Collaborating in the Compilation of the Satawalese Cultural Dictionary: Thirty Years of a Dictionary Project Initiated by Cultural Anthropologists

A dictionary of the Satawalese language is currently being compiled at Japan's National Museum of Ethnology. Its main data are cultural terms recorded by a team of three Japanese cultural anthropologists who stayed on Satawal, an island in Micronesia, for two separate periods in 1978-1980. Various factors hindered progress on the work for two decades, and the original materials were never published. This paper describes part of the "rise and fall, and rise again" of the Satawalese Dictionary Project.