The majority of Western museums hide the authorship and agency of their staff behind the institutional umbrella. This chapter explores an alternative model of knowledge production, which recognises the agency of individual practitioners within institutional practices. The Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (Vanuatu Cultural Centre) began a fieldworker program that gave individual agency to local volunteer community workers in defining and carrying out a research program to document and preserve local customs (kastom). In describing the women’s fieldworker program by focusing on a number of individual women I highlight the ways in which their work opens up the continued relevance of kastom to local communities and enables both personal and institutional fulfilment. In this model of knowledge production, agency is given both ways – from the institution to the fieldworkers and to the institution itself via the fieldworkers. It is a model that enables the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta to engage directly with its postcolonial context and address the needs of the communities it serves.
As institutions, museums are often depersonalised. Exhibition curators are usually not named, and other decisions – about public programs, acquisitions, community liaison – are rarely attributed publicly to one individual. The convention is of institutional authorship, sometimes identified in the person of the current director. As anyone who has ever worked in a museum knows, museums are actually a ferment of personalities, convictions, disputes and politics. An exhibition, for example, is almost always a compromise: a negotiated settlement of deeply felt and often opposing convictions held by curators, educators, designers, conservators, managers and financiers. Unlike feature films, where the closing credits scroll through a litany of participants – studio executives, directors, authors, actors, technicians, funders, even caterers – museums frequently elide the individualities they encompass in favour of a single and impersonal institutional authorship.
As has been persuasively argued in a variety of contexts, many museums were founded to achieve political and social objectives. As strategies for influencing the moral and intellectual conduct of the citizenry, as declarations of national identity, as assertions of certain views of history or culture, the agency of museums has been widely discussed (for example, Bennett 1995; Kaplan 1994; Sherman and Rogoff 1994). This agency is not, at least in my experience, always made explicit in internal museum debates. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many museums are less concerned about their moral or political agency than they are about the impact of their visitor numbers on their funding streams. Even so, museums continue to have significant agency both in reproducing contemporary cultural preoccupations and in modifying them with new or different ideas.
The Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (Vanuatu Cultural Centre, VKS) is well known as an energetic and effective cultural institution in the Pacific. Significantly, the VKS director, Ralph Regenvanu, is explicit about recognising the agency available to his institution and making use of it for the benefit of Vanuatu as a whole (Regenvanu 2003). His interest is not primarily in exhibitions, but rather in a series of research programs directed towards a social and economic development based on indigenous practice. Recent VKS programs have contributed to the formulation of national environmental legislation, promoted the use of the vernacular in kindergartens and early primary education, developed a national history curriculum for secondary school use, and explored the use of indigenous economic systems in contemporary contexts (see Regenvanu 2003; Bolton n.d.; Lightner and Naupa 2005; Huffman 1996).
Although the VKS contains many of the internationally conventional structures of major cultural institutions – incorporating Vanuatu’s national museum, library, archaeological site survey, film and sound unit, and audio-visual archives – the energy that drives these different sections comes from an unconventional source. The bedrock of the VKS is a group of about 100 volunteer extension workers, known as the fieldworkers. Vanuatu is extremely complex culturally: a population of about 220,000 people live on some 80 islands and between them speak 113 languages. The fieldworkers, representing this diversity, act for the VKS in their own places and bring perspectives and issues from those places to bear on the cultural centre’s activities. Their charter is to document, preserve and promote indigenous knowledge and practice in their places.
The fieldworker program personalises and individualises VKS institutional agency. Each fieldworker, working voluntarily in his or her own area, is free to act in whatever way he or she chooses. The role and title – filwoka in Bislama, the national lingua franca – is widely respected throughout Vanuatu, and being a fieldworker can give a person significant agency in his or her own community. To an extent dependant on character, community and circumstances, individual fieldworkers can and do make a significant impact at the local level. They are motivated to act for the VKS out of personal commitment and interest. Indeed for many, what is important is not that they represent the VKS so much as that their connection to it enables them to do things they consider important. VKS staff also listen to what the fieldworkers say: their concerns have an influence on the institution’s projects and policies. This paper explores the fieldworkers’ personal agency, discussing the fieldworker program by focusing on a number of individual fieldworkers. While there are both men and women fieldworkers, this paper addresses the women fieldworkers’ network.
