Vanuatu sand drawing (History and meaning, usefulness of the intangible heritage concept)

Throughout the northern and central islands ofVanuatu, a range of different communities engagesin a practice which has come to be known as ‘sanddrawing’. This unique tradition essentially involvestracing geometric figures in dust, sand or ashes.Each design is considered to be a type of maze, andthe line of the drawing is traced as a largelyuninterrupted path, often without lifting the fingerfrom the ground. To give credit to the intellectualsophistication of this practice, it is perhaps moreaccurate to describe sand drawing as an indigenousform of ‘writing’, rather than ‘drawing’. In fact, theindigenous words for sand drawing (uli,naites,nitu ̈s,ghir,rolu,nana,ulan, etc.) are the samewords used to describe European writing. In thisrespect, it is important to realize that sanddrawings are much more than simple pictures ordecorative patterns.