, which Richard and his wife manage. I found myself sitting with my legs uncomfortably folded facing a brick wall, a few inches from the tattooed biceps of a young man who explained that he had decided to learn to meditate because he was “tired of getting so angry all the time”. As soon as we began our first exercise in meditation the angry man fell asleep and began to wheeze and snore loudly. When our instructor tapped the man firmly on the shoulder he jumped off the floor, shrieked, and looked about confusedly. After we resumed the exercise, I found myself taking nervous half-glances at my colleague, and wondering whether it might be better to let him sleep.

Despite the urgings of our teacher and the positive examples of Richard’s books, which describe him navigating various levels of consciousness and unconsciousness in the same languorously graceful way that an albatross cruises a summer sky, I was unable to meditate properly. We had been instructed to throw all random and quotidian thoughts – thoughts about money, or sex, or dinner – away; freed from these dead weights our minds would rise to new heights, in the same way that hot air balloons rise higher into the sky after sandbags or superfluous passengers have been tossed overboard. Alas, I found trivial thoughts a hard pleasure to abandon. I tried to imagine my mind as a room, and my thoughts as furniture. I opened a window and hurled out televisions and sofas, in the manner of the young and stoned Keith Richards. Every time I turned around and searched my room, though, a new object – a scruffy bookcase or blown stereo or luxuriant potplant – had made itself comfortable in one corner or another.

My inability to meditate is perhaps linked with my inability to write haiku. Zen Buddhism holds that the gap between the individual human consciousness and the world is artificial, and the haiku, along with meditation, is considered a way in which the distinction can be defeated. Through its concreteness and brevity, a haiku is supposed to take us out of the prisons of our minds into the ‘real’ world. A haiku about an oak tree should make us an oak tree; a haiku about the sea should immerse us in the sea. Similies and metaphors are, traditionally, barred from haiku, because they draw attention away from the unique objects and scenes that haiku are supposed to focus upon. A reader can’t merge with oak or leap into the sea if she’s busy comparing and contrasting an oak with a power pole, or making the sea into a symbol of flux.

Unfortunately, as I confessed to my students last week, I’m addicted to metaphors and similies. I can’t think about one thing without almost immediately thinking about something else. Perhaps it is this associative mania which gives my conversation, as well as some of my writing, a rambling quality.

I call many of the short poems I produce ‘anti-haiku’, because they seem to consist mostly of metaphors and similies. I wrote this latest set of anti-haiku after taking the ferry back from ‘Eua Island at the beginning of last week. We rode the ferry out to ‘Eua through blue, well-behaved water, but on our journey home the Tongatapu Channel turned a metallic shade of grey, and threw twelve foot swells in our direction. The old, miniscule, wooden ferry would have been battling to stay afloat, but on the handsome new steel vessel we worried about losing our lunches, rather than our lives. I’m heading back to ‘Eua at the end of the month with my students, who will be – I hope – writing haiku and pursuing research assignments involving ancient forts and contemporary land disputes. If anyone feels like joining us on the island of exiles then they’re most welcome.  

Ferry from ‘Eua: thirteen anti-haiku 

 

bird, sikota, on our prow

instead of a carved atua 

* 

on the receding coast of ‘Eua

caves make the cliffs yawn

* 

plop!

did someone push that old bastard Basho

overboard? 

*

these clouds know Tongan -

their raindrops are shaped

like glottal stops 

* 

on the open deck

where the farmers left their fruit

the wind picks a green banana 

* 

a wave like an upturned metal dinghy

smashes against the prow 

* 

the sea spills drink

after drink

until the deck

is as wet as the boards of Black Pete’s Bar 

* 

swaying

belching

I feel like a cheap drunk

* 

upstairs

the sea rocks our infant son

awake 

* 

lifejackets stacked

beneath the stairs

dream of disaster

and heroic deeds:

dream

of dragging strangers

through the surf,

their chests puffed up with pride 

* 

a launch full of snapping tourists

circles ‘Eueiki

as if the island were a surfacing whale 

* 

chipped pillars

of brown and black

between gaps

where the tide runs

like a tongue:

this reef needs a dentist 

* 

on the asphalt acre by Salote’s wharf

rellies hug

car doors applaud 

Footnote/apology: Anyone who read the recent entries on this blog could be forgiven for assuming that I have been spending all of my time in Tonga talking and writing about literature, movies, dreams, and other subjects that hard-bitten sociologists and political economists tend to consider ‘soft’. In fact, I’ve been doing some fair dinkum sociological research over here, and the seminar I gave at ‘Atenisi the other week was full of unpoetic terms like modes of production and proletarianisation.