From first settlement about 3200 years ago, indigenous society in what is now the Vanuatu archipelago consisted of small, politically independent communities of subsistence agriculturalists. Although people traded widely, both for goods and for cultural resources such as songs and ceremonial cycles, they were in other ways tied to their own land. Unlike many societies in Papua New Guinea, ni-Vanuatu cultural practice often concentrated more on knowledge and performance – ceremony, dance, song, story, intellectual resource – than on the production of objects. They did not worship gods as such, but rather recognised the landscape to be co-inhabited by a range of other beings including spirits, some of which were ancestral spirits. Expatriate contacts with the islands – named the New Hebrides by Captain Cook in 1774 – only became significant from the 1840s, when planters and missionaries began to settle there. No colonial arrangements were put in place until 1906, when an initial joint naval agreement between Britain and France was transformed into the Anglo-French Condominium Government of the New Hebrides.
Britain and France, both rather reluctant participants in this arrangement, invested little in the islands and, equally, made little significant impact on the islanders. Missionaries, labour traders and planters were more influential, and more influential in some islands than others. One consequence of this set of arrangements was that many ni-Vanuatu retained a strong sense of local autonomy through the colonial era. Although the British were keen to grant independence, the French were not, and the resulting struggle for independence through the 1970s helped to create a sense of shared national identity that had never existed before. The fieldworker program was initiated in the late 1970s and developed in the heady years after independence in 1980. It remains infected with the idealism of that whole period.
The VKS fieldworker network has been discussed in a number of publications (Huffman 1996; Tryon 1999; Bolton 2003), and is addressed to some extent in many others (Bolton 1999; Curtis 2002). The network began with a small group of men brought together under the direction of the then VKS curator Kirk Huffman and the Australian linguist Darrell Tryon. In 1994 a women fieldworkers’ network was instituted, under the care of Jean Tarisesei and me. Jean Tarisesei works for the VKS full-time, heading a section called the Women’s Culture Project. Both fieldworker groups have grown steadily through the ensuing years, and there are now about 40 women fieldworkers. The core characteristic of the whole fieldworker program is the project of affirmation: the affirmation of the importance of kastom – the Bislama term for indigenous knowledge and practice – and the affirmation of local initiatives to sustain and support rural ni-Vanuatu society.
The two fieldworker groups each meet for an annual two-week workshop at which each member reports on his or her work through the preceding year, presents a research report on the workshop topic and receives training in research techniques. At the end of each workshop a research topic is set for the following year, and the fieldworkers take away a list of potential research questions. At the women’s workshop we always discuss the next research topic at some length, to get the measure of its potential parameters: questions are written on the basis of that discussion. During the year the fieldworkers live in their own places, supporting themselves by subsistence agriculture and small-scale cash cropping, and working as much, or as little, as they choose.
The annual workshops are a crucial part of the fieldworker program. They give the fieldworkers a regular focus for their work, an audience for their achievements, an environment in which to discuss problems and a source of new ideas. The composition of each group changes a little every year: there are always a few new fieldworkers, and inevitably someone or other is absent. Nevertheless each group has developed a strong identity and camaraderie. Each has its own elected executive, with a chairperson, secretary and treasurer. Individual members make distinctive contributions both to the workshops themselves and to VKS programs, and over time a kind of balance has developed between such various contributions. In the workshops some women participate vigorously in discussion while others hardly say a word. Several have real gifts in research, while others are more interested in action in their own communities. There are also, of course, some women fieldworkers who effectively do no work at all, and hardly contribute to the workshops, but usually VKS staff weed them out from the group, so that most long-term members are active and engaged.
During the colonial era the public discourse that grew up around kastom identified men as its primary actors. Men were seen to know and practice kastom; women were hardly visible. The Women’s Culture Project and the women fieldworkers’ network were founded, with the support of the men fieldworkers, to redress the notion that women possessed no significant cultural knowledge (see Bolton 2003). Through Women’s Culture Project initiatives – through radio, video, arts festivals and the work of individual fieldworkers – this fiction has now been overturned.
More broadly, however, women continue to be disadvantaged by innovations made by expatriates – missionaries, planters, government officials – in the colonial era. Under the colonial government the islands were for the first time comprehended as a collectivity, and an administrative and political hierarchy that overarched indigenous political systems was created. Women were commonly excluded from the new roles and opportunities thus created – from working for the administration; from the formalised system of ‘traditional’ leadership, the chiefs; and from official roles in the church.
