I used to think tapa cloth was just another craft tradition, filed away in my mental catalog of things anthropologists study.
Then I spent an afternoon in a village outside Suva watching three women bend over mulberry bark—stripping it, beating it flat with wooden mallets that sounded like distant thunder, their hands moving in a rhythm I couldn’t quite pin down but definately felt ancient. The bark transformed slowly, stubbornly, into something that looked fragile but wasn’t. One woman, Mere, told me her grandmother taught her this when she was seven, and her grandmother learned it the same way, stretching back maybe fifteen generations or so—nobody keeps exact count because the counting isn’t really the point. What struck me was how ordinary it seemed to them, this act of turning tree into art, and how extraordinary it felt to witness something that’s been happening, in roughly the same form, for at least 3,000 years across the Pacific. Masi—what Fijians call their version of tapa—isn’t museum material to them. It’s alive, evolving, frustratingly hard to master, and absolutely central to how identity gets expressed and preserved.
Here’s the thing: masi shows up at every major life event. Weddings, funerals, chiefly installations—you can’t have the ceremony without it. The designs aren’t random either; they carry meaning that varies by region and family lineage.
The Geometry of Memory and Social Status in Bark
The patterns painted onto masi—geometric grids, triangular motifs, borders that repeat with slight variations—function as a kind of visual language. In the Lau Islands, certain diamond patterns (called noco) indicate chiefly rank; you don’t just slap those onto any piece. The dye comes from mangrove bark or candlenut soot mixed with clay, and the application process requires a steady hand and years of practice because one smudge can ruin days of work. I’ve seen contemporary Fijian artists incorporate traditional masi motifs into installations that hang in galleries from Auckland to London, but the most powerful pieces I encountered were the ones made for local use—gifted during a sevusevu (traditional presentation ceremony) or draped over a coffin. Those aren’t meant to be beautiful in the way we usually mean it; they’re meant to recieve and hold social weight, to make relationships tangible.
What fascinates me is how masi production creates social structure. It’s almost always women’s work, done collectively, which means it’s also where knowledge transfers, where disputes get aired, where younger women learn not just technique but proper behavior and clan history. The beating alone can take hours. The bark strips get soaked, then pounded over a wooden anvil until the fibers fuse into a single sheet—wait—maybe two or three sheets layered together for thicker ceremonial pieces.
When Colonial Collectors Met Living Tradition and Misunderstood Everything
European explorers and missionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries loved collecting tapa, but they treated it like exotic fabric, missing entirely how it functioned within Pacific societies. They cataloged it, measured it, shipped it to museums where it got labeled as “barkcloth” and stuck in drawers. I guess it makes sense—they didn’t have the cultural framework to understand that a piece of masi might represent a political alliance or a family’s accumulated mana (spiritual power). Colonial administrators often banned traditional practices they found threatening, but masi production persisted partly because it seemed harmless to outsiders, just women doing crafts. Turns out that misunderstanding protected it. By the mid-20th century, though, cheaper imported fabrics nearly killed the tradition; fewer women learned the skills, and masi became something you saw mostly at tourist markets—smaller pieces, simplified designs, made for export.
The Contemporary Revival That Nobody Saw Coming and What It Means Now
In the last thirty years or so, there’s been a revival. Younger Fijian artists and designers started reclaiming masi, not as nostalgia but as a living medium for contemporary expression. Fashion designers incorporate masi into garments shown at Pacific fashion weeks; visual artists use it in multimedia installations that comment on climate change, colonialism, and indigenous futurism. The Fiji Museum runs workshops; schools teach masi-making again. But here’s where it gets complicated: this revival exists alongside ongoing debates about cultural appropriation, intellectual property, and who gets to profit from indigenous knowledge. Non-Fijian designers have used masi-inspired patterns without credit or compensation, which raises questions that don’t have easy answers about ownership and authenticity in a globalized art market.
What keeps masi relevant isn’t its age but its adaptability. It absorbs new influences while maintaining core techniques and meanings. I’ve watched master practitioners argue passionately about whether certain innovations—synthetic dyes, printed designs—betray the tradition or keep it alive. Honestly, I think both things can be true. The cloth itself doesn’t care about our categories; it just exists as this ongoing conversation between past and present, individual creativity and collective memory, local identity and global circulation.
