The Future of Indigenous Museums

Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific

Nick Stanley, Nick Stanley

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780857455727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. They derive from a number of motives, ranging from the commercial to the cultural political (and many combine both). A close study of this phenomenon is not only valuable for museological practice but, as has been argued, it may challenge our current bedrock assumptions about the very nature and purpose of the museum. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how museums have evolved particularly in the non-western world to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture. Of particular concern is the uses to which historic records are put in the service of community development and cultural renaissance.

Part I

Island Melanesia

1

Resourcing Change: Fieldworkers, the Women’s Culture Project and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre

Lissant Bolton

In 1997 a senior official of the Vanuatu National Council of Women (VNCW) came to a meeting of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre’s women volunteer extension workers, known as fieldworkers. She began her presentation by saying, ‘We all know that in kastom women are nothing.’ The women fieldworkers, unfailingly courteous, made no response, but after she left the meeting they were outraged. Their project, the Women’s Culture Project, was founded in 1991 on the proposition that ‘women have kastom too’, that is to say that women, as much as men, are the holders of indigenous knowledge and practice. By 1997, the depth and importance of women’s customary knowledge and practice throughout Vanuatu was becoming ever more apparent to them. They were very unimpressed that this should not be recognized by the organization which represents all ni-Vanuatu women at national level.

The VNCW official’s observation reflects a problem faced by many nationallevel organisations in Vanuatu – that of dislocation from rural contexts. The nation of Vanuatu is constituted over an archipelago of more than eighty islands, which lie roughly north-south over a distance of nearly 850 kilometres. The population (about 205,000 people in 2005) speak 113 languages. The capital, Port Vila, is located on the southern coast of the island of Efate in the centre of the archipelago: roughly 31,000 people (or 6.5 per cent of the population) live there. Between 1906 and 1980, the archipelago was administered jointly by the British and the French through the Condominium Government of the New Hebrides. Neither country invested significantly in the archipelago, and despite the depredations of the labour trade, the expropriation of land for plantations, and the widespread influence of Christian missionaries, people maintained reasonable autonomy in managing village-level matters.

Since independence a small middle class of government officials and professionals has began to emerge. Dislocated from rural preoccupations, and influenced by education, media and expatriate interests, some of these people no longer have much sense of the content of kastom, that is, of specific locally based bodies of knowledge and practice.¹ While some of them may regret their dislocation from kastom, for them, kastom is mainly a rhetorical trope, a term which can be used to lend authority to any specific action or decision. Organizations like the VNCW often draw their senior staff from this emerging, urban-based, middle class. Thus they are already dislocated from the concerns of people living in rural areas.

The Cultural Centre (in Vanuatu’s lingua franca Bislama, the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta or VKS), has developed a unique strategy which counteracts this trend – the fieldworker program. Approximately one hundred male and female volunteer extension workers, based in their own villages throughout the country, work to document and research kastom in their own areas, meeting annually to discuss their findings, their achievements and their problems. The Women’s Culture Project oversees the women fieldworkers’ group. Assisting Jean Tarisesei, a VKS staff member, I have had the privilege of helping to found and develop this group, visiting Vanuatu annually for the women fieldworkers’ workshops.

This chapter addresses the Women’s Culture Project (WCP). Specifically, it discusses the WCP within the framework of the Cultural Centre’s principle objective, which is to raise the profile of kastom and draw it into the unfolding process of Vanuatu’s national development. The chapter begins with a brief account of the founding of the Cultural Centre and the development of the fieldworker programme, before discussing the way in which the fieldworkers are resourcing the VKS objective to draw kastom into national frameworks. I then discuss the women fieldworkers as a specific instance of this process.

The Cultural Centre and the Fieldworker Programme

The Cultural Centre was founded in 1956 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Condominium government.² Originally staffed and managed by expatriate volunteers, it comprised a museum, library and archives.³ The museum collected and displayed a small collection of ethnographic objects and natural history specimens from the archipelago, and hosted lectures and other such public events. In 1976, the first salaried curator, Kirk Huffman, was employed. Huffman, then a postgraduate anthropology student studying in Vanuatu, was already well versed in aspects of the knowledge and practice of the archipelago.

