Quotes of the Day

Facing each other in a tight circle, fingers spread and palms making a sharp crack as they clap, the men of the village of Ianapus tattoo the dark ground with their rhythmic stomping. In contrast to the chaotic rainforest that covers most of their island of Tanna, the surface of the men's dancing ground is bare earth, compacted and smooth from countless years of ritual. Today their strong voices sing here for the success of the yam harvest and the bounty of gardens to come. Young boys, clad like their fathers and uncles only in the nambas, or penis covering, join in, listening intently to the rites they will inherit. A few kilometers away is a small building with a handful of computers in it, but these children will probably never sit in front of them or in any school. The way most of their parents see it, the village is the only classroom they will ever need.

About 900 Tannese live in Ianapus, a hamlet where the laden branches of wild mandarin trees hang over small, dark-roomed dwellings thatched with leaves, and dogs and pigs lie in the dust. The tourists who fly half an hour south to Tanna from Port Vila, the capital, come mainly to see the molten belching of Mt. Yasur, the island's live volcano, and rarely visit places like this, self-sufficient communities connected to the world beyond their borders by little more than a web of narrow walking tracks. Money isn't seen here much, either. While few Tannese villagers still favor the nambas or grass skirts seen in Ianapus, most still live the kastom way, following traditional codes and hierarchies that have survived 160 years of contact with the outside world. They are lucky, for the land is usually so fertile that people have plenty of time to tend their culture as well as their crops of taro or kava. Even as the modern world encroaches, the old ways hold fast. On Tanna, home of chocolate-colored butterflies and nights perfumed by huge orange trumpet lilies, you can find resorts and fancy foreign wine, but never far away are the tupunis, the men who believe they can conjure up cyclones or sunshine with their special stones.

Chief Tom Numake was a tupunis once, until he set aside the powers he inherited from his father and chose the Bible 30 years ago. A former president of Vanuatu's National Council of Chiefs, he is among the most senior of Tanna's 300 chiefs in a community where such men still wield great power. It was his idea to make Tanna the only island to record its kastom law in writing, a feat it completed in 1995, and though he worships in a church, at the same time Numake lives very much as kastom dictates. He embodies the meeting of two worlds found in many of his fellow ni-Vanuatu: a Western-dressed world traveler with a mobile phone and a partnership in the island's most upmarket resort, he consults healers who specialize in ridding people of curses, and talks with the spirits from which his island sprang.

Tanna's brushes with the outside world have not always been happy. Explorers, whalers, traders and blackbirders snatching laborers for the canefields of Queensland all figure in the island's memory. Missionaries arrived in the 1840s; the sterner among them tried to stamp out the arranged marriages, kava drinking and other rituals that underpin Tannese kastom life. Today, a jumble of Christian groups still jostle for believers. But the history of contact is brief enough that the first local person to fly in a plane - a young woman sent because the chiefs were suspicious of the strange craft - is still alive. The world remains quieter here, the green-leafed silence interrupted perhaps by the crepuscular hum of insects, or the morning call of the cone shell, blown at this time of year, when circumcision rituals are taking place. After they have been circumcised with a sharpened piece of bamboo, small boys stay in the forest for a month or so in seclusion. Now, as they prepare to return to their families, preparations are under way throughout villages for the celebration that will last all night. Women prepare laplap, the traditional mixture of grated taro or yam and meat - perhaps chicken or flying fox - cooked in ground ovens, while on trestles under a massive tree in the port town of Lenakel, piles of glittering tinsel are sold to adorn mothers eager to welcome home their sons.

The ships that unload at Lenakel's wharf soon fill again with a hectic cargo. Bound for the capital on an overnight journey are wide-eyed children clutching live chickens, women in bright floral dresses, men carrying knives. Piled into the rocking hold are their gifts and wares: immense, dusty piles of kava root, thick brown lengths of sugar cane, pigs staring from roughly crafted wooden cages. Their owners may be hoping to earn some vatu (the national currency) at Port Vila's markets, but in the villages where the majority of ni-Vanuatu still live, pigs, kava and other traditional items like woven mats are also currency - used in ceremonies, for marriage, to pay fines and resolve disputes, or to acquire status.

Though the advent of money has diluted traditional systems of exchange, the rare hairless pigs of Tanna, the hermaphrodite pigs from Pentecost, or the male tusker pigs of Malakula - upper teeth removed to encourage the growth of extraordinary curved tusks - remain symbols of great wealth. In Vanuatu's northern islands, tusker pigs can even buy a tribe the songs, dances and secret ways of making masks and headdresses of another tribe under an ancient notion of intellectual copyright.

It's fitting that in the country with the world's largest number of languages per capita - around 100, with many more dialects, among a population of 187,000 - there's a debate about how much of the outside world it wants to let in. The impact of money on kastom is a special worry. Last month in Vila, the Council of Chiefs, government officials and Cultural Centre staff met to discuss how to protect traditional wealth items from the cash economy. They agreed that the use of vatu for bride price (around $550) and other customary exchanges should be stopped and the government lobbied to let school and medical fees be paid without cash. Council of Chiefs deputy president Selwyn Garu, whose North Pentecost province already accepts woven red mats as school fees, says the approach makes sense in a country where few people have access to money. "Vatu has a place here," he says, "but it shouldn't do away with traditional currencies, which help keep ceremonies alive." As well as protecting its traditions, Garu says, Vanuatu should be trying to head off poverty and joblessness: "If you want to get the whole population involved with money, you have to give them the opportunity to make money. Otherwise, don't raise their expectations."

