Kastom · 113 languages · 320,000 people
Vanuatu Culture: Kastom, the Traditions, Languages and Customs
Vanuatu culture is not one culture. The archipelago carries about 113 living languages among roughly 320,000 people, and most of what governs daily life — land, rank, marriage, ceremony — is decided locally, island by island.
Vanuatu culture rests on kastom
The word that holds Vanuatu culture together is kastom: customary law, knowledge and practice. Kastom decides who holds land, who may speak in a dispute, who may perform a particular dance, and what standing a person has. It was written into the 1980 constitution as a source of law, not as heritage, and it returned all land in the country to customary owners.
That is why land here is leased and never sold outright, and why kastom is a live legal question.
Traditions that are owned, not performed
Traditions in Vanuatu generally belong to someone. A song, a design, a dance or a technique is held by a family, a clan or a grade, and reproducing it requires permission. The most visible of these traditions outside the country is naghol, the land dive on Pentecost, which is tied to the yam harvest rather than to a visitor season.
It follows that a refusal to be photographed is not rudeness but ownership being exercised, and that traditions shown to visitors are shown by decision.
Languages: about 113 of them
Vanuatu has the highest density of languages per head of population anywhere in the world. Malakula alone carries roughly thirty. These languages are not dialects of each other; they are separate, and communities a valley apart may share none of them.
The common tongue is Bislama, which came out of the nineteenth-century labour trade and is now one of three official languages alongside English and French.
Customs at the village level
Customs differ sharply between islands and often between villages. Grade-taking with pigs runs through much of the north and centre; the boar's tusk on the national flag comes from it. Kava is drunk almost everywhere, but what it means in a nakamal on Tanna and what it means in a bar in Port Vila are not quite the same thing.
Christianity sits alongside these customs rather than in place of them, and most of the country sees no contradiction in holding both. Anyone describing Vanuatu culture as a single set of traditions has flattened something that its own people keep deliberately local.
In this section
Common questions
What is kastom?
Customary law, knowledge and practice governing land, rank, marriage and ceremony. It is named in the constitution as a source of law — see kastom.
How many languages are there in Vanuatu?
About 113 living indigenous languages among roughly 320,000 people, the highest density anywhere. Bislama is the shared language.
Can visitors attend ceremonies?
Sometimes, by arrangement with the community that holds the ceremony. What is shown and whether it may be photographed is their decision.
Is Vanuatu Christian or traditional?
Both, and the question is not felt as a contradiction. Most ni-Vanuatu are Christian and most also live by kastom.
Approaching it as a visitor
The single most useful thing to understand is that permission is the mechanism for everything. Land is owned, ceremony is owned, songs and designs are owned, and access to any of them is given by someone who holds the right to give it. A visitor who asks will usually be told yes; a visitor who assumes will eventually be told no, and will have caused offence getting there.
What a visitor is actually looking at
Almost everything presented as culture to visitors in Vanuatu is presented by the people who own it, on land they hold, for a fee that goes to them. That is not a policy someone adopted; it follows from customary land ownership, which makes it impossible for an outside operator to lease a site and run it. The practical effect is that cultural tourism here is unusually direct.
Sand drawing
Inscribed by UNESCO in 2003. A single continuous line traced in sand or ash with one finger, producing a symmetrical figure without lifting or retracing, and encoding a story, a route or a relationship. It is a writing system as much as an art form, and reading one is a separate skill from drawing it.
Music and food
String band — guitar, ukulele and a bush bass built from a tea chest — is the popular form and is played at every gathering. Laplap, grated root crop baked in leaves with coconut cream, is the national dish and varies by island. Both are everyday things, and both are more representative of daily life than anything staged.
A shorter account of the same ground, written for classroom use, is the people and culture page in the learning section.