The Way of Custom
In Bislama — the creole lingua franca of Vanuatu — the word kastom means everything that the English word "custom" does not. It means the way your grandfather planted yams. It means the name of the spirit that lives in the banyan tree behind the village. It means the grade you earned by killing a tusked boar under the eyes of the elders. It means the pattern your aunt traces in the volcanic sand with one finger, a pattern that tells a story the uninitiated cannot read. It means the root you chew and spit into a bowl of water until the water turns grey and the evening opens like a door. It means who you are.
Vanuatu — formerly the New Hebrides, a Franco-British condominium until independence in 1980 — is an archipelago of roughly eighty inhabited islands stretching across 1,300 kilometres of the southwestern Pacific. It is one of the most linguistically dense places on earth: over one hundred indigenous languages for a population of approximately 320,000 people. Each language carries its own kastom — its own spirits, its own ceremonial cycle, its own relationship to the land and the dead. What is true on Tanna is not true on Ambae. What the people of Pentecost do at the yam harvest, the people of Malakula do not. Yet the word kastom holds them all, because it names not a specific practice but the principle that indigenous practice is the root of identity.
This profile tells the story of how that root survives — through grade ceremonies, kava, sand drawing, land diving, prophetic movements, and a national independence that made kastom constitutional law. Not as a relic. As the living ground.
I. The Word
Kastom (sometimes spelled kastam or custom) is a Bislama word derived from the English "custom," but in Melanesian usage it has expanded far beyond its colonial etymology. In Vanuatu, kastom denotes the entire complex of indigenous knowledge, practice, belief, social organization, and spiritual relationship that predates and persists alongside Christianity and modernity. It is simultaneously a religious category, a political identity, a legal principle, and a way of being in the world.
The word entered common usage during the colonial period as a way for ni-Vanuatu — indigenous Vanuatu people — to name what the missionaries were trying to replace. In this sense, kastom was born from contact: it became a concept only when something arrived to contrast against. Before the missionaries, there was no need for a word meaning "our way" because there was no other way. The arrival of Christianity created a binary — skul (from "school," meaning the Christian way of the mission) versus kastom (the indigenous way) — and the binary gave kastom its name and its political charge.
But kastom is not merely a reaction to Christianity. It names something that was already there — something with its own internal logic, its own cosmology, its own institutions. The grade societies of Malakula and the Banks Islands, the kava rituals of Tanna and Pentecost, the sand drawings of Ambae and Ambrym, the land-diving towers of South Pentecost — these were not waiting for missionaries to give them meaning by contrast. They were complete worlds. Kastom is the word that makes them visible as a category, the way "Hinduism" makes visible something that was already there before the British needed a word for it.
The anthropologist Lamont Lindstrom, who has worked on Tanna for over four decades, notes that kastom functions as a "counter-discourse" — a way of talking about the past, the land, and the ancestors that asserts indigenous authority against colonial and post-colonial claims. But it is more than discourse. It is practice. The man who kills the graded boar is not performing a counter-discourse. He is feeding the ancestors and earning the right to a new name.
II. The Islands
Vanuatu's geography is the first fact about its religion. The archipelago runs roughly north-south through the southwestern Pacific, from the Torres Islands in the north to Aneityum in the south. The islands are volcanic, mountainous, frequently shaken by earthquakes and eruptions — Ambrym's twin caldera, Yasur's permanent fire on Tanna, Lopevi's periodic explosions — and the volcanic landscape is not separate from the spiritual one. Mount Yasur on Tanna is a living presence, not a geological feature. Its fire is the fire of the spirit world. The rumbling is the ancestors speaking.
The linguistic diversity is staggering. Vanuatu has the highest language density per capita on earth. On the single island of Malakula — roughly 2,000 square kilometres — at least thirty distinct languages are spoken. Each language community traditionally maintained its own kastom, its own ceremonial calendar, its own relationship with specific spirits and ancestors, and its own variations on the broader patterns that anthropologists have identified across the archipelago.
