Sand drawings from Vanuatu: an interdisciplinary approach (anthropology / ethnomathematics / linguistics)

In the 1980s, American mathematician Marcia Ascher analyzed, from an ethnomathematical perspective, the corpus of sand drawings collected by British anthropologists John Layard (1942) and A. Bernard Deacon (1934), bringing to light the “mathematical ideas” involved in this practice (Ascher, 1988, 1991).

Concomitantly, sand drawings were analyzed by other researchers as a traditional graphic art with—in the societies concerned—a mnemonic dimension involved in the recollection of ritual, mythological and/or environmental knowledge (Huffman 1996, Gell 1998, Zagala 2004, Rio 2005...).

In the 2000s, under the “Centre Culturel de Vanuatu” ’s impulse, the practice of sand drawing was revitalized through various cultural and educational projects (Hinge 2008, VKS 2009...). As a result of this effort, in 2008, the practice of sand drawing was added to the UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Over the past decade, new research projects have been devoted to the practice of sand drawing through different disciplinary perspectives, including those of the anthropology of memory (Baron, 2020), linguistic and cognitive anthropology (Franjieh 2018, Devylder 2022), and ethnomathematics (Da Silva 2022, Vandendriessche & Da Silva 2022, Vandendriessche 2022).

This workshop’s goal will be to :

faire un état des lieux de ces recherches récentes et de nouvelles avancées
croiser plus loin différentes approches disciplinaires dans la perspective d’enrichir notre compréhension des aspects culturels et cognitifs de la pratique des dessins sur le sable de Vanuatu.

Enfin, ces journées d’étude offriront une opportunité de poursuivre la réflexion épistémologique sur la façon dont les dessins sur le sable constituent dans ces sociétés vanuataises un mode d’organisation et de transmission de savoirs mythologiques, cosmologiques, sociologiques, ou géographiques, impliquant l’usage de concepts mathématiques.