I’ve blogged at some length about the peculiar and fascinating sociology of Tonga in the past, but now that I’m actually exploring the subject systematically, with the help of the linguists and genealogists at ‘Atenisi, I realise how much I have to learn, and how dangerous hasty generalisations can be.

The distinctive thing about literature, of course, is that it doesn’t rely on systematic studies of reality, but on subjective impressions. As I keep telling my Creative Writing students, we don’t assess the generalisations of a poet or a novelist by looking at a stack of statistics. Epeli Hau’ofa published his classic book of short stories Tales of the Tikongs a few years after penning his treatise Corned Beef and Tapioca: a report on the food distribution systems in Tonga. Both books tell us much about Tonga, but they communicate in very different ways. That’s my excuse, anyway, for putting so much dodgy poetry on this blog…

 Footnote (2): In search of a reliable internet connection, I just stepped out of the twenty-eight degree heat of Nuku’alofa into the permanently temperate climate of Escape Café, where expats, diplomats, conmen, agents of the International Monetary Fund, shirtless beachcombers, and other flotsam and jetsam of the Pacific gather to plot over watery flat whites. (There’s a table near the back of the café, within a few yards of a door, which is more or less reserved for a couple of grizzled and permatanned German-Tongans. Unlike other members of their tribe, who are busy running businesses, these gentlemen spend almost all their time idling in cafes and bars around Nuku’alofa. One of them grimly counts and recounts a pile of tattered notes; the other sits with a succession of unlit cigarettes in his mouth. Rumour insists that the pair are bitter and unrepentant exiles from Nazi Germany).

I’m sitting at a low table a few feet from the dapper Japanese ambassador to Tonga, who visited ‘Atenisi a couple of weeks ago in his black shiny SUV to thank us for hosting an exchange student from Okinawa.  The ambassador is a learned man who was fascinated by the works of Japanese literature in our library, but I dare not show him my anti-haiku, for fear of sparking a diplomatic incident…

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]


  

Cruising with Paul Theroux

I’ve often lamented, on this blog and elsewhere, the influence of Paul Theroux on Western conceptions of the modern Pacific. Theroux is a bad-tempered man at the best of times, and when he researched and wrote his bestselling book The Happy Isles of Oceania twenty or so years ago the implosion of his marriage and a cancer scare had left him particularly dyspeptic, so that he could take sadistic pleasure in characterising Tongans, Samoans, and other inhabitants of the Pacific as comically stupid, chronically dishonest, and disgustingly gluttonous.

The Happy Isles spends hundreds of pages reviving or inventing racist stereotypes, but it does have a few enjoyable passages, thanks to its author’s love of the natural world. Theroux the misanthrope is happiest when he turns his back on the contemptible mass of humanity, and walks into a forest, or paddles out to sea. In the chapter on his visit to the Trobriand Islands Theroux describes kayaking across a flat stretch of water at night, under a sky teeming with stars. As he paddles towards a horizon that is the same colour as the sea, the author makes an analogy between the thousands of islands flung across the Pacific Ocean and the uncounted solar systems strewn through the Milky Way. He looks up at the stars, and imagines that he is guiding his little craft through Outer Space, from one archipelago of planets to another.

Yesterday Skyler, Aneirin and I caught the new and improved ferry which motors between Tongatapu and ‘Eua Islands on every day of the week except the Sabbath. When I travelled on the old, small, unstable boat to ‘Eua a couple of years ago, my face turned as green as a gangrenous limb, and I donated my lunch to the fleets of sharks that cut the deep water of the Tongatapu Channel. On the new, three-storey ferry, though, I confidently ate first one and then another ham and cheese sandwich, and only leaned over a handrail to take photographs.

The journey to ‘Eua begins with a ride through Nuku’alofa harbour, which is home to a series of small islands, each protected by its own reef. Tonga was one of the seedbeds of Polynesian culture, and these islands gave their names – ‘Ata, Motutapu, ‘Eueiki, Hihifo, Hahake, Onevao - to forests and beaches and marae thousands of kilometres away, in Tahiti and Aotearoa and Ontong Java. Wooden dinghies lay beached on the islands, like the landing craft of an invading army, an army which had disappeared amongst groves of coconut trees and giant taro.

By noon, when the ferry pushed past the V-shaped island of Fukave, the sky had turned the same very dark shade of blue as the sea. Nuku, the round green island just beyond Fukave, seemed to float like a little planet in this universe of blue.