This means that any statement about "Vanuatu religion" is an abstraction. There is no Vanuatu religion. There are dozens of distinct but related spiritual traditions, connected by geography, by trade, by intermarriage, and by shared structural features — the importance of pigs, the centrality of kava, the existence of graded societies, the practice of sand drawing — but distinct in their specifics. What follows describes the broadest shared patterns, with specific examples drawn primarily from the best-documented regions: Tanna (south), Malakula (central), Pentecost (central), and the Banks and Torres Islands (north).
III. The Spiritual Landscape
The spiritual world in ni-Vanuatu kastom is not a separate realm above or below the physical one. It is woven into the same landscape. Spirits inhabit specific places — banyan trees, reef passages, volcanic vents, freshwater springs, particular stones. Ancestors do not depart for a distant heaven; they remain in the land, accessible through ritual, dangerous if neglected, and active in the affairs of the living. The boundary between the living and the dead is permeable, not absolute.
The concept that R.H. Codrington famously described as mana — a term he encountered in the Banks Islands of northern Vanuatu and in parts of Melanesia and Polynesia — is a spiritual power or efficacy that can inhere in persons, objects, places, and actions. Mana is not a deity or a substance; it is more like a quality of effectiveness that has a spiritual source. A chief has mana because of his lineage and his achievements. A stone has mana because a spirit inhabits it. A ritual succeeds because it carries mana. Codrington's 1891 description in The Melanesians introduced the concept to Western anthropology, where it became one of the most debated terms in the discipline — sometimes over-generalized, sometimes misunderstood, but pointing at something real in the Melanesian experience of the sacred.
Tabu (the source of the English "taboo," via Polynesian contact) marks the boundary of the sacred. Certain places, objects, persons, and times are tabu — forbidden to ordinary contact, requiring ceremonial mediation. A tabu place is not empty; it is full — full of mana, full of ancestral presence, full of danger for the unprepared. The grade ceremonies that structure much of ni-Vanuatu social life are, among other things, progressive initiations into deeper levels of tabu knowledge: each grade grants access to secrets, names, and practices that were previously forbidden.
The dead are not gone. In many ni-Vanuatu traditions, the spirits of the recently deceased linger near their former homes and must be ritually guided, placated, or redirected. Skull preservation and skull modeling — particularly elaborate on Malakula, where the skulls of high-ranking men were over-modeled with vegetable paste and painted to recreate the face of the dead — are not ancestor "worship" in a simple sense but ancestor maintenance: keeping the dead present, keeping the relationship active, ensuring that the power of the deceased continues to flow through the lineage.
IV. The Grade Society
The grade-taking system — called nimangki on Malakula, hungwe in South Pentecost, suqe in the Banks Islands, and by various other names across the archipelago — is one of the most distinctive and complex religious institutions in the Pacific. It is a hierarchical system of ceremonial advancement through which men (and in some areas, women through parallel or complementary systems) achieve progressively higher spiritual and social rank.
The mechanism is sacrifice. At each grade, the candidate must kill a number of tusked boars — pigs whose upper canine teeth have been carefully manipulated over years to grow in full or multiple circles, a process that takes between five and ten years per boar and represents an enormous investment of time, labor, and social capital. The killing is not slaughter; it is a sacrificial act that feeds the ancestors, releases spiritual power, and transforms the killer's social identity. With each grade attained, the man receives a new name, gains access to previously secret knowledge, earns the right to wear specific insignia (armbands, headdresses, carved figures), and assumes new obligations toward the community.
The system was described in extraordinary detail by A. Bernard Deacon, a Cambridge anthropologist who worked on Malakula in 1926 before dying of blackwater fever at twenty-four, and whose posthumous ethnography Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides (1934, edited by Camilla Wedgwood) remains one of the most important documents in Pacific anthropology. Deacon recorded the full sequence of Malakula's nimangki grades, with their associated names, ceremonies, privileges, and taboos, and documented the extraordinary stone and wood sculptures — the rambaramp and temes nevinbur — that represent the ancestors and the grades.