The 1970s were an era in which organizations such as UNESCO and the South Pacific Commission were funding oral traditions programmes to tape-record myths, histories and songs for posterity. Huffman and Peter Crowe (an ethnomusicologist also working in the archipelago) together developed an oral traditions project for Vanuatu which had, from the beginning, a double objective. It was designed both to record ‘all forms of unwritten knowledge’ and to ‘stimulate the revival and continuance of traditional ways’ (Crowe n.d.[1977]: 6). In this project men from different islands were trained in the use of audiorecording equipment which they then used to record material in their own districts and islands. In 1981 these men met for the first time at the Cultural Centre in Port Vila, under the chairmanship of Darrell Tryon, a linguist based at the Australian National University. Annual two-week training workshops developed from this initiative. With the support and encouragement of both Huffman and Tryon, the men fieldworker group grew and flourished. The Women’s Culture Project (WCP) was founded a decade later, in 1991, and the first women fieldworkers’ workshop was held in 1994, following the model developed in the men’s programme. I chair the women fieldworkers’ workshop, in collaboration with the Women’s Culture Project coordinator, Jean Tarisesei.

The fieldworker workshops are devoted to training, research reporting and to providing the fieldworkers with information. Training focuses on documentation techniques drawn from anthropology, linguistics and to some extent archaeology, such as tape-recording, making dictionaries, writing genealogies, and site recording. At each workshop a research topic is agreed for the following year. Topics range widely, and include, for example, land ownership, gardening techniques, kinship terminologies and marriage rituals. Fieldworkers research the topic during the year, and present their findings at the next workshop. They also report on other aspects of their year’s work. As volunteers, the fieldworkers are free to work as much or as little as they wish, but over the years those not interested in the work have left, so that now in each group there is a core of highly committed individuals. At the annual workshops they have developed a sophisticated understanding of their project, of the issues and the difficulties they face. Discussions revolve not only around the distinctive cultural practices of each area and language group, but also address the question of what kastom can be retained in the face of social and economic change, how this is to be achieved, and what kinds of opposition can be faced.

Huffman was Cultural Centre curator until 1989. Three incumbents succeeded him in quick succession, until in 1995 Ralph Regenvanu was appointed as VKS Director. Regenvanu has developed the role of the VKS in ways perhaps unimaginable to its founders. Very appreciative of Huffman’s legacy, and equally committed to kastom, Regenvanu has nevertheless significantly changed the focus of VKS programmes. The contrast between their two approaches reflects not only their own interests, but also the changing dimensions of the developing nation of Vanuatu.

Huffman’s approach to curatorship was essentially conservationist. He was concerned that the wealth of kastom should not be lost. Not content with recording kastom through object collections, tape-recordings and the other conventional techniques of ethnography, Huffman was primarily interested in revival, in encouraging people to perform rituals again, to revive indigenous clothing, to pass on knowledge to the next generation, to keep language alive. His own deep knowledge of kastom in the island of Malakula enabled him to prompt and encourage the fieldworkers to recognize and to search out kastom among those people who still knew it, and to piece together from various accounts the stories, history and rituals of their own places.

Huffman’s concerns matched the temper of the times: in the 1970s and 1980s ni-Vanuatu leaders took hold of kastom as the basis of the identity of their new nation. Although the British were keen to grant independence, the French were not. Ni-Vanuatu fought for independence, debating and discussing amongst themselves (in person and on the national short-wave radio) what that independence would entail. The leaders of the independence movement sought a foundation for national unity. Acknowledging the tremendous cultural diversity within the archipelago, they nevertheless recognized a basic commonality threaded through it. The First National Arts Festival, held in Port Vila in 1979, demonstrated this diversity and an underlying unity. As the festival organizer Godwin Ligo later wrote, the festival ‘brought about an awareness amongst ni-Vanuatu of the importance and vividness of our own culture. … The Festival came at a vital moment in the history of Vanuatu, and showed to the world at large their identity, which was their passport through the gate of independence as “Ni-Vanuatu”’ (Ligo 1980: 65).

