|
|
| TITLE: |
Kava : an old drug in a new world / Y N Singh. |
| AUTHOR: |
Singh, Y. N. |
| PUBLISHED: |
Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press |
| DESCRIPTION: |
p. [107] - 128 : 28 cm. |
| NOTES: |
In: Cultural critique - TESOL Press, no. 71, (2009): 107-128. |
| NOTES: |
Kava has been used in the Pacific Islands for hundreds of years for ceremonial, ritualistic, medicinal, and social purposes. The point of origin, dispersal, and discontinuous distribution of kava, its link to the history of human migration, and whether it shares the main migratory routes of other Pacific crops, such as yam and taro, into and across Oceania remain unresolved. Nonetheless, kava is a substance whose usage remains mired in suppositions regarding its traditional functions in Oceanic societies and the incompatibility or appeal of these within modern regimes of health, pleasure, and commerce. Frequently understood as an ethnospecific drug whose distribution patterns have followed the diasporic movements of Pacific Islanders, kava has recently entered the circuits of complementary and alternative medicine and thus become subject to different modes of cultivation, mobility, consumption, and regulation. Exploring the complex and contradictory relations between these modes of production and distribution, as well as the beliefs and restrictions surrounding the use of kava, provides an opportunity to analyze how the circulation of this drug at once constructs and problematizes the classical anthropological distinction between traditional and modern societies. To describe kava as an old drug in a new world is to enter a contested field in which the periodizing categories of old and new are themselves held up for questioning. |
| ELEC. ACCESS: |
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/cultural_critique/v071/71.singh.html
|
| SUBJECT: |
Kava--Pacific Islands. |
| SUBJECT: |
Medicinal plant--Oceania. |
| SUBJECT: |
Kava--Oceania. |
| SUBJECT: |
Kava--Ceremonial plant--Pacific Islands. |
| SUBJECT: |
Pacific crops |
| ADDED ENTRY: |
Cultural critique. |
|
Title Information
