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Consumption and Cosmopolitanism: Practicing Modernity at the Second-Hand Marketplace in Nuku'alofa, Tonga
- Anthropological Quarterly
- George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
- Volume 77, Number 1, Winter 2004
- pp. 7-45
- 10.1353/anq.2004.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
At the second-hand marketplace in Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, Tongans buy and sell objects that their diasporic relatives send them instead of remittances. While selling objects goes against the grain of a traditional moral order, the marketplace is immensely popular but dominated by local Others. It enables participants to articulate and practice consumption and, more generally, a modern but locally relevant self, while at the same time quietly challenge the generally accepted assumption that high-ranking or wealthy elites control modernity.