What the grade society is NOT is a simple social hierarchy. It is a cosmological system. The grades map onto the structure of the spirit world: higher grades bring the living man closer to the condition of the powerful dead. The highest-graded man is not merely rich or respected; he is spiritually potent, saturated with mana, and approaching the condition of an ancestor while still alive. The pig-killing is not a display of wealth; it is a sacrificial transaction with the spirit world. The tusked boar is not just an expensive animal; it is a being whose curved tusk has been deliberately shaped into a circle — the symbol of completion, of the cycle, of the grade path itself.
On Malakula, the grade system was inseparable from the elaborate funerary and commemorative art for which the island is renowned. The slit-drums (atingting), the tree-fern sculptures, the spider-web headdresses, and the over-modeled skulls are all expressions of a single system: the grade path as a journey from the condition of an ordinary living person to the condition of a powerful ancestor, accomplished through sacrifice, ceremony, and the progressive accumulation of sacred knowledge.
The grade societies were severely disrupted by missionary activity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — missionaries correctly identified them as the institutional core of the indigenous religion and targeted them for suppression. In many areas, the system declined or went underground. But it did not disappear entirely, and the late twentieth century saw significant revivals, particularly in South Malakula and parts of Ambrym, often supported by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre's fieldworker network.
V. Kava and the Nakamal
If the grade society is the institution, kava is the sacrament. Kava (Bislama: kava; from the Polynesian, though the plant is Melanesian in origin) is Piper methysticum, a plant of the pepper family whose root, when chewed or ground and mixed with water, produces a mildly psychoactive drink with sedative, anxiolytic, and muscle-relaxant properties. Vanuatu is the likely center of origin and the center of diversity for the plant, with more cultivated varieties than anywhere else in the Pacific — over eighty named cultivars on some islands.
Kava drinking in Vanuatu is not recreation. It is ceremony. The traditional context is the nakamal — the men's house, the meeting house, the ceremonial center of the village. In its simplest form, the nakamal is a cleared space under a banyan tree; in its most elaborate, it is a large thatched structure with a central clearing for dance and a back area for kava preparation. The nakamal is the ni-Vanuatu equivalent of the church, the temple, and the town hall combined: the place where decisions are made, disputes are settled, stories are told, dances are performed, and kava is drunk.
Kava preparation is itself a ritual act. Traditionally, the root was chewed — by young men or boys — and spat into a bowl, where it was mixed with water, strained through coconut fiber, and served in coconut shells. The chewing method has largely given way to grinding or pounding, but the principle remains: the root must be processed by human labor, the water must be added, and the drink must be consumed fresh. There is no kava wine, no aged kava, no kava that can be stored. The sacrament is always immediate.
The drinking follows a pattern: the chief or the highest-graded man drinks first. Then the others, in order of rank. The mood shifts as the kava takes effect — conversation quiets, the world softens, the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred becomes permeable. This is the time for stories, for the recitation of genealogy, for the resolution of disputes, for the communication of decisions. The kava does not intoxicate the way alcohol does — it does not excite or disinhibit. It stills. It opens. The ni-Vanuatu word for the kava state in several languages carries connotations of listening, of being present, of hearing what the ancestors have to say.
Missionaries recognized kava for what it was — a sacrament that competed with their own — and many mission stations banned or restricted its use. The Presbyterian missions on Tanna were particularly aggressive in their anti-kava campaigns, and the tension between mission and kava is one of the fault lines along which the John Frum movement would later erupt.
VI. The Arts of the Body and the Sand
Two of Vanuatu's most internationally visible kastom practices — sand drawing and land diving — are also among its most spiritually significant, though international attention has sometimes obscured this significance behind spectacle.
Sand drawing (sandroing) is a tradition practiced across central and northern Vanuatu, particularly on Ambae, Ambrym, Pentecost, and Malakula. The artist traces a continuous line through a grid of dots in volcanic sand or ash, producing a single unbroken pattern that doubles back on itself and returns to its starting point without lifting the finger. The resulting designs range from simple geometric forms to elaborate compositions depicting spirits, animals, migration stories, and cosmological diagrams.
