1884.12.113

Collection type

Object

Description

Wooden club with rounded head. [FB 10/10/2011]

Long description

Wooden club with rounded head. The handle tapers in the centre and the butt is flared. There is a round hole through one side of the botton of the handle at the butt end which terminates through the butt. [FB 10/10/2011]

Geographical reference

Fiji

Oceania > Melanesia > Fiji

Person

Maker Unknown Maker

Field collector Unknown Collector

PRM source Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers founding collection

Date / Period

Date made: Possibly before 1874

Date collected

?By 1874

Acquisition information

Donated: 1884

Materials and processes

Material Wood Plant, Process Carved, Process Perforated

Dimensions

Length: max 1020 mm, Diameter: max 65 mm

Object numbers

Accession number: 1884.12.113 PR Cat other PR nos: 470

Research and responses

See F Clunie 'Fijian Weapons and Warfare' 1977 Fiji Museum, Suva, Bulletin of the Fiji Museum no.2 and R. Ewins, Fijian Artefacts: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery collection' Australia 1982: p.29. "Bowai (baseball-bat clubs) and Gadi (pole clubs). The difference between bowai and gadi is often not very clear. Typically, a bowai is shaped like a baseball bat, with distinctly tapered shaft and rounded tip. In practice, many examples appear as hybrids. Cakobau presented his favourite bowai to Queen Victoria at the time of Cession; it was ornamented in silver and returned by King George V to Fiji as the Mace of Parliament, which it remains today. The bowai was probably introduced from Tonga (where it was called povai) or Samoa. Gadi were named for the wood from which they were frequently made (gadi-Storckiella vitiensis), and were virtually straight-shafted heavy poles, sometime plain, sometimes decorated, usually with flat ends." [FC 26/09/2011]

The following notes are drawn from research compiled by Andy Mills as part of the DCF Cutting Edge project in 2006-2007.

The bowai (pron. Um-bow-eye) is another transnational club style in Western Polynesia, commonest in Fiji and of Fijian origin, but also to be found in Tonga and Samoa as the povai (Clunie, F. (2003) Fijian Weapons & Warfare. Suva: The Fiji Museum, p.128). In one sense, it is the most simple and straightforward design of club imaginable – a plain, slightly tapering cylinder – but to assume that this apparent simplicity reflects a simplicity of conception in the work of the carver would be to do the Fijian matai, Tongan tufunga and Samoan tufuga – master woodcarvers - a great disservice. Recent research (Mills, A. (2007) Tufunga Tongi ‘Akau: Tongan Club-Carvers & Their Arts. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of East Anglia) into the formal proportions of weapons such as the bowai has revealed that all of the weapon’s principal dimensions are carefully interrelated through a complex series of fractional relationships, mathematical squares, and so on; the formal aesthetics of their shape was not only determined by eye and hand, but also by reference to complex ideas of mathematical appropriateness; the principles of appropriateness were inscribed into the weapon by the carver, who used lengths of cordage to transfer dimensions from one part of the carving to another, subdividing and multiplying the cordage into complex fractions and multiples as he did so. Furthermore, ergonomics cannot be overlooked when discussing the form of the bowai, so close to that of an American baseball bat; of course, this is no coincidence, and the tapering cylinder offers the greatest consistency of grip and weight distribution, whether the object to be struck is a ball or a skull. [FB 10/10/2011]

Search terms: Weapon, Club