ABSTRACT
When I went to the Kingdom of Tonga in Western Polynesia in June of 1981, it was to study ngatu, tapa cloth. But the excitement surrounding the Heilala Festival preempted the women's attention, and mine as well.! Tonga is a constitutional monarchy, an independent kingdom protected by England that struggles against growing pluralism to maintain a stratified society where the chiefly and/or noble ('eiki) ranks are socially differentiated from commoners (tu'a).2 As Campbell and others have noted, this struggle is manifested in tensions "arising between the new economy and the old social order, just as they have arisen between the new economy and the old political order" (Campbell 1992, 227). These tensions in turn are articulated in the debate over "beauty" that emerges in the Miss Heilala Beauty Pageant.
