In practice, the principal role of the Vanuatu Cultural Center since its establishment in the early 1960s has been to document and record the culture and cultural history of Vanuatu. This has been done by the Cultural Center staff and a network of approximately 80 volunteer fieldworkers throughout the islands of Vanuatu. The main focus of documentation efforts are details of remembered histories and traditions (the latter are also called legends), details of ritual practices, classification systems and languages, details of cultural landscapes and particularly sites of cultural significance, and records of contemporary events of historical and cultural significance. The latter (which is essentially history-in-the-making) is recorded on video, examples of (usually ritual) material culture are collected for museological display, but almost everything else is documented on audio-tape. This is because all our indigenous cultures are oral and therefore all our cultural knowledge is retained and transmitted orally. This documented knowledge is held by the Cultural Center and has been used as source material for the revival of certain traditional cultural practices no longer being practiced.
All are volunteers, none receive wages, and their numbers grow each year.
In fact the Cultural Center in the capital is the tip of a hidden pyramid - most of its activities are in the outer islands of Vanuatu, with living people and cultures. The Cultural Center's 55 men fieldworkers (the network began with two fieldworkers at the end of 1977) and 25 women fieldworkers (who held their first annual meeting at the Cultural Center in 1994 under the guidance of the recently-established Women's Culture Project), are each based in their own linguistic and cultural areas in the outer islands, and document the culture and the history of their own and neighbouring areas. All are volunteers, none receive wages, and their numbers grow each year. There are two annual Fieldworker Workshops for both men and women, to enable the fieldworkers to improve their skills in preserving their cultural identity and customs.
Faced with the need to record and store indigenous knowledge which in practice is controlled by strict access and transmission procedures, the Cultural Center has developed a system which, to the extent that is possible, respects these maxims. When knowledge is recorded on audio-tape by fieldworkers, it is made clear at this stage what portions of the oral narrative are restricted, and to whom. As fieldworkers are from the same language group if not kin group as the informant, there is a much greater possibility that the informant will be made fully aware of what such documentation entails and that they, in turn, will be willing to divulge certain knowledge that they have. Having a local doing this documentation work has proved to be an invaluable asset to the success of our program to preserve cultural knowledge.
The fieldworkers continue as well with a long term project of eventually producing dictionaries of their own languages, local ethnographies of their own cultures, and transcriptions of selected non-taboo myths, legends and histories for potential use in the education system. Regular radio programs are also produced in Bislama based upon non-taboo selections from the audio collections (see National Film and Sound Unit).
Only the persons identified by the informant as having the right to access this material are allowed access to it once in storage at the Cultural Center. In some cases, these access restrictions extend even to the Cultural Center staff, who then become responsible for curating audio cassettes which they cannot listen to. A secured room within the Cultural Centre building is the “Tabu Room”: here all material with some degree of restriction on it is stored. There are different sections for each island group, and the records of women’s knowledge are kept separate from the men in recognition of the fact that there exists an almost ubiquitous separation between the ritual realms of women and men in all the cultures of Vanuatu. Often people come into the Centre and listen to material recorded by their deceased kin, once their right to access is verified. In this way some part of the tradition of the oral transmission of knowledge is continued and, moreover, the opportunity is afforded for a kin group to learn its own traditions even though this opportunity had been foregone while the possessor of the knowledge was still alive. The Cultural Centre is now embarking upon a program to make some of the unrestricted cultural information stored on audio tape available to members of the general public in the form of books and published audio cassettes, with a primary target group being school children.