Huffman’s concern with the revival of kastom matched well the buoyant enthusiasm of the nation’s new politicians, and also underpinned it. People throughout the country at the time were sometimes puzzled by how to act on the new affirmation of kastom. Bob Tonkinson reports, for example, that in this period people on Ambrym ‘worried about a return to grass skirts … and bows and arrows’, and wondered who among them still remembered enough to revive ritual (Tonkinson 1982: 310). The fieldworker program could not address these questions in each place, but it nevertheless carried some of the moral weight of this project for the nation as a whole. Moreover, the research findings of the fieldworkers substantiated the political rhetoric and made that substantiation available to the nation through the Cultural Centre’s radio programme (see Bolton 1999a). The projects initiated by active fieldworkers in their own areas made political rhetoric about the importance of kastom real in those places.

Resourcing Change

Regenvanu’s directorship has taken a different emphasis. If Huffman was concerned with revival, since the late 1990s Regenvanu has focused on ‘trying to “mainstream” the issue of culture and cultural heritage in national development’ (Regenvanu 2005: 42). He is preoccupied by the massive social and economic changes which have come to Vanuatu since independence. Population growth is a particular issue: over half of the population is now under eighteen years of age, and perhaps a quarter under the age of six. Regenvanu points out that the lives of almost all ni-Vanuatu involve aspects of kastom on a daily basis: kinship systems, subsistence agriculture, traditional leadership systems, language use and some rituals are all commonplace in many lives. However, he says, ‘the reality of globalisation, which includes the persistence of pro-monetarisation policies of government, is gradually eroding the strength and capacity of custom in the lives of ni-Vanuatu’ (2005: 45). He comments that ‘the enormous capacity that custom has provided the society with in terms of security (food self-sufficiency and community support) and social order seems not to be recognised by policies that overwhelmingly target ways of increasing money-making’ (2005: 42). As VKS director, he is concerned to find ways to halt this process of erosion and to reinforce the strength and capacity of kastom.

Regenvanu recognizes the contradictions inherent in accommodating an introduced governance system. He observes:

The state structure which was inherited by the anti-colonial movement is itself antithetical to customary governance principles – which are fluid and context-specific (that is, unwritten), very locally based (operating most effectively at the level of the clan) and founded on traditional spiritual and cultural beliefs. (2005: 40)

However, he believes that there are ways in which kastom can be inserted into the state structure, through environment law, for example, and through the education system. In effecting this, Regenvanu and the VKS rely significantly upon the work of the fieldworkers. They are crucial to the process because they are a critical source of information and ideas on which kastom-based policies and procedures can be developed. The VKS initiates and operates its own research projects, working with and through the fieldworker networks. Making use of funding opportunities as they arise, the VKS has, for example, developed research on marine tenure systems, and language orthography, and has introduced a series of archaeological and historical site surveys. It has also developed programmes researching contemporary problems in Vanuatu. The Vanuatu Young People’s Project, founded by Regenvanu and the Canadian anthropologist Jean Mitchell, has undertaken very significant research into the situation of young people in town and in the islands. Research findings from this project led to both NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and government departments providing services and training for young people in Vanuatu to a level not previously provided (Mitchell 1998, 2002).

The fieldworker network also provides the Vila-based VKS staff with access to and information about what is happening in the islands. As each fieldworker reports on his or her year’s work, they inevitably report also on what is happening in their place. Listening to the women fieldworkers’ reports each year, I learn something about the course of their own lives (births, marriages, deaths), about the regular intervention of various natural calamities (landslides, cyclones, volcanic activity), about community disputes, communication problems (the failure of the Radio Vanuatu broadcasting transmitters), the increasing reach of tourism. The encouragements and discouragements and the rhythm of rural life – gardening cycles, the school year, ritual cycles, church meetings – all emerge in the fieldworker reports.

The VKS also controls expatriate social science research, granting research permits to linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnomusicologists, historians and so on. It negotiates the terms and details of the research programme and usually assigns each researcher to the care of a fieldworker in the area where the research is implemented (Regenvanu 1999; see also Curtis 2002). Fieldworkers thus contribute in a variety of ways to the findings of these projects. The Vanuatu National Film and Sound Unit, part of the VKS, manages film crews wishing to work in the country, and manages their filming with the assistance of fieldworkers. Not all researchers welcome this necessary association with fieldworkers. Although personalities and preoccupations do not always match, where these pairings work they can be immensely productive.

The fieldworker network is also ...