The Bowl and the Cord

A tanoa is a turned or adzed bowl, commonly two to three feet across and only a few inches deep, standing on anything from four to two dozen short legs cut from the same block. Fijian bowls are usually vesi, a dense hardwood that darkens with use and takes a polish from the kava itself; a well-used bowl acquires a pale enamel-like deposit inside which is left in place and read as evidence of the bowl's history. On the rim, or through a lug beneath it, is fastened the wa, a braided cord of coconut fibre, often finished with cowrie shells.

Vincent Lebot, Mark Merlin and Lamont Lindstrom's survey of kava in the Pacific describes the bowl and its furniture as part of a single apparatus with the drink, and that is the right way to read it. The cord is not decoration. During a ceremony it is stretched out towards the person of highest rank present, which fixes the geometry of the gathering: the mixer sits behind the bowl facing that person, the cup-bearer moves along the line the cord defines, and everyone else is placed relative to it. Move the cord and the meaning of the seating changes. The object therefore carries information as well as liquid, which is why an old bowl is inherited rather than replaced.