Bowl for Yaqona, Fiji

Private Collection, Florida
Abraham Rosman and Paula Rubel, New York, acquired from the above on March 17, 2001

Yaqona is an intoxicating drink infused from the pounded, grated, and chewed roots of the narcotic Piper methysticum plant. Historically yaqona was of great ceremonial importance, and priests, or bete, would consume the grated root "in the ancient burau fashion, the priest kneeling to suck the liquid from a leaf-lined hole in the floor […] or an often supremely elegant dish carved from sacred vesi wood." (Clunie, Yalo i Viti: a Fiji Museum Catalogue, Suva, 1986, p. 80).

The Tongan influence in Fiji from the late eighteenth introduced a more social yaqona ceremony, in which the chewed root was mixed in a tanoa bowl such as the present lot and then drunk with due ceremony from coconut shell cups. The tanoa would be placed so that the suspension lug on the underside of the bowl faced the most senior chief present.