Tanoa

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.

Kava is drunk socially throughout the western Pacific, but the ceremony built around a tanoa is a formal act with a fixed order, and the bowl is what makes the difference. Root is pounded or ground, put into the bowl with water, and strained repeatedly through fibre by a mixer working with both hands while the assembly watches; the mixing is done in view because it is part of the event. Cups are then served in strict sequence, the first to the highest-ranking guest or to the chief, each drained at one draught and the cup returned.

In Fiji the occasion is used for welcoming visitors, for the installation of chiefs, and for the opening of undertakings; in Tonga and Samoa comparable ceremonies attend title-holding and formal reception. What is being enacted is order, since the sequence of cups states rank publicly and settles it for the duration. The religious dimension is a matter of degree rather than a separate category. The high ceremonies concern ancestors and the standing of chiefs whose authority is not merely secular, and kava is offered in that context, while a smaller gathering may carry little of it. The atlas describes the practice as living, which it very much is, and does not set out an order of service for anyone to follow.