| Drug plant species used traditionally throughout the
world for secular and spiritual purposes (e.g., Cannabis spp., Erythroxylon coca,
Papaversomniferum, Nicotiana tabacum) were absent from the local flora when the first
immigrants arrived in the Pacific Islands. However, religious, therapeutic, and biological
motivations led these people to find kava amid the diversity of their new ecosystems and
to substitute it for psychoactive species left behind in Southeast Asia.
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Beyond
the large and biologically diverse island of New Guinea, the number of plant species in
the Pacific Islands drops off dramatically. Nevertheless, somewhere in the remote islands
of Melanesia, most likely northern Vanuatu, humans found an extraordinary indigenous
pepper plant. They experimented with it following trial-and-error methods and perhaps
observing and imitating animals that sampled the plant-like the "drunken rat" of
kava origin legends. The forefathers of today's Pacific Islanders eventually domesticated
wild Piper wichmannii. By selecting for the most palatable chemotypes, they produced the
existing kava cultivars. Kava chemotypes may be further developed; it is a relatively
young cultigen, and its improvement is still in process.
Kava plays a unique role in the social life of many Pacific societies. In spite of the
joint opposition of churches and colonial administrations, the Pacific drug is presently
enjoying a resurgence of popularity among Islanders asserting their cultural identity. In
several areas, especially in Melanesia and on Pohnpei Island in Micronesia, the plant
continues to be cultivated and consumed to serve traditional religious and political
interests, and its use is spreading into new social contexts. The contemporary social
importance of kava in many Pacific Island societies is similar to that of wine in southern
Europe: a sacred drug, a social drink, and a cash crop.
Piper methysticum is the only species from the traditional Pacific
Island pharmacopoeia that has been marketed by the European pharmaceutical industry. The
plant's export and commercial potentials are diverse and promising. Because kava
production is increasing, maintaining a regular supply of selected chemotypes is now
possible. Furthermore, Pacific Island politicians and leaders are generally willing to
develop an export commodity unique to their geographical area. The uniqueness of kava, as
opposed to such other tropical commodities as copra, cocoa, or coffee, could accord
Pacific producers greater control over export prices.
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In
the West, the popularity of natural products is an emerging trend. At the same time, both
Europeans and North Americans are consuming increasing amounts of tranquilizers and
anxiety- relieving substances to treat systemic stresses associated with everyday life in
the western world. Pacific Island farmers can provide the industrialized world with a
desirable natural substance comparable or superior in its psychoactive properties to
anti-stress prescription drugs like valium, and also to alcohol, nicotine, and cocaine. In
particular, kava has a more subtle, yet often equally appreciated, effect on the nervous
system than does alcohol; it could serve as an alcohol substitute throughout the Pacific
region and beyond if legislation in importing countries remains favorable. Kava is
certainly more attractive and less addictive than most widely used drugs (see Siegel
1989). Stimulant drinks such as cola, coffee, and tea are the world's best-selling drugs.
There is also room in the international market for a relaxant beverage with acknowledged
therapeutic properties. Because kava, is a natural product, it might be especially
successful in Southeast Asia, where phytotherapy is widely valued (note, for example, the
popularity of ginseng). This market, potentially involving millions of consumers, is
highly promising, although it demands efficacious, highquality products. In the West, kava
as a "pacific" drug could have an equal appeal if processed and marketed
effectively.
"Can Kava Kill?"
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Kava's
commercial potential is exciting but not without problems. In October 1989, Islands
Business, a monthly magazine printed in Suva, Fiji, with a regional distribution,
published a cover article entitled, "Can Kava Kill?" (Anonymous 1989). This
article was based in part on medical research into increasing kava use in Australian
Aboriginal communities. Recent commentary, particularly in Australia, has suggested that
kava use is unhealthful and socially disruptive, especially among Aboriginal people.