Lucy Moses, from North Ambrym, joined the fieldworker group in 1997. Lucy was born in 1942, during World War II. Her father was forcibly recruited to work for the Allies before she was born, and her mother died when she was very small. To her bitter regret, there wasn’t enough money in the family to pay school fees for all the children, and so, as a girl, she was only educated to the fifth class at the village school. She felt this keenly, recalling that when the others went to school she felt so bad she used to go out of the village each day, to the bush or down to the sea. Eventually, she left altogether, taking the opportunity to follow her aunt to the nearby island of Malakula. Her aunt had been educated at the French school in the capital, Port Vila, had found work as a domestic servant, and had then become the mistress of a Frenchman who subsequently took up a plantation on Malakula. Lucy worked for them as a domestic servant, a ‘housegirl’, the most common employment young women could find, staying with them for some years. Eventually she returned to Ambrym, married and settled down to village life.
The decade leading to independence, the 1970s, was a decade of considerable ferment throughout Vanuatu, but particularly on Ambrym, Lucy’s home island. Willie Bongmatur Maldo, who became the first chairman of the Vanuatu Council of Chiefs, also came from North Ambrym, although his right to his role as chief was strongly disputed on Ambrym itself (Bolton 1998). Lucy joined the New Hebrides National Party, which ultimately formed the first government after independence and with which Chief Willie was also connected. The participation of women in the independence movement, with a few notable exceptions, hardly rates a mention in accounts of this era, and women did not have any opportunity to take formal roles, or to contribute significantly to discussions about the formation of the new nation. After independence, the Vanuatu National Council of Women was founded. The council both acted as an umbrella organisation for existing women’s groups through Vanuatu, including church groups, and founded new rural women’s groups. Lucy became a member of the Ambrym branch of the organisation. Not long after the women fieldworkers’ network was founded, Lucy joined. A person of considerable energy and intelligence, her history is the history of someone looking for an outlet, a place to contribute.
Figure 13.1 Lucy Moses, Kaljoral Senta fieldworker from North Ambrym, 2002
© L. Bolton
Lucy is one of the older women in the women’s network. She has been most comfortable contributing to two workshops that have been held on historical themes – domestic service in the colonial era and mission dresses.1 In both cases she provided vivid and amusing reports about her own experiences and encounters (Moses n.d.). Although she makes reports on other workshop topics – on indigenous calendrical systems and gardening, for example – her keenest interest has always been directed to non-traditional or historical topics. Her particular contribution to the group has been to make the precolonial era vivid for other, younger women, and in her lively, wry sense of humour.
Ethnographic museums constantly struggle with the intersection of the ‘Western’ knowledge systems; the systems of record, organisation and classification that generated museums in the first place; and the indigenous knowledge systems that produced the objects displayed within them. Internationally, issues in the presentation and management of ethnographic material have become more complex as source communities (or ‘traditional owners’) have started, in the last two decades, to engage with ethnographic museums as holders of their cultural property. A whole new series of accommodations and modifications to the practice of ethnographic museums has developed from this. These developments have been widely discussed, especially in anthropology (see Clifford 1997; Peers and Brown 2003).
This situation is further complicated for museums established in postcolonial contexts. Using a Western model for the organisation of knowledge and objects these museums attempt to engage with and document local systems of knowledge and practice for a local audience, and sometimes find that engagement uphill work (Eoe 1991). On the whole, the Western academic project of museum anthropology has privileged male knowledge and practice, so that this situation is further complicated when local museums address women’s knowledge and practice.
When Jean Tarisesei and I organised the first women fieldworkers workshop in 1994, we adopted the model established by the men’s group, a model of research followed by seminar-style reporting and discussion. The first few workshops were challenging as the new fieldworkers got used to this approach. Every now and then a ni-Vanuatu-invited speaker at the workshop would comment to the women on the difficulty of merely sitting in a chair every day for 10 days: the fieldworkers always nodded in recognition. The workshops are set up to operate without recourse to writing – all the presentations are oral – but writing is becoming more important. As time has passed, more and more women have began to prepare their reports on paper, in notebooks issued to them by the VKS. Their knowledge of the kastom of their places is increasingly being presented in a written format – inherently alien to the material itself.
The fieldworker program is itself alien in this sense – objectifying knowledge and practice as something on which to act in new ways. Both men and women fieldworkers are unwilling to subject certain branches of knowledge and practice to this alien strategy of documentation. Subjects like traditional medicine, childbirth and origin narratives have all been withheld by the fieldworkers from the workshop process. Other topics are uncontroversial. The women’s network has discussed a range of topics from kinship terms and marriage rituals to baskets and cooking techniques, each fieldworker presenting the specific practices from her own area. Individual interest in these topics always varies. A woman whose reports on kin terms and marriage rituals were rather perfunctory may suddenly blossom in a workshop on traditional gardening techniques, and produce a detailed report.
