Description:
Luo in Western Kenya treat different amounts of money as if they were the same size. This points to an understanding of quantity for which a part of a set can have the same size as the set itself. Parts do not result in a whole, as it were additively, but in a part and the whole can be set in a recursive step as equal subsets of a third, imaginary remaining set. This scale invariant understanding of quantities is also reflected in the interpretation of election results, investment strategies and risk calculations. However, in other situations, e.g. in school mathematics classes, an additive understanding of quantities is applied, i.e. one based on the assumption that quantities follow each other. This difference indicates a qualitative breakdown of the quantitative.
In view of its central central question, which connections exist between the structure of luosociality and the cognitive and cultural classification of money supply and quantities in general, the research project aims to examine more closely those ethnographic moments in which breaks between a recursive and an additive approach to quantities become visible. The ethnographic method of participating observation will be complemented by economic game experiments and cognitive tests. In the continuous recourse to ethnographic data, this will contribute to clarifying the overarching question of whether the structure of cognitive processes can rather be mapped by a recursive or an additive approach to quantities or whether the cognitive abilities of humans are not neutral with respect to this question, i.e. whether the change between the two as well as the emphasis of an approach do not have purely cultural reasons.
In a second step, the results thus obtained will be recursively transferred to a discussion of the theoretical history of ethnology. Ethnology often sees itself as a social science of the qualitative. Nevertheless, approaches can be found within the history of anthropology that consciously attempt to make quantitative data usable. Just think of Meyer Fortes' obsessive use of statistical data, Edmund Leach's interest in formal mathematics and abstraction, formalist work within economic ethnology, colonial ethnological statistics, some new work on the connection between ethnology and chaos theory, and a regained interest in ethnomathematics.
The main aim of this part of the project is to uncover the various understandings of quantity underlying these strands of research. What, then one could summarize the main question of this part of the project, would remain of it if ethnology abandoned its founding myth of being a qualitative science and understood itself as quantitative science?
Support: DFG
Duration: 2019 - 2022