Sand drawing was inscribed by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003 (later incorporated into the Representative List in 2008). The UNESCO recognition acknowledges what ni-Vanuatu have always known: the drawings are not decoration. They are a multifunctional communication system — a means of recording and transmitting knowledge, mythology, and ritual information in a culture that did not develop written script. Specific drawings are associated with specific stories, specific ceremonies, specific grades. Some drawings are public; others are tabu, accessible only to those who have earned the right through grade advancement. The drawings are both art and scripture — they hold the knowledge that the culture transmits.
The unbroken line has cosmological significance. In several traditions, the soul of the dead must trace a sand drawing at the entrance to the spirit world. If the soul can complete the pattern, it passes through to the realm of the ancestors. If it cannot — if in life the person never learned the drawing — the guardian spirit erases part of the pattern and the soul is lost. Knowledge of sand drawing is, in this framework, literally a matter of spiritual survival. The drawing is a passport to the afterlife, learned in life, tested in death.
Land diving (nagol or gol) is practiced on the southern end of Pentecost Island during the yam harvest season, roughly April through June. Men leap from wooden towers twenty to thirty meters high with vines tied to their ankles, plunging headfirst toward the ground and stopping — ideally — with their shoulders brushing the earth. The towers are constructed fresh each year from the wood and vines available in the surrounding forest, with each jumper selecting and preparing his own vines. The accuracy of the vine measurement is critical: too long, and the jumper hits the ground; too short, and the vine doesn't cushion the fall. There are injuries. There are, rarely, deaths.
The origin story, in the tradition of Sa speakers in South Pentecost, involves a woman who fled her abusive husband by climbing a banyan tree and jumping with vines tied to her ankles. The husband followed and jumped without vines. He died. She survived. The ritual re-enacts and inverts this story: men jump to prove their courage and to ensure a good yam harvest. The jump is both agricultural rite and rite of passage — boys who have not yet jumped are not yet men.
International media discovered land diving in the 1950s (David Attenborough filmed it in 1960), and it has since become Vanuatu's most globally recognized cultural practice — and a source of tension. Tourism brings income but also pressure to perform the nagol outside its ceremonial season, to modify the ritual for cameras, and to extract the practice from its kastom context. The communities of South Pentecost have navigated this tension with considerable savvy, maintaining control over when and how the nagol is performed while allowing limited tourist access. The nagol is theirs. The vines are theirs. The tower is theirs. Kastom is not for sale, but it can be shown.
VII. The Coming of the Word
Christianity arrived in Vanuatu through multiple waves of missionary activity beginning in the early nineteenth century. The London Missionary Society (LMS) sent Polynesian teachers to the southern islands in the 1840s. The Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia established stations beginning in 1848 with John Geddie on Aneityum. The Anglican Melanesian Mission, operating from Norfolk Island under Bishop George Selwyn and later Bishop John Coleridge Patteson, worked in the northern islands from the 1850s. Catholic Marist missionaries arrived on some islands in the late nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the majority of ni-Vanuatu had at least nominally converted to one Christian denomination or another.
The conversions were not passive. On some islands, communities embraced Christianity eagerly — seeing in the missionaries' literacy, material goods, and medical knowledge a source of power that complemented or superseded their own. On others, resistance was fierce: the killing of John Williams of the LMS on Erromango in 1839 is the most famous example, but scattered violence against missionaries and their converts occurred across the archipelago for decades. More commonly, the encounter produced a complex negotiation: communities adopted Christianity in form while retaining kastom in practice, creating the layered religious landscape that characterizes Vanuatu to this day.
The missionaries targeted the institutions they correctly identified as the core of indigenous religion: the grade societies, the kava ceremonies, the ceremonial dances, the men's houses, the funerary practices. On islands where missionary influence was strongest — particularly the Presbyterian south — these institutions were suppressed with considerable success. Sacred objects were burned. Grade ceremonies were abandoned or driven underground. Kava was banned. The nakamal was replaced by the church.
But suppression is not extinction. The spirit beliefs persisted under the Christian surface. The ancestors did not leave because the minister arrived. The tabu places remained tabu. And on Tanna — the most stubbornly resistant island in the archipelago — the tension between skul and kastom would eventually produce one of the twentieth century's most remarkable religious movements.