Aboriginal people, living mostly in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia,
began using kava in the early 1980s. Learning of the drug from resident Pacific Island
church workers (mostly from the Uniting [Methodist] denomination), Aboriginal people began
to purchase imported powdered kava as an alcohol substitute. Contradictory commentary in
the Australian media and in Australian church and social services communities continues to
either laud this adoption of a "good" indigenous and ethnic alcohol substitute
or to bemoan kava's new wider consumption. Those unhappy with the spread of drugs of any
sort are currently working to uncover psychologically, socially, or medically harmful
effects that kava might have. These effects-should any be documented-could argue for
kava's eventual legal prohibition by state authorities (see, e.g., Ellis 1984; Cawte 1986;
Mathews et at. 1988; Gregory and Cawte 1988; Gerrard 1988; d'Abbs 1991).
In some Aboriginal communities, kava is reportedly used in very large quantities on a
daily basis by up to 80 percent of adult men and 20 percent of adult women (Cawte 1988;
Mathews et al. 1988). Keledjian et al. (1988) argued that kava "became a drug of
abuse because of a lack of ceremonial or traditional constraints controlling its
use." This is a theory found elsewhere in the anthropological and psychological
literature (see Du Toit 1977). These authors state that estimates of kava consumption by
Aborigines range "as high as fifty times the amount" habitually drunk in the
Pacific Islands.
It has been noted that "alien poisons," or drugs from abroad, are far more
disruptive, deleterious, and dangerous than those native to one's own country. This
"law of alien poisons" (Schenk 1956; Gregory and Cawte 1988) has been cited to
explain alcohol abuse among Inuit (Eskimos), American Indians, and Aboriginals of
Australia. It also may explain, in a different setting, cocaine, heroin, and cannabis
abuse among Western youth-and excessive kava consumption among native Australians.
Researchers from the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, Australia, conducted an
epidemiological survey of 97 Aboriginal kava drinkers in the Northern Territory of
Australia (Mathews et al. 1988). The findings of this survey indicated that heavy kava
drinkers were more likely to suffer from general ill health, skin rash, shortness of
breath, malnutrition (with 20 percent loss of body weight and 50 percent loss of body
fat), liver damage, and biochemical changes in red and white blood cells and platelets
similar to those caused by large doses of alcohol.
For kava use, as for alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine, dosage is an
important variable in comparative study. Although Mathews et al. (1988) did initially
differentiate levels of consumption, their conclusion that kava is harmful neglected to
take into account dosage level or drinkers' psychological set and cultural setting. They
define an occasional kava drinker as one who uses about 100 grams of powder per week
(equivalent to 500 grams fresh weight or 10 to 15 grams of kavalactone resin); a heavy
drinker as one who uses 310 grams per week (1550 grams fresh weight or 30 to 45 grams of
resin); and a very heavy drinker as one who uses 440 grams per week (2200 grams of fresh
weight or 40 to 70 grams of resin). The survey included only two subjects from the
"occasional user" category, but seven "heavy users" and 12 "very
heavy users."
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In
the end, Mathews and his associates, referring to data based principally on heavy and very
heavy usage, argued that kava drinking is harmful and that Aboriginals are abusing the
drug and suffering deleterious side effects. They conclude that "the usage of kava
can cause malnutrition and weight loss, liver and renal dysfunction, a rash, red eyes,
shortness of breath, and possibly incoordination and pulmonary hypertension, as well as
abnormalities in red cells, lymphocytes and platelets.... It appears that the toxic effect
of kava on the liver may be considerably greater than of alcohol" (Mathews et al.
1988).
These conclusions arc not very surprising, for the same symptoms follow abuse or heavy
usage of such other drugs as alcohol or nicotine. Furthermore, many heavy kava users were
no doubt once also heavy alcohol drinkers, before a selfimposed ban on alcohol was
declared in this Aboriginal community-the ban that sparked kava's growing local
popularity. Some of the survey's subjects probably were also heavy smokers. It is accepted
by Australian authorities that Aboriginal health generally is worse than that of other
groups in Australia (Devanesen, Furber, and Hampton 1986), and it is possible that
surveyed subjects were in poor health before taking up kava drinking. Many of the symptoms
documented by this survey should not be attributed to kava consumption alone.