The experience of the colonial era in Vanuatu varied considerably from island to island. Maewo, a long thin pencil of an island in north Vanuatu, was not much affected by expatriate settlement and did not even have an expatriate missionary stationed there. Indigenous knowledge and practice has continued there more vigorously than in some other places. Irene Lini, from Maewo, attended the first women fieldworkers workshop in 1994 and has from the first been an active and engaged fieldworker, quick to grasp the essential idea of both documenting and reviving kastom. With the moral support of another more elderly Maewo fieldworker, Rachel Boe, now retired, and the male fieldworker, Jeffrey Uliboe, Irene has revived the making of two important Maewo textiles, has reinvigorated the women’s status-alteration ritual, lengwasa, and has taken up and extended the use of indigenous medical knowledge. Using this knowledge, she now regularly delivers babies on Maewo, an island without significant medical facilities. She also encouraged the young men in her area to start a string band – a band with guitars and a miscellany of other sometimes homemade string instruments – to use in conjunction with kastom songs and dances. Instead of accompanying these with rattles, drums and the beating of feet upon the earth, the dances are now accompanied by the band. Irene’s comment is that young people are much more interested in this way of performing kastom.
Figure 13.2 Lengwasa ceremony, Maewo, organised by Irene Lini, 1997
© L. Bolton
Irene cannot read or write. She is an energetic and intelligent woman with children and grandchildren. With or without the fieldworker program, she would have been involved in the life of her community. But with the program, she has had the opportunity both to grasp the importance of kastom as the basis of community identity, and the opportunity to find ways in which to act on it. Her confidence in speaking publicly has grown and I suspect that she has also gained confidence in her own convictions. Her leadership abilities have been recognised by the community in which she lives and since she became a fieldworker she has become an advisor to the chief in her area, often asked by him to assist with dispute settlement. Her role as fieldworker enables her to access VKS resources, and to draw on them. In 1997, for example, she recruited National Film and Sound Unit staff to film a lengwasa ceremony; in 1999 she drew Women’s Culture Project staff to Maewo to hold a small workshop to assist in reviving traditional textiles. Irene’s contribution to the fieldworker workshops is also significant because, as the possessor of significant knowledge about cultural practice on Maewo, she enriched other fieldworkers’ understanding of each research topic.
If the colonial system favoured men, and produced a male-dominated national structure for the newly independent nation, then, another intellectual import, Western feminism, offered a model for overturning that structure. Grace Molisa was key figure in post-independence Vanuatu. Born and brought up on the island of Ambae, Grace subsequently studied at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, becoming the first ni-Vanuatu woman graduate. She returned to Vanuatu in the late 1970s to join the independence movement, working after 1980 as a political advisor and secretary to the first prime minister, Walter Lini. Although she was clearly influenced by feminism at university she later wrote that she had ‘no idea about discrimination’ until she began working in the prime minister’s office. Before then, she said, ‘as far as I was concerned, people were people and in every community and every family men and women worked together’ (Molisa 2002, 39). A tireless campaigner for women’s issues in Vanuatu until her death in 2002, her project was to bring women into the national public arena, and specifically into the urban male-dominated political elite. It was Grace who pressured the VKS to start a women fieldworkers’ group, and to acknowledge that women were equally possessors of kastom knowledge and practice with men.
The Vanuatu National Council of Women, which Grace helped to found in 1980, started as an umbrella organisation to assist and support rural women, but in the ensuing decades it has been increasingly politicised and detached from rural preoccupations. Influenced both by expatriate advisors and by participation in international women’s conferences such as the 4th World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, in 1996, the council increasingly formulates issues in terms alien to rural women. For example, the adoption of the international ‘rights’ discourse (women’s rights, children’s rights) makes little sense to people who hold to the indigenous notion of a right as something one purchases or acquires by ritual achievement. Other women’s organisations in rural areas are church groups, such as the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union, and groups associated with the government’s women’s affairs unit.
