Big Wok: The Vanuatu Cultural Centre’s World War Two Ethnohistory Project (original) (raw)

By the 1980s, it was clear that the generation of older ni-Vanuatu that had experienced the remarkable and sometimes traumatic events of the Pacific War was passing away. Sponsored by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VCC), with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, VCC fieldworkers between 1987 and 1989 interviewed more than 125 men and women who had lived through the war years in Vanuatu (1942–1946). Coordinated by James Gwero and Lamont Lindstrom, the project attempted to locate and interview throughout Vanuatu men and women with stories to tell.1 A selection of these recorded accounts subsequently appeared in a book Big Wok: Storian blong Wol Wo Tu long Vanuatu, published entirely in Bislama (Lindstrom and Gwero 1998; for a second collection of war history in Vanuatu, see Moon and Moon 1998). The project also produced a weekly program for Radio Vanuatu in late 1988 and early 1989. The project’s upcoming twentiet...