Cawte (1988) contributed a sensational editorial to the "killer kava"
debateentitled "Macabre Effects of a 'Cult' for Kava"-in the same issue of the
Medical Journal ofAustralia as the Mathews report. In this, he argues that deleterious
side effects of kava, as purportedly discovered by the Mathews group, are why the
pharmaceutical industry has abandoned further research and development of kava-based
therapies. This erroneous statement ignores the fact that the kavabased product Kaviase is
currently sanctioned by the National Health Scheme in France and also ignores continuing
European pharmaceutical interest in kava.
Most Pacific Island countries publish annual health reports and submit these to the World
Health Organization. Islanders have been drinking kava on a regular basis for centuries.
Because generally only half of the population drinks (males), any major side effects of
kava consumption would be statistically obvious in national health data. So far, not one
has been observed. Scientists working in university laboratories with limited field
experience may be in too great a hurry to be the first to discover harmful effects of
heavy consumption of kava. No doubt there are some, especially on the liver cells when
kava use is combined with use of other drugs (such as nicotine, alcohol, or both), but the
question remains, at what kavalactone dose?
There is as yet no scientific evidence for recommending legal bans on
kava importation or consumption. Nevertheless, partly as a result of the findings in
Mathews et al. 1988, the Western Australian government recently restricted the
availability of kava in that state pending consideration of kava for classification under
the state Poison Act (Gregory and Cawte 1988). Several Queensland state officials have
also proposed banning the importation and sale of kava, although such prohibition would be
challenged by Aboriginal leaders who want to keep their comrnunities free from the
violence caused by heavy alcohol consumption (d'Abbs 1991).
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Other
misleading statements about the physiological dangers of kava have also recently been
published. Knauft (1987) and Brunton (1988), for example, both claim that kava drinkers
may become comatose and can hallucinate after heavy usage. Hallucinating drinkers
reportedly sometimes even become paranoid, despite attempts to calm them. Because
kavalactones act physiologically as muscle relaxants and anxiety- relieving compounds,
heavy drinkers might indeed be rendered comatose; hallucination, however, seems an
unlikely effect of kavalactones, given their psychoactive properties as these currently
are understood. If hallucination occurs, it probably does so as the result of extreme
indulgence and a culturebased syndrome that locally influences comportment during kava
use. Personal experience with the drug (Lebot, personal observation, 1981-87) suggests to
us that these statements about hallucinogenic or killer kava are either erroneous or
dubiously simplistic.
Reports of people dying from drinking kava likewise should be received with suspicion. The
authors of "Can Kava Kill?" cite only one death resulting from kava consumption.
This supposedly occurred in July 1988 on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu. However, after a
review of the case, the Ministry of Health in Port Vila stated that three medical
investigations had been unable to determine the actual cause of death, and that kava was
not implicated. The "Can Kava Kill?" article also repeated an erroneous
statement, previously published by Gregory and Cawte (1988), that kava is addictive. No
existing clinical evidence substantiates this claim, nor does long term personal use of
the drug by V. Lebot. Medical evaluation of Lebot, who was rather more than a casual
drinker for six years of two to three coconut shells daily (200 to 300 milliliters, or 2
to 3 grams of resin), has not revealed any addictive or other physical effects of steady
kava consumption.
Finally, it might be noted that kava drinking has also spread to new groups other than
Aboriginal people of Australia. In Noumea, New Caledonia, where kava was also
traditionally not used, two kava bars opened their doors in 1987. Although these nakamals
are very popular among both the European and Melanesian communities, the "alien
poison" there has produced no noticeable deleterious effects on public health and no
medical or government intervention into kava use. The Australian case, therefore, appears
to be a special situation that reflects Aboriginal people's substandard socioeconomic
position within their own country.
Kava Futures
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We predict that kava consumption in the
future will increase as new communities of users gain access to the drug and new kava
products are developed for the pharmacological and recreational markets. Drug usage,
however, can also decrease and be abandoned, particularly when targeted by religious and
political forces. The recent history of kava documents such abandonment. People on several
Pacific Islands (e.g., Kosrae, in Micronesia) in the past have renounced kava drinking
upon their conversion to Christianity.