On Tanna, chief Numake says talks have begun with the government to have new ways of paying school fees - around $180 a year - introduced in 2007. At one roadside market, where women sit cross-legged near piles of wild spinach and sweet bananas, 19-year-old Cymon Charlie says her parents scraped together enough cash to send her to school, and she now wants to be a teacher. But Charlie, a Seventh-Day Adventist, isn't sure kastom and the classroom mix well. She suspects kastom will fade as more children go to school: "They learn the Western education and then they go and get a job to earn money." That's the worry of many Tannese. Back at Ianapus, village spokesman Sam Posen, wearing a nambas and a carved flying fox around his neck, says money is slowly changing the way they live, "and that is bringing worry. But our chief tells people all the time that the cheapest, good way to live is kastom. He tells them that this is the easiest place, the best life." Several creek-crossings away, in the village of Yakel in the hills behind Lenakel, 107-year-old chief Kowia urges his people to reject the modern world's ideas and medicines. His back may be bowed and his gait slow, but his voice is unwavering. Two people in his village know enough English from school to converse with the outside world, and he thinks that's enough. "Maybe when the children go to school they lose the kastom," he says, as a giant black pig snuffles nearby and smoke drifts from the hut where women prepare food. "At school they learn only a few things, but when they stay here they learn everything."

Translating for chief Kowia is Tom Noka, one of the two villagers who went to school, where he used a computer and saw television for the first time. A young man with a distant gaze, he says such gadgets don't interest him. "We stay here and everything is free," he says. Yakel's men still wear the nambas, and its women grass skirts, but they have found a way of benefiting from outsiders while keeping them at arm's length. For a small fee, which is spent on pigs or axes, local tour operators bring tourists here to watch dancing. The village of Ypai also welcomes tourists, whose money has bought much-wanted saucepans and knives. But here too only a small number of the children will go to one of Tanna's schools, says villager Louis Kabalu: "The rest are left behind learning how to do kastom."

Of course change comes even to a remote place like Tanna. Village law used to deal severely with women who drank kava, the intoxicating drink that's used not only for ceremonies and communing with the spirits, but to round off each day. When sunset arrives, many Tannese men's thoughts turn to it. Kerosene lamps denote kava bars, tiny shacks where drinkers congregate for coconut shells full of the murky, bitter liquid, which swiftly induces a relaxing haze. Many villages fall silent after sunset: talking is not part of the kava ritual, and children are discouraged from making too much noise. Women's involvement is usually confined to preparing food for the drinkers, but recent years have seen a slow trickle of women ignoring the old tabu.

The sea is rolling under a lambent sky as Ola John has the first of several shells. Men say kava is like a woman, she says wryly, "if his wife is away and a man drinks kava, he doesn't think of her. Maybe men believe that if women drink kava too, then who would do all the work?" Her family don't approve, but she says she could go to the police if any chief tried to punish her. The restrictions placed on women are one of kastom's dark aspects, she says quietly, along with domestic violence and the practice of bequeathing land to boys and sending girls away, often to other islands, to be married. Perhaps Tanna's most fascinating dialogue between the old and the imported can be found an hour's bumpy drive south of Lenakel, past beaches covered in glittering black sand, to Green Point. About 3,000 villagers here are ardent members of the John Frum Movement, which follows the teaching of a European-looking spirit-man who they say appeared to senior men in the area just before World War II, urging them to reject missionary rule and return to kastom living. Green Point men, sitting under the fern-clad branches of an enormous banyan tree, say Frum's original name was Brum, or broom, referring to the need to "sweep out" foreign influences that threatened traditional lifestyles.

He called Tanna's chiefs together and predicted the coming of new and strange objects and ideas. "He said there is a big boat coming, a plane and the icebox, the truck, and this place will be different," says senior man Johnson Kuanu. Some new things, he told them, would be good, including parts of Christianity, and some bad. "He said we had to be careful." Along a winding track leading from the banyan, a wind-blown cliff looks down to where the forest surges to meet the sand. This is where John Frum is believed to have first appeared, and where the sacred stones he left behind are still watched over. When he disappeared at the end of 1942, he promised to come back one day. "People still hope that he is coming," says Kuanu.

Across the island, near the vast plain of gray ash that lies at the foot of rumbling Mt. Yasur, other John Frum believers see things differently. Here, every Friday around 8 a.m., the village of Lamakara falls still as three men disappear into a hut, where they change from faded T shirts and trousers into smart tan military uniforms. They then solemnly raise the flags of the U.S., France and Australian Aborigines, with whom they feel solidarity over land rights. When chief Isaac Wan appears, other men regard him with grave respect: they believe he is John Frum's prophet. The gray-bearded Wan says he was chosen by Frum himself as an infant. John Frum, "dressed all in white," he says, here too urged people to stick to kastom, but went to Green Point only after appearing at nearby Sulphur Bay, initially as a lion. He promised too that Americans, many of whom were stationed on the main island of Efate during World War II, would one day bring development to the area.

Chief Numake isn't a John Frum man, though he says his grandfather was the last chief to shake the mysterious visitor's hand. He sees in the movement echoes of his adopted faith - the figure in white, staying for several years before disappearing but promising to return - and says the blend makes sense on Tanna. "When Tannese first converted, we were in a dim light," he says, looking over the glistening sea. "But after John Frum came we knew our kastom should not be destroyed, that you can be Christian but know your culture as well." Which is perhaps why on Tanna, you will find pastors drinking kava, and kastom men flying foreign flags.

• Lisa Clausen
• After over a century of contact, many Vanuatu people remain wary of the wider world, shunning cash and schooling in favor of ancestral ways