Description

Geoffrey Saxe traces the emergence of numerical representations and ideas as people participate in collective practices of daily life. Through an ethnographic study of a Papua New Guinea cultural group, Geoffrey Saxe traces the emergence of numerical representations and ideas as people participate in collective practices of daily life. His findings will be useful for understanding shifting representational forms and emerging cognitive functions in any human community. Through an ethnographic study of a Papua New Guinea cultural group, Geoffrey Saxe traces the emergence of numerical representations and ideas as people participate in collective practices of daily life. His findings will be useful for understanding shifting representational forms and emerging cognitive functions in any human community. Drawing upon field studies conducted in 1978, 1980 and 2001 with the Oksapmin, a remote Papua New Guinea group, Geoffrey B. Saxe traces the emergence of new forms of numerical representations and ideas in the social history of the community. In traditional life, the Oksapmin used a counting system that makes use of twenty-seven parts of the body; there is no evidence that the group used arithmetic in prehistory. As practices of economic exchange and schooling have shifted, children and adults unwittingly reproduced and altered the system in order to solve new kinds of numerical and arithmetical problems, a process that has led to new forms of collective representations in the community. While Dr Saxe's focus is on the Oksapmin, the insights and general framework he provides are useful for understanding shifting representational forms and emerging cognitive functions in any human community. Introduction; Part I. The Origins of Number-Enduring Questions: 1. Culture-cognition relations; 2. Cultural forms of number representation used in Oksapmin communities; Part II. Economic Exchange: 3. Collective practices of economic exchange: a brief social history; 4. Reproduction and alteration of numerical representations; 5. Reproduction and alteration in currency token representations; 6. Representational forms, functions, collective practices, and fu: a microcosm; Part III. Schooling: 7. A brief history: collective practices of schooling in Oksapmin; 8. Unschooled children's developing uses of the body system; 9. Children's adaptations of the body system in school in 1980: an unintended consequence of postcolonial schooling; 10. About twenty years later: schooling and number; 11. Teachers and students as (unintentional) agents of change; Part IV. Towards an Integrated Treatment of Socio-Historical and Cognitive Developmental Processes: 12. What develops? A focus on form-function relations; 13. How do quantification practices develop?; 14. Why do form-function relations shift?; Epilogue. 'Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed that 'small facts speak to large issues' … In many ways, Geoffrey Saxe's new book echoes the Geertz quote. By gathering together the many small facts of numerical reasoning practices he has collected over a thirty-year period in a community in the Oksapmin region of Papua New Guinea, Saxe has assembled a dynamic documentary report of answers to the question: how are culture and cognition related? … At the end of this book, Saxe returns us to the Geertz quote … by suggesting that this culmination of thirty years of field work in Oksapmin mathematics makes three distinct contributions to the literature: thick description