Some Islanders may also have abandoned use of the drug on their own, even before the era
of European colonial influence. As noted in chapter 2, Brunton (1989) relies upon a theory
of wholesale indigenous abandonment to account for the absence of kava use throughout the
Solomon Islands and in scattered locales elsewhere within the main kava using region.
Discounting the possibility of direct, although infrequent, contacts between island
societies that could explain gaps in the contemporary distribution of kava use, he
speculates that the plant originated in the west, diffused eastward as far as the
Marquesas and Society islands, to be irregularly preserved or abandoned by various island
societies.
Genetic, chemotypic, and morphological data (see chapters 2, 3, and 4) lead us to suggest
instead a northern Vanuatu origin for kava. We are also less ready to dismiss the
possibility of sporadic direct contacts between widely separated Pacific societies; and we
are less inclined to rely, as Brunton does, on massive kava abandonment in order to
account for its disjunct distribution.
The greatest diversity of kava zymotypes, morphotypes, and chemotypes is found in Vanuatu.
The sporadic occurrence of only some of these types in New Guinea, by contrast, makes the
hypothesis that kava was domesticated in the "Lapita homeland"-the Bismark
Archipelago region-exceedingly unlikely. Moreover, genetically P. methysticum is more
closely related to the R wichmannii plants of Vanuatu than those of New Guinea; kava's
domesticated forms descend from selected wild progenitors found today in Vanuatu. Finally,
any botanist with some field experience should be able to recognize that the R methysticum
grown in spotty New Guinea locales is clearly an introduced plant.
Brunton (1989) has suggested that Islanders (particularly Melanesians) rejected kava as
part of one "cultural package" they replaced with a second. Kava's central
ritual significance makes it a prime target for religious or cultural reformers of any
sort, whether these are pre-contact indigenous prophets and leaders or European
missionaries. Brunton thus finds a rationale for kava abandonment in endemic Pacific
cultural instability and creativity-in Islanders' proclivities to play with and reorder
their cultural and religious systems in a continuing attempt to achieve power, control,
and social order. Some new religious "package" might therefore have demanded the
prohibition of kava use along with associated elements of an older, exhausted religious
system-a kind of original "Just Say No" campaign. Brunton cites a perhaps
parallel abandonment of banana eating by folks on Ulawa, in the Solomon Islands, because
of an innovative religious taboo that once developed there.
We know that kava prohibition and abandonment did occur in historical times, induced by
external (usually Western religious) pressures upon traditional Pacific societies.
Under the influence of the Christian missions, Kosraeans, Tahitians, and others stopped
planting and drinking kava. The religious use of kava as a libation also disappeared on
Tikopia between the 1930s and 1950s, as observed by the anthropologist R. Firth (Firth
1970; see also Kirch and Yen 1982).
On the other hand, the physiological, social, and psychological attractiveness of the drug
makes problematic theories of wholesale kava abandonment. Kava is more than a banana. Its
psychoactive properties make its prohibition a more serious and difficult endeavor. The
history of psychoactive drugs worldwide (such as tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, and opium) is
generally one of adoption and spread rather than abandonment (Ray 1972). Although we agree
with Brunton that the most effective kind of drug prohibition or taboo is religious in
character, drugs do manage to spread in spite of the application of sometimes stringent
religious and legal prohibitions.
We recognize that religious innovation may occasionally have led people to stop using kava
before the era of European contact with Pacific Island societies, although we doubt
whether this sort of ritualized prohibition was as widespread as Brunton's theory demands.
It is equally informative to consider kava's adoption and spread- adoptions of kava that
must have occurred prehistorically, as it diffused (directly or indirectly) from one
society to another, and those that we can observe underway today. Given kava's remarkable
psychoactive and physiological properties, we suggest that cultural innovations and
religious packages extend and elaborate kava use at least as commonly as they demand its
prohibition.
