ABSTRACT
The Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC) is unique in the world. It is not only about the things one see in the museum, but about the life that people live. Cultural revival and traditional knowledge, the empowerment of local communities and the animation of museum collections provided a first context for discussing intangible heritage within Te Papa Tongarewa. Rather than a set of cultural practices untainted by modernity, intangible heritage emerges as fluid and open to change. This chapter examines these issues in the context of the VCC in Port Vila, the capital of the Melanesian island state of Vanuatu. It explores how intangible heritage is adopted in the VCC to serve its postcolonial Indigenous museology. The VCC has adopted the idea of intangible heritage to conflate kastom and development, and in so doing suit the ni-Vanuatu heritage lexicon. Kastom seems to be a cultural asset that can serve current processes of local and national development.
