Niko Besnier's On the Edge of the Global focuses on the unlikely sites of pawnshops, bodybuilding gyms, beauty pageants, secondhand marketplaces, hair salons, and charismatic Christian congregations in Tonga to examine how local struggles over claims to modernity are lived in the everyday. It is in these sites on the margins of Tongan society, Besnier argues, that localized enactments of globalized modernity can be most clearly seen, for example in body hexis and adornment, business transactions, contemporary performances of traditional obligations, and language use. In one vignette the author takes us to the beauty salon where women negotiate adherence to Tongan custom (cutting one's hair after a funeral) while presenting themselves as modern professional women (with appropriately cut and styled hair). Using what he calls an “analytic bifocality,” Besnier examines the conceptual dualities of history-present, tradition-modernity, and local-global and how they are imagined, understood, and engaged in Tonga. In contrast to how these dualities are often depicted, he argues that they are deeply entangled and co-constructed rather than discrete oppositions, have multiple rather than single origins, and invoke an array of ever-shifting rather than fixed meanings. Their dynamics of convergence produce different anxieties, but struggles over claims to modernity and how it is defined and incorporated in the local context permeate twenty-first-century Tongan society.

In this sense, modernities are not simply imposed or imported from the outside, but are reimagined and reconfigured within specific local contexts: they are shaped by late capitalist logics of consumption and cosmopolitanism that intersect with rank hierarchy, cultural practice, and Tongan tradition. The lens of bifocality is particularly useful in capturing the nuances in these shifting social dynamics. It is not simply a researcher's analytic tool, but one that reflects everyday life in Tonga where interpretations of local practices are made with an awareness of the nonlocal, and the global and transnational are in turn filtered through local lenses. At the same time, bifocality is not just in reference to the outside, but is also employed in local comparisons between segments of Tongan society.

This book is a quality addition to contemporary anthropology for its compelling analysis of local and large-scale dynamics. With the benefit of personal experience and ethnographic fieldwork in Tonga that spans four decades, the author provides a wealth of ethnographic detail in vividly rendered sites and dynamics that draws the reader in. For example, his descriptions of mainstream women's and transgender beauty pageants offer incisive insight and humor, as well as a depth of knowledge and understanding of local social nuance and international trends. While this book focuses on a changing Tongan society “on the edge of the global,” it offers critical analyses that could be applied in many other contexts similarly situated, in the Pacific Islands and elsewhere. It is a useful text for scholars and students of contemporary dynamics that are anchored in place but global or transnational in scope. Those interested in theories of modernity, culture, the body, exchange, practice theory, or religion will also find their time reading this book to be well spent.