The Tongan Tuʻi Tonga Burial and Sacred Kingship

Record summary

Tongan traditions concerning the Tuʻi Tonga portray the paramount ruler through a mixture of political authority, sacred genealogy, ritual precedence, and distinctive burial practices. European visitors in the eighteenth century, especially Cook’s expedition, recorded aspects of Tongan chiefly etiquette and mortuary culture that can be compared with other Polynesian theories of divine or semi-divine kingship. The lead should be treated as a historical and textual complex rather than evidence that Tongan rulers were universally regarded as gods. Oral histories and colonial-era ethnographies require careful chronological separation.