Vanuatu Sandroing

Sandroings are used for many things, including communicating ideas, leaving messages, telling stories, teaching concepts, and in sorcery or magic. Sandroings have developed not only as a form of communication and symbolic exchange, but also as a sophisticated means of symbolising and recording the rituals and mythologies of distinct language groups.

Even though the historical circumstances of Vanuatu have changed during the processes of colonization and post-colonial national “development”, sandroing continues to function as a form of both cultural exchange and cultural distinction. Different communities within the central islands still practice particular styles of sandroing in association with stories and songs that are locally specific. In fact, these designs are important devices for recalling oral information about local histories, indigenous cosmologies, kinship systems, scientific knowledge, and choreographic patterns, which have been threatened by modern education.

For anthropologists Deacon and John Layard in the early 20th century, the cultural significance of sandroing was confirmed by their use in ensuring a safe passage to the land of ancestral spirits. These sacred varieties of sandroing must be committed to memory and subsequently used as a type of password when a dead person’s spirit is moving on to the next life. The nature of this journey varies from area to area, but in most cosmologies from this region the spirit encounters a half completed sandroing on the path. If the spirit is able to finish the design it is allowed to continue, but if it fails this test it will be devoured by a “devil” or prevented from entering “paradise”.