Paper short abstract:

Sand-drawing is an evanescent art-form composed by the movement of a finger through sand. The most enduring qualities of this craft are the persons who recall them in moments of revelation, that evoke the lives of their ancestors while weaving their own existence inextricably into these designs.

Paper long abstract:

Sand-drawing (tisien eni atan) on Paama, Vanuatu, is an evanescent, geometric art-form composed by a single, continuous movement of a finger through sand or ash. Once executed, these figures are wiped away almost as soon as they find form. Indeed, the most enduring qualities of this craft are the persons who recall them in moments of revelation - at once evoking the lives of their ancestors while simultaneously weaving their own existence inextricably into these designs. Many examples of this art are very complex, requiring continual practice, lest the routes and turns through which they are fleetingly realised be lost to memory. Conventionally interpreted as clan 'knowledge' in anthropology, sand-drawing is more meaningful to young Paamese people for the way that it recalls time spent with the agnatic kin with whom they learned this craft. These days it is clear that the continuity of this skill has been broken. Many men claim to know nothing of it because of their absences from their kin during periods of labour migration during Vanuatu's colonial period. By the same token, boys given custodianship of this art form, by their grandfathers, often complain that the hustle and bustle of town life makes them forget how to correctly reproduce the figures. This paper considers the way in which the aesthetics of sand-drawing embody and express important qualities of Paamese sociality and the way in which these islanders experience its absence and its forgetting in a rapidly urbanising Pacific nation.