The fieldworker program does not have the kind of reach that these organisations have. Nevertheless, it provides some women with another way to think about and explore contemporary gender relationships. The problem is not so much the indigenous gender relations, which are still sustained to some extent in local contexts. Although arrangements vary significantly from place to place in indigenous Vanuatu, the point is that in small communities each relationship is determined by specific kinship proscriptions. Each relationship is determined by kinship norms that, for example, might make how a man behaves to his sister quite different from how he behaves to his father’s sister. ‘Western’ feminism, which identifies an opposition between all women and all men, only makes sense in larger groups, as at the national level in Vanuatu.
The emphasis on male authority at national level, however, has influenced gender relations at local levels: it legitimates the exclusion of women from some contexts and the creative revision of some kinship proscriptions at others. The Women’s Culture Project provides a counter discourse at national level, consistently demonstrating in national contexts the extent of women’s participation in kastom at local levels. It has also drawn national level attention to the essential contributions women make in rural contexts.
Tanni Frazer, from Uripiv, Malakula, joined the women fieldworkers’ group in 1995, at the second women fieldworkers workshop. She continued as an active member of the network until her death from bowel cancer in 2005, when she was probably in her late 30s. Tanni was an extremely unusual ni-Vanuatu woman in that she had decided she would never marry. Her mother had died when she was small, and she had been brought up by her father, to whom she was very devoted. She described this childhood as enabling her to act and think independently. At the workshop devoted to the history of women’s domestic service, she commented that she herself had never been willing to work as a housegirl, indeed that she was not willing to be a ‘slave’ to any man (Frazer n.d.). She was not antisocial in any broad sense; rather she was an active member of her community on Uripiv island.
Figure 13.3 Tanni Frazer, Kaljoral Senta Fieldworker from Uripiv, Malakula, 2000
© L. Bolton
It took Tanni no time at all to grasp the nature of the fieldworker project, and her interest in the work grew quickly. She recognised the importance both of documenting and promoting kastom and of preserving knowledge about Vanuatu’s colonial history. On Uripiv, she organised a workshop about traditional cooking techniques, taught kastom knowledge to classes at the local primary school, and researched many aspects of the kastom and history of her own area. Her research reports were consistently detailed and thorough. At the fieldworker workshops, she understood both the research questions and the reports, and she always asked insightful and pointed questions that extended the discussion and our understanding of the issues involved. She served the women fieldworkers group as executive secretary for most of her time in the group, and contributed both organisational ability and leadership to the network.
Although no researcher was based with her full-time, she provided assistance and hospitality to a number of VKS research projects, for example, the project looking at women’s use of marine resources. Several times Jean Tarisesei asked Tanni if she would host expatriate visitors working with the VKS (helping with the museum, for example), to give them some insight into rural life, and she was always willing to do so.
Alongside her involvement with the VKS, Tanni was very involved in the Presbyterian Church, seeing it as important to be active in both arenas. She was never discouraged by the potential difficulty of any task. Kate Holmes, who ran the marine resource project, commented that if the VKS had suggested that it would be good to try and build a rocket ship, Tanni would have gone back to Uripiv and started to draw up the plans: she was willing to take on anything. The fieldworker program gave her an outlet for her energies, and a legitimising position.2 It gave her a way of being a non-traditional woman who nevertheless valued kastom highly.
Especially when they start work, a number of women fieldworkers experience considerable opposition from their communities. Their agency is not recognised by those around them, or it is opposed for personal and political reasons. This opposition can be very intense, and it is not unknown for a woman to cry as she reports to the workshop on the difficulties she has encountered in the previous year. In some cases this opposition comes from a conviction that kastom is history and that communities must move forward. Sometimes it results from longstanding acrimony between families or villages or from jealousy that in becoming a fieldworker a woman has gained access to resources or opportunities denied to others. The workshops always allow time for discussion of how to handle these problems. Jean Tarisesei supports fieldworkers during the year, and takes opportunities where she has them to visit fieldworkers. She believes in facing such problems head on, and during these visits always convenes a community meeting at which such issues can be aired.
The fact that the fieldworkers are not paid, but work for free, is crucial to the survival of the project, as is the fieldworkers’ personal conduct. Like Tanni, Roselyn Garae, the fieldworker from east Ambae and first chairperson of the women fieldworkers’ group, places considerable emphasis on the importance of community participation. Women who are supportive of their communities in several arenas are often more accepted as fieldworkers. Roselyn is always urging the importance of appearing at every community event and occasion – participating in church activities, supporting the local primary school, helping in community work projects and so forth. Fieldworkers are also helped by what they can bring to the community. Bringing a film crew to document a ceremony or festival, putting people’s voices on the VKS radio program and organising a small local workshop are all strategies that establish a woman’s identity as a fieldworker. Roselyn is also a strong advocate for regional responsibilities. She and quite a few other fieldworkers take time to visit adjacent villages around their district each year. In each place they report on the last workshop they attended and talk about the research topic for the next year. Rural transport is very expensive and, far from being paid, they often invest their own resources into such tours.