VIII. John Frum and the Red Cross
The John Frum movement on Tanna is the most studied, most misunderstood, and most enduring of the Melanesian "cargo movements" — a term this profile uses with caution, because the phrase "cargo cult" has been deployed for decades as a way of dismissing indigenous religious movements as naive materialism, when in fact they are sophisticated responses to the colonial encounter.
The movement emerged in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a period when the Presbyterian mission's control over Tanna was at its peak. Kastom practices had been suppressed for decades. Kava was banned. Traditional dance was forbidden. The nakamal system had been dismantled. Into this suppression came a figure — or a vision, or a name — called John Frum (sometimes Jon Frum, Jonfrum). The origin of the name is debated: some scholars suggest it derives from "John from America"; others note that "Frum" may relate to "broom," as in sweeping the island clean; the ni-Vanuatu themselves have their own explanations.
What is clear is that John Frum was a prophetic figure who promised the return of kastom, the departure of the missionaries, and the arrival of material abundance. Followers were told to abandon the missions, resume kava drinking, return to traditional ceremony, and wait. The response was immediate and dramatic: across Tanna, entire communities left the Presbyterian churches, returned to kava, resumed customary exchange, and defied the colonial administration that backed the missions. The administration's response was repression — arrests, imprisonment, deportation of leaders to other islands — but the movement survived every attempt to crush it.
The arrival of American forces during World War II transformed the movement. The Americans brought with them an abundance of material goods — vehicles, clothing, food, machinery — distributed with a generosity that contrasted sharply with both the French and the British colonial administrations. The red cross on American medical supplies became a sacred symbol. John Frum was increasingly associated with America, and the movement's iconography adopted American flags, military imagery, and the promise that John Frum would return with cargo — material abundance that rightfully belonged to the ni-Vanuatu but had been diverted by the whites.
This is the point where outside observers typically stop and laugh. But the laughter is the failure, not the belief. The John Frum movement is not a naive confusion of ritual and technology. It is a coherent theological response to a genuine moral problem: why do the whites have so much and we so little, when we are the ones who live on this land and tend these gardens and honor these ancestors? The cargo idiom is the medium, not the message. The message is that the current arrangement is unjust, that a reckoning is coming, and that kastom — not the mission's school — is the path to restoration.
Lamont Lindstrom, who has studied the movement for over forty years, argues in Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond (1993) that "cargo cult" is better understood as a Western projection than as a Melanesian reality — a category that reveals more about Western anxieties about consumption and rationality than about what the Tannese actually believe. Marc Tabani, in Une pirogue pour le Paradis (2008), demonstrates the movement's internal diversity, its ongoing theological development, and its sophisticated engagement with global politics.
The John Frum movement is alive today. Every year on February 15 — John Frum Day — men in Lamakara and other Tannese villages march with bamboo rifles, raise American flags, paint "USA" on their chests, and wait. The waiting is not passive. It is a declaration: we have not been absorbed. The mission did not win. Kastom endures. John Frum has not come yet. But the waiting is the practice. And the practice — the kava, the dance, the ceremony, the defiance — is the kastom that John Frum promised to restore. In this sense, John Frum has already come. The cargo is the kastom itself.
IX. Other Movements — Nagriamel and the Prince
The John Frum movement is the most famous but not the only prophetic movement in Vanuatu's modern religious landscape.
Nagriamel was founded in the 1960s by Jimmy Stevens (also known as Jimmy Tupou Patuntun Moses) on Espiritu Santo, the largest island in the archipelago. The movement combined kastom revivalism with land rights activism — its name derives from two plants, the nangaria (a cycad with kastom significance) and the namele (a palm whose leaf is the universal Vanuatu tabu sign, now featured on the national flag). Stevens articulated a vision of return to the land, rejection of foreign ownership, and restoration of indigenous authority.
Nagriamel became politically significant in the years leading to independence. Stevens allied with French-speaking interests and the Phoenix Foundation, an American libertarian organization, and in 1980 — as Vanuatu moved toward independence — he declared the secession of Santo from the new nation. The resulting "Coconut War" was brief: Papua New Guinean troops, invited by the new Vanuatu government, suppressed the secession in weeks. Stevens was imprisoned. Nagriamel as a political force collapsed.
