Vanuatu is mostly Christian, and which church a village belongs to is largely a matter of which mission reached it first: Presbyterian in the central and southern islands, Anglican in the north, Catholic and Seventh day Adventist elsewhere. The country was governed until independence in 1980 by an Anglo French condominium, an administration with two of everything, which left the islands with two colonial languages and a corresponding split in the mission field.
What distinguishes Vanuatu is the standing given to kastom. The word covers the customary order as a whole: ritual, exchange, rank taking, land tenure and dispute settlement. It is not treated as a superseded past. The constitution recognises custom as a source of law, chiefs are constituted in a national council, and a person may be simultaneously an active church member and a participant in graded society rituals, with the two held as parallel systems rather than as a contradiction to be resolved. Some communities on Tanna and Santo rejected the missions altogether and kept kastom whole.
Sand drawing is inscribed by UNESCO. It is not decoration: the practitioner traces a continuous line in the sand in a single unbroken movement, and the resulting figure encodes ritual knowledge, kinship relations, songs or the layout of a place, functioning as a memory device and a means of communication between speakers of different languages, of which Vanuatu has more than a hundred.
Land is the point on which kastom, church and state most often meet, because in Vanuatu land is held by custom owners and the identification of who they are is a matter for customary rather than statutory determination.