Kava - Introduction

The purpose of this page is to relate my experience as I searched for information relating to the substance kava. To begin, I will provide basic data about kava and why it is studied today, and a map link. I will also present a bibliography of kava, my attempt to update/continue the one found in Lebot's 1992 book about Kava and discuss the search process/strategy involved. Also included is a brief listing of kava books and articles, my experience using remote library catalogs and how I found primary data archives. I shall discuss kava-related sources of information available through the Internet, including Veronica searches, gophers, archives of kava use/experience and newsgroups.
I do not expect that many people are interested in kava per se. However, my work will be of interest to those performing their own searches. I by no means claim that my work is comprehensive and total, but it should provide some sense of the tools available to perform such a search. Hopefully, the search process contained within illustrates the way in which traditional research methods are increasingly supplemented by newer, evolving technologies.

General Information about Kava
"Kava (Piper methysticum Forst.f.), a member of the pepper family Piperceae, is an outstanding
ethnopharmacological species. The drug is, or once was, consumed in a wide range of Pacific
Ocean societies, from coastal areas on the large Melanesian island of New Guinea in the west to isolated Polynesian Hawai'i, 7000 kilometers distant to the northeast. Kava is a handsome shrub that is propagated vegetatively, as are most of the Pacific's major traditional crops. Its active principles, a series of kavalactones, are concentrated in the rootstock and roots. Islanders ingest these psychoactive chemicals by drinking cold-water infusions of chewed, ground, pounded, or otherwise macerated kava stumps and roots" (Lebot: 1)

Why study kava?
Of what possible interest could a drug used by peoples in the South Pacific ocean islands be to members of Western Society? Lebot answers this question very succinctly:

" In the Pacific today, although some Islanders have abandoned its use, its traditional functions are being maintained and it is being developed into an important cash crop. The plant attracts a wide range of contemporary interest. For prehistorians and linguists, its distribution provides traces of the migrations of Oceanic peoples. For anthropologists and sociologists, the drug facilitates social interaction. For theologians, kava consumption is a religious act. For political scientists, kava ritual today symbolizes new traditional identities and unity within postcolonial Pacific states. Botanists are intrigued by the problems of defining the species and by the sterility of its cultivars. Geneticists have begun to survey its zymotypes and chemotypes. Agronomists view the plant as an increasingly valuable cash crop suited to the traditional practices of subsistence farmers. National development officials in some Melanasian countries suggest that investments in kava cultivation may generate desperately needed export earnings for newly independent Pacific Island nations. Pharmacologists search rain forests and folk medicinal systems for useful new therapies. And kava drinkers themselves may want to know more about their daily dose" (1992: 8)

Open a new window to a  map of the Pacific islands courtesy of the The Perry-Castaņeda Library Map
Collection at the The University of Texas at Austin.

Copyright 1999, 2000
Updated March 15, 2000
Formerly on the web
as Lee Kagan's Kava Page