Numaline Mahana, one of the fieldworkers on Tanna in south Vanuatu and currently chairperson of the women’s group, is one of the best educated women fieldworkers. After attending the British Secondary School, she worked for the British sector of the Condominium Government before independence and for various sectors of the Vanuatu Government afterwards, mostly as a secretarial assistant. She worked for the VKS briefly in the late 1990s, but she and her husband are now mainly based on Tanna. Numaline is a major contributor to the fieldworker workshops, always ready to ask a question or raise an issue in discussion, and her questions are often acute. A good speech writer, she has often assisted those women fieldworkers making speeches, for example, to workshop funders such as the Australian High Commissioner or Vanuatu government officials.
Some community leaders are more willing to grant women agency than others: women fieldworkers have devised a number of strategies for working with, or around, this kind of opposition. As is the case for a number of fieldworkers, Numaline’s husband is very supportive of her work and assists her with it. If Numaline, in researching a particular topic, comes up against leaders who are not willing to assist, her husband is willing to step in and do the research for her. Numaline is not disrespectful of male authority, but she has no time for those who obstruct legitimate research. She is explicit about the importance of research. At the workshop about domestic service in 2001 she commented, ‘what interests me so much about fieldworker research is that the more you do, the more you find that the work is without end, it goes on and on’ (Mahana n.d.).
Numaline is also explicit about the importance of applying research results. Currently, a lot of her energies are devoted to programs to promote indigenous food and cooking. Trade stores through the islands sell rice, tinned meat, pot noodles, biscuits and jam, and, ironically, in some places these are becoming preferred foodstuffs. In the past indigenous food preparation across Vanuatu utilised a diverse range of recipes, many of which are now being forgotten. In 2005 Numaline initiated a project to teach such recipes to people in her district. At the following workshop she reported with real pleasure on the young men who commented to her that eating the food she was teaching them to prepare gave them far more energy than their normal diet – power they put to good use on the football field. Even so, she has had a hard time getting this food program going in Tanna, and uses a number of inducements to get people to come to her workshops, including giving gifts, such as gardening tools, to participants. The VKS has arranged to assist her with a small grant to support this program.
Numaline Mahana’s food project highlights another aspect of the fieldworker program, an aspect crucial to the work of the VKS as defined by Ralph Regenvanu – that is, that kastom should be the basis of contemporary development. Rather than drawing on models from overseas, Regenvanu believes in taking the systems that have operated in the archipelago for centuries and adapting them to contemporary conditions. The fieldworkers’ research provides some of the materials on which this can be based. Regenvanu recognises the extent to which the education system undermines individual self-respect, both in teaching only introduced subjects, and in presenting the prospect of future employment, which is very often not fulfilled (Regenvanu 2003). He is also concerned to build identity and self-respect among ni-Vanuatu. Both major programs such as the development of the national history curriculum for secondary schools and small projects such as Numaline’s food project achieve these objectives.
VKS agency, especially the personal agency of VKS fieldworkers, is always transformative. By documenting kastom, fieldworkers transform it, objectifying it as knowledge and often modifying practices so that they can be continued in contemporary settings. VKS programs are intended to be effective. Both the fieldworkers in their own districts and the VKS at the national level are transforming that which is their own: their own knowledge, their own practice, their own social arrangements. In acknowledging and making use of the agency that a cultural institution can have, and giving that agency a personal impetus, the VKS is more and more powerfully influential in Vanuatu.
1 These workshops were additional to the main workshop program, and were attended only by fieldworkers who expressed interest in the topic. The workshop on domestic service was organised in collaboration with Margaret Rodman, and held in 2001. Two workshops on mission dresses arose out of fieldworker interest in my research on mission dresses (known as island dresses) and were held in 2001 and 2002 respectively.
2 This comment by Kate Holmes in 2004 was the starting point for this paper. I acknowledge her insight with thanks.
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Cite this chapter as: Bolton, Lissant. 2006. ‘The museum as cultural agent: The Vanuatu Cultural Centre extension worker program’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 13.1–13.13.
© Copyright 2006 Lissant Bolton
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