Marshall Island Stick Charts and Embodied Mathematics

There were two things I found most interesting about the article on the Marshall Island stick charts. The first was how detailed and ingenious the charts were, and how skilled the navigators were who used them. It’s a testament to human adaptability and intellect that the Marshallese people were able to use their observations of their environment to discover scientific facts about wave refraction, reflection, and interference, and to put this knowledge to work navigating their environment. I was particularly struck by the section which described how navigators would train lying in different parts of the water around their atolls in order to get a kinaesthetic sense for the structures on their mattang (stick charts mapping wave interactions with other waves and landmasses), and have such a fine-tuned awareness of the feeling of the waves that they could determine where they were on their mattang just by lying in the bottom of their boats and feeling the waves. 

I was also surprised that they developed these extremely detailed charts despite not having any written language. In my mind, language and maps/charts went hand-in-hand as visual representations of ideas, and it surprised me that the Marshallese had one but not the other. I guess it goes to show that perhaps mapping and written language are fundamentally different from each-other, and that a culture with strong need for one but not the other might develop them independently.

I don’t think it would be a huge stretch to say that mathematics, like many fields of human intellectual endeavour, had its origins, in most cultures, in real-world scenarios and problems. From the sea navigation of the Marshallese to the land surveying and accounting of the Babylonians, mathematics (and science) arose, partially or completely, in response to concrete problems in a particular context. This is in contrast to how math is taught today, as an abstract, oft-decontextualized opus of pure thought and reasoning. 

I think there are a few benefits of embodied mathematics, which I will discuss briefly here. First, I think that including embodied mathematics makes the learning diet of mathematics students more rich. Even without thinking of any of the particular benefits of embodied mathematics, variety and novelty will benefit students and help them remain engaged. Second, and I think research backs this up, embodied mathematics, and multimodal learning generally, increases comprehension. Though I want to be careful about not attributing this to the concept of ‘learning styles’ (which, I think, has been either debunked or highly contested at this point), it makes sense that the same student, learning something through multiple pathways (visual, kinesthetic, auditory, alone, in collaboration, etc.), will have better retention and understanding of a concept than if they only learn a concept in a single way. 


Asher, M. (1995). Models and Maps from the Marshal Islands: A Case in Ethnomathematics. Historia Mathematica, vol. 22, pp. 347 –370. 

  


Comments

  1. Amanda FritzlanDecember 19, 2022 at 2:47 PM

    I agree that the practice of developing a kinaesthetic sense for the water movement around the atolls that make up the Marshall Islands is fascinating. It makes me think of the fact that most of us could probably walk around our familiar homes in the dark or blindfolded and not bump into the furniture. Your points about mapping without language are intriguing. When would mapping become a language?

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