On Pohnpei, for example, Riesenberg (1968) reports that the use of green bast (inner b
ark) from Hibiscus tiliaceus to strain kava, a strainer that gives Pohnpei kava its
infamous sliminess-dates only to about 1915. Instead of drying and processing the fiber
for straining, a man named Sigismundo innovated the use of green bast. Brunton (1989)
reports another elaboration of kava consumption, from Tanna. Sometime after the turn of
the century, a man named Manga from Larnwinaura Village began the practice of using the
island's manipulated and decorated form of kava root (nikava tapuga) as a gift to mark the
end of a circumcised boy's period of social seclusion. Fiji's "traditional" kava
circle protocol similarly dates only to the eighteenth century (Clunie 1986). And in 1991
some Port Vila kava bars innovated a special kava drink made with effervescent green
coconut water (K. Huffmann, personal communication, 1991).
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Not only have there been recent
elaborations in kava usage, but since European contact, the drug has also diffused into
new communities of users. Along with Australia's Aboriginal people and Noumea urbanites,
these communities include several hundred thousand descendants of Indian immigrants the
British brought to Fiji to work on sugarcane plantations (Brenneis 1984; figure 7.1). Here
is a historic rather than mythic conjunction of sugarcane and kava. Today, the modem
Fijian kava break has replaced the English colonial- inspired tradition of tea breaks in
downtown Suva office buildings (Barrau 1955; Naidu 1983). Prepared from dried and powdered
rootstock, the kava served there tends to have only mild physiological effects. Kava's
growing popularity as a recreational drug is apparent in its commodification and sale in
urban kava bars in Vanuatu, Pohnpei, New Caledonia, and Fiji and from public kava bowls
set up in Apia, Western Samoa, and at flea markets in Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand
(figures 7.2 and 7.3).
There is a small but growing number of Western users of the drug. Kava is available in
health food and herbalist shops in major Australasian and American cities, in spite of
occasional advisories against its importation or sale, or both, issued by the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration. These are markets that Vanuatu and other Pacific kava-producing
countries hope to tap (see chapter 6). Western tourists throughout the Pacific
occasionally sample kava and sometimes purchase souvenir bags of the powdered drug to
bring home. A large kava bowl sits at the entrance of the Fiji Museum in Suva, available
for tourists to taste. Kava bars in Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Pohnpei attract a small
but steady clientele of overseas visitors.
Among Islanders themselves, kava use is also spreading. This relates
in part to the efficacy of modern communication and transportation networks, but also
reflects how the religious, political, and economic functions of kava are being adapted
and developed to meet the demands of contemporary Pacific life. The old Christian
hostility to the drug has in large part faded. Although some newcoming missionaries, who
tend to be of evangelical or fundamentalist bent, continue to admonish proselytes to
abjure kava, the more established denominations generally have relaxed much of their
opposition to the drug. Some communities that once abandoned kava as a part of their
conversion to Christianity recently have begun using the drug again-see, for example,
Philibert (1986) on revived kava use in Erakor Village, Vanuatu. Other Vanuatu communities
that appear not to have used kava traditionally (such as some groups on Malakula, Ambrym,
and Santo) have also begun to consume the beverage regularly (Lamboll 1988; Rubinstein
1987).
Kava's traditional uses as a means of communion with the supernatural
and a means of establishing brotherly social relations have obvious ritual potential that
can be exploited by Christian congregations. The Roman Catholics, for example, who
typically were less hostile to kava than were their Protestant compeers, in Pohnpei have
incorporated the drug into Christian rites of atonement. Where Islanders traditionally
presented kava to wronged chiefs to beg forgiveness, they now bring kava to church for
presentation to God during a joint confession of sin and request for forgiveness. The
priest, as God's representative, consumes the drug as part of the ceremony (McGrath
1973).
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In some churches of Tonga, a kava root with
attached stem is presented to church dignitaries during Sunday ceremony. "Most
Methodist-derived congregations have a kava club, which is often designated as a
"youth club," to encourage young men to use kava rather than to drink alcohol
and go to dances. A kava circle is almost invariably held before church services ... in
order that the preacher might be welcomed, and arrangements for the service finalized....
The preacher is not noticeably less vehement, nor the members noticeably more sleepy
during the services" (Cowling 1988).