After the ferry had left Nuku’alofa harbour and entered the Tongatapu channel I went downstairs, to a room with linoleum floors and tinted windows, and found a space between its sprawled snoring bodies. I fell asleep quickly in the gently rocking semi-darkness, and began to dream that I was back in Auckland, in the darkness of the Civic Theatre’s little basement cinema, where avant-garde dramas and overly serious documentaries are shown to clusters of graduate students during the city’s yearly film festival. I knew, thanks to the background knowledge which is mysteriously granted to dreamers, that I was about to watch a recently discovered extended cut of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I leaned forward in my seat, peered at the man seated beside me, discovered that he was Paul Theroux, and began at once to complain to him that the very notion of an extended version of a film as long as 2001 was absurd. “Dreams are defined by their absurdity”, Theroux replied solemnly, without bothering to turn his head in my direction.

Slowly, with the soft roar of a distant but unstoppable tidal wave, seven long, bone-white spacecraft cruised onto the movie screen’s black sky. Untwinkling stars appeared one at a time in the distance: I wondered whether they might be the lights of a fleet of outpaced pursuers.

In the last science fiction movie I had watched all the spacecraft resembled Stealth bombers and had little American flags painted on their wings, so that they looked like stamped envelopes. The ships on the Civic’s screen lacked flags, but had koru patterns carved into their sides. A carved atua perched like a wart on the nose of the closest ship, just above a cockpit filled with orange light and brown tattooed faces. “A thousand years ago seven waka set out across interstellar space, from the constellation of Tropical Polynesia to the outlier planet known as Aotearoa”, a voice announced through the theatre’s speakers. “This is the story of the Imperial Starships Tainui, Aotea, Mataatua – “

Theroux was looking at me grumpily. “Foolish!” he shouted. “How foolish – and how implausible!”

I was suddenly impressed by the distinguished travel writer’s knowledge of New Zealand history, and by his awareness of the blunders of amateur Victorian ethnographers like Percy Smith and Elsdon Best. “Yes, well, the Great Fleet story about seven founding waka was pretty much discredited in the ‘70s” I began. “We know that Smith and Best simplified the stories they collected, and settled on a number of mythic significance – “

Theroux’s face had hardened. “Foolish boring man! I’m not interested in your tinpot country’s oral history – I’m talking about the mechanics of space travel. Those ships are impossibly cumbersome – they’d sink into the depths of space before they made it a mile to Aotearoa. The only way to travel through space is with a small kayak – the paddle is more efficient than the fission engine. An explorer has to travel alone, not with a herd of engineers and ethnographers.”

As Theroux spoke the screen began to turn the same dark shade of blue as the sky and the sea that enclosed the ferry to ‘Eua.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

 

The sociologist as DJ

Last year I blogged about the great historian EP Thompson's brief but entertaining stint as a BBC DJ. Here in Tonga, where the population is small, resources are in short supply, and multitasking is a way of life, the sociologist Dr Michael Horowitz has been moonlighting as a prime time radio DJ. Horowitz has spent decades teaching at Tonga's 'Atenisi Institute and at various North America institutions, and spent last summer in Wellington, as a Visiting Fellow of Victoria University.

Now that he's back on Tongatapu, though, the man locals call Maikolo is spending Wednesday evenings as a DJ on the state-owned FM broadcaster Tonga One, where he presents a classical music show sponsored by the Vava'u Academy, a thinktank he co-founded with the 'Atenisi graduate Dr 'Okusi Mahina.

When Maikolo came over for dinner the other night, I lobbied hard for the inclusion of my favourite pieces of music in his show. He repeatedly refused, though, to promise to play John Adams or Steve Reich or any other of the minimalist composers I favour. "It was hard enough for me to get this show" he said. "And if I play that stuff there'll be outrage. I'm sticking to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto". I tried to explain to Maikolo that I'm no classical music snob, and that I enjoy the trance-like music of Reich and Adams and other minimalists because it is intended as a populist reaction against the elitism and hyper-intellectualism of avant-garde atonal mid-century composers. Maikolo was not interested in my protestations. "I might let you guest DJ one night" he said, "and then it'll be on your head".

Even if you live outside the Friendly Islands, you can listen to DJ Horowitz tonight on Tonga One by going to this page and following the link.

Maikolo is no stranger to the radio industry. During a sojourn in native America in the mid-noughties, he worked for the liberal radio network KBOO, presenting well-researched programmes on everything from America's neo-fascist Christian Reconstructionist movement to political affairs in the Pacific. As one would expect, Tonga was a recurring subject of Horowitz's work for HBOO. Here's a link to a programme the sociologist made in the aftermath of the riots that destroyed a third of central Nuku'alofa in November 2006. You can use the search engine on HBOO's homepage to find more of Horowitz's programmes.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

See you in Nuku'alofa next Monday night

Riots, Idleness and Land Reform: the ideas of EP Thompson, and what they might mean in Tonga

A seminar by Dr Scott Hamilton, to be held on the 7 pm, 22^nd of April, at the ‘Atenisi Institute’s Lalo Masi Building, and followed by refreshments.