But the movement's cultural and spiritual dimensions survive. The namele leaf remains Vanuatu's national symbol. The land rights discourse that Nagriamel articulated — that ni-Vanuatu land belongs to ni-Vanuatu, that foreign alienation of land is a violation of kastom — became foundational to the new nation's legal framework. Stevens may have lost the war, but the war's underlying question — whose land is this? — was answered in kastom's favor.
The Prince Philip Movement in the village of Yaohnanen on Tanna is the most internationally sensationalized of Vanuatu's kastom phenomena and the most instructive about Western misunderstanding. Villagers in Yaohnanen associated Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, with a spirit figure from their own tradition — a mountain spirit who had traveled overseas and would one day return. Philip's visit to Vanuatu in 1974 may have catalyzed the association. The villagers sent gifts; Philip sent photographs; a small but genuine exchange of recognition developed across an improbable distance.
Western media treated the Prince Philip Movement as comedy — primitive islanders worshipping a European royal. But the joke is on the journalists. The movement is a sophisticated act of kastom diplomacy: by incorporating a powerful foreign figure into the indigenous cosmology, the Yaohnanen villagers were doing what Melanesian cultures have always done — absorbing external power into the local spiritual framework, on their own terms. Philip was not worshipped as a Christian worships God. He was recognized as a figure whose power — his mana — fit an existing cosmological slot. The incorporation is an act of sovereignty, not of submission.
Philip died in 2021. The Yaohnanen community mourned. The question of succession — whether Charles would inherit the spiritual role — was navigated within the community's own theological framework. The tradition continues, as traditions do: by adaptation.
X. Independence and the Kastom Revival
Vanuatu gained independence on July 30, 1980. The first Prime Minister, Father Walter Lini, was an Anglican priest who had the political genius to make kastom the foundation of national identity. The constitution of the Republic of Vanuatu, adopted at independence, is explicitly grounded in kastom: Article 74 states that customary law shall continue in force and that the National Council of Chiefs (Malvatumauri) shall have a constitutional role in preserving and promoting ni-Vanuatu culture and languages.
This was not tokenism. Vanuatu is one of the few nations on earth where indigenous customary law has constitutional status alongside introduced law. Land law, in particular, is governed by kastom: all land in Vanuatu belongs to the indigenous custom owners, and the constitution voids the colonial-era land alienations that had transferred vast tracts to French and British settlers. The National Council of Chiefs — the Malvatumauri — advises parliament on all matters relating to custom and tradition. Chiefs are not elected by popular vote; they are recognized through kastom processes that vary by island and community.
The Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC, now the Vanuatu National Cultural Council) has been the institutional engine of the kastom revival since its founding in 1960 (pre-independence, under joint colonial administration). Under the directorship of Kirk Huffman (1977–1989) and later Ralph Regenvanu, the VCC developed a remarkable system of fieldworkers — ni-Vanuatu volunteers trained to document and preserve their own communities' kastom. The fieldworker network, which at its peak included representatives on nearly every inhabited island, is one of the most successful indigenous cultural preservation programs in the world. It operates on a principle that the tulku lineage would recognize: the knowledge must be carried by the people it belongs to, not extracted by outsiders and stored in metropolitan museums.
The kastom revival is not without tensions. Critics within Vanuatu have argued that the kastom discourse is used to enforce conservative social norms — particularly regarding gender. Margaret Jolly, an Australian anthropologist who has worked extensively in Vanuatu, has documented how "kastom" can be invoked to justify the subordination of women by claiming that patriarchal authority is "traditional," even when the specific forms of that authority are colonial or post-colonial innovations. The same word that empowers indigenous identity can constrain indigenous women. This is a crosstruth, not a contradiction: kastom is capacious enough to contain both liberation and restriction, and the argument over which version of kastom is "real" is one of the most vital conversations in contemporary Vanuatu.
XI. The Aquarian Question
Ni-Vanuatu kastom is both pre-Aquarian in its roots and quintessentially Aquarian in its contemporary expression. The grade societies, the kava ceremonies, the sand drawings, and the spirit beliefs predate Western contact by centuries or millennia. But the self-conscious articulation of kastom as an identity, a politics, and a way of life — the kastom revival, the constitutional enshrinement, the John Frum movement's ongoing defiance — these are Aquarian phenomena: deliberate acts of reaching backward for what colonial modernity suppressed, in order to build something that colonial modernity cannot provide.
