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Reviewed by:
  • Buveurs de Kava by Patricia Siméoni and Vincent Lebot
  • Knut Rio
Buveurs de Kava, by Patricia Siméoni and Vincent Lebot. Port Vila: Éditions Geo-Consulte, 2014. isbn 978-2-9533362-3-8; 361 pages, maps, illustrations, figures, tables, index, bibliography. Cloth, us $189.99.

At first glance, the format of Buveurs de Kava suggests a coffee-table publication—richly illustrated, glossy, big format, and broadly informative. It is thus a pleasant surprise to find that this turns out to be a book with a much larger ambition. The most comprehensive account of the kava plant and its cultural history to date, Buveurs de Kava draws together central cultural and historical materials for crucial aspects of Pacific history. Chapters take up kava’s history and prehistory, its diffusion among the islands of the Pacific, a detailed picture of the commercial role kava now plays in its recent spread to Australia and Europe, and debates on kava’s health benefits or use in medicine. In certain respects, the book is Vanuatucentric, but this follows from the book’s claim that Vanuatu has been the major center of domestication and export of the Piper methysticum plant throughout history. Many color photos from all over the Pacific beautifully demonstrate the centrality of the drink for the Pacific way of life. Moreover, Patricia Siméoni and Vincent Lebot also do their best for promoting a continuation of the enjoyment of this drink into the future. On the whole, their book constitutes an impressive synthesis of a century of research on “the Pacific drug.”

The importance of kava as a cultural phenomenon was already outlined in W H R Rivers’s monumental [End Page 260] two-volume History of Melanesian Society (1914), and it is perhaps not coincidental that this new and important book is published in 2014, a hundred years later. This is thus a very timely publication. In the historical model developed by Rivers, the original inhabitants of the Melanesian islands, the so-called “betel people,” were colonized by an incoming “kava people” who practiced totemism, patrilineal descent, ranking rituals, a cult of the dead, and penis incision (see The Ethnographic Experiment: A M Hocart and W H R Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908, edited by Edvard Hviding and Cato Berg, 2014). But the type of cultural historical analysis initiated by Rivers was rendered unfashionable shortly after the publication of his History. Surviving solely in the field of archaeology, cultural historical perspectives on the region of the Pacific have since been, with a few notable exceptions, separated from studies of contemporary culture and society.

Buveurs de Kava is thus a key text since it ties back together an account of cultural history and the spread of the kava plant with contemporary culture and language in the Pacific. It explains in a lucid and still scientifically tenable fashion the way the “Kava People” have come to live in and transform the islands of Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia.

Through sophisticated analysis of species classification and dendrograms (taxonomic tree diagrams), we learn of the multitude of species classed under the all-too-general label of “kava.” It is of historical interest to note that the variety classed as Piper wichmannii, for instance, prevalent in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, contains much less of the sought-after psycho-active ingredients called kavalactones. In the wichmannii type, there is only 3–5 percent of the kavalactone dihydromethysticin, while in the “real” kava type, methysticum, there is 8–20 percent of the kavalactone kavaine—making the latter variety, physiologically speaking, a much more potent drug.

Through these types of observations, the authors make a good case for saying that the real, intensive domestication of the kava plant, as an effective means for inducing physical intoxication and as fully under the control of man, originally took place in Vanuatu. The eighty-three varieties of Piper methysticum that exist in Vanuatu, compared to the far lesser diversity in the rest of Melanesia and in Polynesia, also suggest the Vanuatu archipelago as the source for what we might call a cult of kava.

Whereas one used to think that the kava plant was introduced to southern Vanuatu from...

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