Edward Palmer Thompson was one of the most versatile and passionate intellectuals of the twentieth century. Thompson became famous in 1963, at the age of thirty-nine, when he published his massive and meticulous book The Making of the English Class, which tried to tell the story of the world’s first Industrial Revolution from the point of view of artisans, factory workers, and peasants, rather than the statesmen and industrialists who dominated the work of more conventional historians. Thompson showed the human cost of the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of capitalism in England. He sympathised with the peasants who were driven off their lands, and forced into the cities to toil for a pittance in factories. He cheered the men and women who organised trade unions and similar associations to fight for a better deal from factory owners.

Thompson’s approach to history can be explained partly by his politics. A lifelong socialist, he was as happy marching against nuclear weapons or standing on the picket line with a group of striking workers as he was working in academic archives or delivering a seminar. As well as academic books and essays, Thompson produced hundreds of articles about important political issues.

EP Thompson’s academic writing focuses mostly on England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its themes of social conflict and modernisation give it a relevance that extends far beyond his homeland. His books have for decades been popular in nations like India and Korea, and this month a conference in Australia marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Making of the English Working Class.

Thompson was always interested in comparing the histories of different nations. During a visit to Auckland to deliver several lectures in 1987, he announced that he was keen to learn about the history of the South Pacific, and about the ways both Polynesian and local palangi peoples organised their societies and used land. Sadly, Thompson’s declining health and early death in 1993 prevented him from realising this ambition.

If EP Thompson were able to visit the Kingdom of Tonga in 2013, what would he make of the place? What lessons might he have to offer Tonga, and what might Tonga be able to teach him? In this seminar Scott Hamilton will suggest a couple of possible answers to these questions.  

Hamilton will argue that Thompson would have been fascinated by Tonga, because of the unusual historical path the country has taken. In the nineteenth century Taufa’ahau managed to unify and modernise Tonga without embracing capitalism. Even today the basis of the domestic Tongan economy remains small, semi-subsistence farming, and non-capitalist practices involving gift-giving and the distribution of wealth through family networks remain extremely important.

Hamilton will suggest that EP Thompson’s great essay ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ can help Tongans to understand the clash between their traditional ways of life and the demands of the capitalist sector of their economy. Thompson’s essay describes how factory owners and other employers regulate the time of their workers, so that they labour for a certain number of hours a day, and a certain number of days a week, and how workers in the West have gradually internalised this regulation, and come to regard it as natural. In nations like Tonga, where the people can still live off the land, and thus do not have to sell their labour to survive, capitalism struggles to force workers into its patterns. Frustrated employers and foreign ‘experts’ on economic ‘development’ complain about the ‘idleness’ of the native people, and call for them to be disciplined, or separated from their land. But Thompson shows that rejection of the nine to five rhythms of the capitalist economy does not equal laziness. For thousands of years, humans laboured according to different, looser rhythms, as they brought in harvests or hunted game. Their work was guided by the seasons, not by the clock.

Thompson grew up in a strongly Methodist family – his father was famous for his work as a Methodist missionary in India – but was sometimes critical of the faith. In a famous and controversial passage in The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson rails against John Wesley for turning the poor of England away from a political solution to their problems. Thompson complains that, instead of encouraging the poor to campaign for better wages and the vote, Wesley  convinced them to blame their own supposed sinfulness for their miserable state. Instead of marching for justice and confronting England’s rich and powerful, the Methodist poor congregated in chapels. Tongan’s Free Wesleyan Church has sometimes been criticised for its links with the state, and for its alleged political conservatism. Are EP Thompson’s complaints against the English Methodists relevant to Tonga?

One of EP Thompson’s best-known essays discussed the riots which occasionally disturbed eighteenth century England. In ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’ Thompson argues that a riot can tell us much about the fundamental beliefs of a society. In eighteenth century England an unspoken contract between the poor and the powerful usually ensured social stability. When this contract was broken, though, the poor could loot and burn with a ferocity that shocked the powerful. Can we use Thompson’s celebrated study of civil disorder to understand the causes of the riot which hit Nuku’alofa nearly seven years ago?

Hamilton will suggest that Thompson could learn from Tonga, as well as offer the country lessons. Despite his sympathy for the often illiterate peasants and workers of eighteenth and nineteenth century England, Thompson seldom used oral history in his work. He considered old texts much more reliable than oral traditions about old events, because stories can change so easily as they pass from one tongue to another. Hamilton will suggest that Thompson might change his mind about oral history, if he could consider the work of scholars like Sione Latukefu, Niel Gunson, and Wendy Pond, who have discovered important truths in the songs and oral traditions of Tonga.

Scott Hamilton is the author of The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson and the British New Left, which was published by Manchester University Press in hardback in 2011 and in a paperback edition last year.