A non-Christian mathematics. Unstable sets in Indigenous Amazonia

Date
Fri January 24th 2020, 3:30pm
Location
Department of Anthropology
Main Quad - Building 50
Room 51A (Colloquium Room)
Presenter:  Aparecida Vilaça
Professor of Social Anthropology, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and Tinker Visiting Professor, Stanford University

In the Amazonian literature, the scarcity of numerical terms and lack of interest in counting, which characterize diverse indigenous groups in the region, are usually associated with linguistic issues or cultural limitations. My purpose in this paper is to take a different approach and relate the enumeration processes of one of these peoples, the Wari', to the perspectivism that traditionally organized their perceptual world. My hypothesis is that the qualitative indefinition of this universe, where subjects and objects change their forms and affects according to the relational context, has implications for the quantitative instability of the sets that could be counted.