Kava

Kava is prepared by pounding, grating or formerly chewing the root of Piper methysticum and steeping it in water to make a cloudy, peppery, earth-tasting drink. It is a sedative rather than a visionary plant: it relaxes the muscles, loosens speech, numbs the mouth and produces a sociable calm without confusion. That effect is exactly suited to the work its ceremonies do.

Across Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Vanuatu, Pohnpei and beyond, kava is the drink of formal occasion, and the ceremony is a statement of order. The cup passes in a sequence that expresses rank, and who is served first, who prepares it, who calls the toast and where each person sits are all determined and all meaningful. A chiefly installation, the reception of a visitor, the opening of a council, the settling of a dispute and the sealing of an agreement are all done over kava. In Tonga the formal kava circle is an institution of state; in Fiji the presentation of a root, sevusevu, is how a visitor asks permission to be somewhere.

The religious dimension is not separable from the political one, which is the point. The ancestors and the spirits are present at these occasions, the first cup may be poured out for them, and the authority the ceremony confirms is understood to come from them. Kava is the medium in which a community says what it is.

Kava is sterile. It does not set viable seed, it is propagated only from cuttings, and no wild ancestral population has ever been found, though Piper wichmannii in Melanesia is the probable progenitor. Every kava plant in existence was planted by a person, and the species as such is a human artefact.

Two things follow. The first is a dating argument: producing a sterile crop with many named cultivars, selected for potency and effect and distinguished by growers, takes a very long time, and kava's distribution across the Pacific tracks the Austronesian voyages that carried it. The plant is a record of those voyages. The second is that kava depends on continuous cultivation. A tradition that lapsed for a generation would lose its cultivars permanently.

Its modern history has a sharp episode. In the late 1990s and early 2000s kava extracts sold as herbal supplements in Europe were linked to cases of severe liver injury, and several countries banned it. The bans were economically devastating for Pacific growers. Subsequent review found the picture considerably more complicated: the traditional preparation is a water extraction of the peeled root, while several implicated products used solvent extraction or included aerial parts and peel, which carry compounds the traditional method leaves out. Most of the bans were eventually lifted or narrowed. The episode is a clean example of a traditional preparation being safer than the industrial version marketed in its name.