Islanders are using kava for novel economic purposes, as well as religious (see chapter
6). Tongans, for example, have transformed their informal kava clubs and circles into what
anthropologists call "rotating credit associations." Traditionally, female kava
prepapers and servers might dance inside the circle of drinking men to entertain the
gathering. Lemert observes: "Singing to the accompaniment of guitars may occur; songs
deal with love themes or may be laments for persons who have suffered misfortunes. At one
fai-kava [kava party] the writer witnessed dancing as follows: singly by the toa [toua,
female kava maker], the toa with a female partner, and finally the toa with a male
partner. The dance movements were slow, stylized, and not even remotely erotic"
(Lemert 1967).
Tongans have adapted this pattern of informal kava drinking to serve the cash needs of
contemporary life (Feldman 1980; Cowling 1988 Olson 1990). The Tongan community of
Honolulu, Hawaii, for example, organizes several different kava circles that meet Friday
and Saturday nights at Kapiolani Park and elsewhere. While rounds of kava are prepared and
distributed, the tou'a dance in the center of the drinking circle as men play guitars and
sing. Drinkers come into the center of Figure 7.2. A kava merchant advertises his products
in Suva market (photo V. Lebot). the circle and, with relish, shower dollar bills onto the
dancer's head and body. Most of these bills fall to the ground to be gathered by
kava circle organizers, who count and store the money in a metal box. In the mid 1980s,
these kava circles often massed between U.S. $1000 and $2000 a night, each collection of
money going to different group member on a rotating basis. Rotating credit associations of
this sort are common in societies where people find it hard to acquire and save large sums
of money, and where banks and other savings institutions either do not exist r are
inconvenient or unstable. Tongan people with occasional need for substantial sums of cash
(for medical treatment, college education bills, plane fares between Honolulu and
Nuku'alofa, and so on) invest small amounts of money weekly in a kava circle, awaiting an
eventual large return.
Kava's political
functions likewise continue to evolve within the contemporary Pacific. Bott (1972) and
others have described the Polynesian formal kava circle as display in which a society's
legitimate political hierarchy is laid out about the kava owl (or rather, carefully seated
and served) for all to see. Biersack has noted the politically constitutive uses of kava
sharing, as well as its display functions. Kava an awaken new political unities: "The
kava ceremony is more than a reflection of an existing order. Each performance is a
structure -making event" (Biersack 199 1).
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A task of newly independent states, in the
Pacific as elsewhere, is to establish sentiments of national identity and unity that are
at least as strong as people's more traditional and parochial ethnic, religious, or
linguistic affinities. New Pacific States, borrowing especially from the politics of kava
use in Tonga and Samoa, are putting the drug to work to these ends. National holidays and
public events in Vanuatu and Fiji, for example, may be marked by a display of kava sharing
among the politicians and bureaucrats who have organized the ceremony. The political
message of shared kava here draws on the drug's traditional role in constituting
sociability in order to legitimate the powers, concerns, and demands of the new state and
its political elite.
Throughout the South Pacific, kava has
acquired a political value as an emerging icon of national identity and unity. Images of
kava. bowls and plants decorate a range of politically and economically important objects
and products in the Pacific today, lending these a measure of traditional authenticity and
symbolic weight. A kava bowl is featured on Western Samoa's new two tala (dollar) bank
notes and on the labels of its locally produced Vailima beer. A kava bowl adorns the logo
of the newsletter of one of Vanuatu's political parties. That country in 1990 issued a
postage stamp that celebrated "kava, the national plant." Kava cups appear on
the Pohnpei state flag, on the seal of the Pohnpei State Governor and Supreme Court, the
official State Seal, and the modified seal that appears on government property, including
the nearly ubiquitous state vehicles (Petersen 1991). And on Baluan in the Admiralties,
people who had given up kava once again prepared and drank it as focal cultural symbol
during a "cultural show" in 1987 (T. Otto, personal communication, 1990).
Philibert has commented on this recent "fetishizing" of kava as state symbol, a
fetishizing that "has transformed kava into at worst simply a locally available means
of intoxication and, at best, into a sign in a discourse on culture, a form of
aesthetics" (1986).
