In pre-Christian Fijian, Tongan and Samoan religion, kava drinking served as more than social protocol: it functioned as a channel through which participants understood themselves to be in communication with ancestral spirits and gods, offered as part of formal address to chiefly and divine authority alike, the two categories often overlapping in traditional Pacific political theology. Since the widespread adoption of Christianity across the region from the nineteenth century onward, the ceremony has persisted primarily in its social and diplomatic register, welcoming visitors, sealing agreements, and marking formal occasions, in communities that are today majority Christian.
This atlas records that shift in register explicitly rather than treating the kava ceremony as an unchanged survival: the practice's form has remained recognizably continuous across generations while the cosmology surrounding it has changed substantially, a pattern common across the region's ritual life.
Missionary accounts from the nineteenth century frequently singled out kava drinking for criticism alongside other practices they associated with pre-Christian religion, yet the ceremony survived that pressure more successfully than many other traditional Pacific religious practices, in part because it was readily reframed as a secular social custom rather than suppressed outright.