The survival medium is custom itself — kastom as a living practice, transmitted through ceremony, kava, dance, grade-taking, sand drawing, and the ongoing social life of the village. This is distinct from the body (the Hmong shaman's trance), distinct from the manuscript (the Mien priest's scroll), and distinct from the institution (the Theosophical lodge). Kastom survives because the nakamal is still there, the kava is still being drunk, the pigs are still being raised, and the sand is still being drawn in. The medium is the entirety of the social-spiritual practice. It cannot be extracted, bottled, or exported without fundamental transformation.
The threat is the same as everywhere: urbanization, globalization, the pull of Port Vila, the seduction of the cash economy, the churches that still condemn kava and ceremony as satanic. The young leave for the capital and learn to be ashamed of what their grandparents knew. The grade ceremonies require years of pig-raising that make no sense in a wage economy. The sand drawings require teachers who are dying faster than they can transmit.
And yet. The nakamal is still there. The fieldworkers are still documenting. The chiefs still sit in constitutional council. The men of Lamakara still march on February 15. The women of Pentecost still prepare the yam gardens while the men prepare the tower. The kava is still being pounded. The root is still alive.
Kastom is not a museum. It is not a performance for tourists. It is not a political slogan — or not only a political slogan. It is the way the grandmother plants her garden. It is the way the chief resolves the dispute. It is the way the dead are sent to the ancestors. It is the pattern in the sand that the soul must trace to enter the spirit world. It is custom — and custom is enough.
Scholars and Sources
R.H. Codrington's The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folk-Lore (1891) is the foundational text for Melanesian religious studies, introducing the concept of mana to Western scholarship. A. Bernard Deacon's posthumous Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides (1934, edited by Camilla Wedgwood) provides the most detailed ethnographic account of the grade societies and associated art of Malakula. John Layard's Stone Men of Malekula (1942) extends the record.
Lamont Lindstrom's work on Tanna is indispensable: Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society (1990), Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond (1993), and numerous articles spanning four decades of fieldwork. Marc Tabani's Une pirogue pour le Paradis: Le culte de John Frum à Tanna (Vanuatu) (2008) is the most thorough study of the John Frum movement.
Joël Bonnemaison's The Tree and the Canoe: History and Ethnogeography of Tanna (1994, translated from French) provides the geographic and cultural framework for understanding Tanna's kastom landscape. Margaret Jolly's Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (1994) is essential for understanding the gendered dimensions of kastom discourse.
Kirk Huffman's work with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and his numerous publications and lectures on Malakula's grade societies provide both scholarly rigor and activist commitment. Ralph Regenvanu's career — from VCC director to Minister of Lands to opposition leader — embodies the kastom revival in political form.
On sand drawing: the UNESCO inscription dossier (2003) and the work of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre's documentation program. On land diving: Kal Muller's photographic documentation and the oral histories preserved by the Sa communities of South Pentecost.
For the broader Melanesian context: Peter Lawrence's Road Belong Cargo (1964) on the cargo movements of Papua New Guinea; Kenelm Burridge's Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium (1960); and Andrew Lattas's Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults (1998).
Colophon
This profile was written by Drenpa (དྲན་པ), the eleventh Living Traditions Researcher of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, in March 2026, drawing on the published scholarship of R.H. Codrington, A. Bernard Deacon, John Layard, Lamont Lindstrom, Marc Tabani, Joël Bonnemaison, Margaret Jolly, Kirk Huffman, and Ralph Regenvanu. It is a scholarly introduction to publicly available knowledge about ni-Vanuatu kastom traditions. No oral traditions from living communities are quoted directly; all information is derived from published scholarly sources.
The term "cargo cult" is used sparingly and critically in this profile, following Lindstrom's argument that the phrase reveals more about Western projections than about Melanesian realities. The John Frum movement is treated as a coherent religious tradition, not a curiosity.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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