Those Islanders who today
live within the Pacific Rim states (either as migrants or as colonized peoples like the
Hawaiians) also are turning to kava as a kind of political fetish to assert their
distinctive and indigenous identities and rights. This function helps to account for
kava's occasional usage today in Hawai'i. Titcomb's 1948 review of kava consumption in
traditional Hawai'i concluded:
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In 1903 no Hawaiian went home from the Saturday market without an 'awa
root tied to his saddle. In 1930 'awa was still to be purchased in the market; today it is
not. Today the plant is scarce on O'ahu except in a few areas deep in the forest. On the
other islands there are more numerous wild patches, but outside of botanists, only the
older Hawaiians know or care what it is, and only a few still have a taste for the old
Polynesian drink once so important and so popular. When these pass away there will be no
more of their kind to take their place and probably all use of 'awa in Hawai'i will end.
But kava use in Hawai'i has refused to
end-at least completely. True, beachside bars at the Sheraton Hotel on Waikiki presently
serve tourists an orchidbedecked, sugary rum drink called a kava bowl in a blue drinking
cup supported by ersatz Hawaiian tiki legs (figure 7.4), but some Hawaiians are raising
more serious and more meaningful drafts of kava. Hawaiian nationalists and activists today
incorporate kava drinking into some of their public rituals of political defiance.
Activists several times have occupied the U.S. Navy-held island of Kaho'olawe to demand
its return to native Hawaiians. Part of their ritual occupation, during state approved
monthly access visits, has included brewing up batches of kava. Even though reportedly
this kava once was served hot with choice of milk or sugar, this sort of kava sharing
builds on traditional understandings of the drug to symbolize, in a contemporary political
context, indigenous identity and rights. On the Big Island of Hawai'i, other Hawaiians
more pragmatically are replanting kava as a cash crop.
Alongside the assertion of indigenous
rights and identities, kava drinking may serve darker political ends within new Pacific
states. Focusing both on the uses of shared kava to display and thereby justify existing
political hierarchies and on the drug's powers to infuse an emotional camaraderie and
sociability into its users, some who observe the contemporary kava scene, pace Marx,
describe kava as a sort of literal opiate of the masses. For example, Rubinstein writes
about the new, ideological uses of kava drinking on Malo, Vanuatu:
Kava helps mask and deal with tensions which are based on feelings about emerging economic
and class differentiation, differentials in access to resources such as land, money, jobs,
and knowledge, through education. What kava drinking does is to enhance a feeling of
interpersonal universalism when many structurally profound changes are taking place which
will ultimately serve to alienate people from one another.... It helps overcome status
differences among men and maintains gender-based differences which present men to
themselves as special. It focuses on shared inner experiences, promoting these, along with
good will, and the notion that one can not hide bad feelings within the context of the
kava experience. As such it masks, I believe, concerns with economic and access
differences which increasingly matter. (Rubinstein 1987; see also Rodman 1984; Toren 1989)
For better or for worse, psychoactive kava does enhance feelings of
interperonal universalism and does promote goodwill. This attractive emotionally altered
state is available for ongoing political and religious symbolic elaboration, just as the
plant itself continues to be a valuable good within traditional exchange networks and,
increasingly, within the modern commercial pharmacological and recreational drug
economies. We expect that the religious, economic, and political functions and meanings of
kava will continue to evolve, both within the Pacific and beyond (figure 7.5). This
melange of expanding symbolic meanings and social functions is of course grounded
ultimately in the chemical properties of kavalactones and their physiological effects on
the human body. We look for future adoptions and elaborations of kava use, rather than
abandonment. Kava's traditional cultural meanings and social functions are now overlaid
with new uses in the contemporary Pacific: kava as symbol of Christian atonement; kava as
icon of the new state; kava as cultural fetish within developing nationalist discourse;
kava as assertion of resistance and indigenous rights; kava as cash crop; kava as ethnic
valium or alcohol; kava as fulcrum of ongoing male domination and gender inequalities;
kava as camouflage for developing economic equalities and class formation; kava as the
shared pickme-up of urban Pacific kava bars.
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The story of kava is far from ended.
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 3 Chemistry:
Active Principles and Their Effects
Chapter 4 Ethnobotany:
Cultivation, Classification, Preparation, and Medicinal Use
Bibliography
Pictorial
Presentation of Kava |
