Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide - Softcover

Nelson, Diane M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822360055 ISBN 13: 9780822360056

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2015

Synopsis

In Who Counts? Diane M. Nelson explores the social life of numbers, teasing out the myriad roles math plays in Guatemalan state violence, economic exploitation, and disenfranchisement, as well as in Mayan revitalization and grassroots environmental struggles. In the aftermath of thirty-six years of civil war, to count—both numerically and in the sense of having value—is a contested and qualitative practice of complex calculations encompassing war losses, migration, debt, and competing understandings of progress. Nelson makes broad connections among seemingly divergent phenomena, such as debates over reparations for genocide victims, Ponzi schemes, and antimining movements. Challenging the presumed objectivity of Western mathematics, Nelson shows how it flattens social complexity and becomes a raced, classed, and gendered skill that colonial powers considered beyond the grasp of indigenous peoples. Yet the Classic Maya are famous for the precision of their mathematics, including conceptualizing zero long before Europeans. Nelson shows how Guatemala's indigenous population is increasingly returning to Mayan numeracy to critique systemic inequalities with the goal of being counted—in every sense of the word. 

 

About this title

About the Author

Diane M. Nelson is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and the author of A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala; she is also the author of Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala and coeditor of War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala, both also published by Duke University Press.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Who Counts?

The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide

By Diane M. Nelson

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6005-6

Contents

Preface, 
-1 Chapter Minus One, 
Part I. When You Count You Begin with 1, 2, 3, 
0 Bookkeeping, 
1 Before and After-Math, 
Part II. Bonesetting, 
2 The Algebra of Genocide, 
3 Reunion of Broken Parts, 
Part III. Mayan Pyramids, 
4 100% Omnilife, 
5 Mayan Pyramid (Scheme), 
Part IV. YES to Life = NO to Mining, 
6 A Life's Worth, 
7 Beyond Adequacy, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

### THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT NUMBERS ###

It will tell you interesting facts about many simple, ordinary things like counting, money, bones, equivalence, vitamins, pyramids, mines, conjuring, and light. ###

Politics, logic and mathematics are inseparable.

— Helen Verran

In the ornate, brightly lit women's bathroom of the luxury Camino Real hotel in Guatemala City, Santos, a Maya-K'iche' woman, was surrounded. The mostly nonindigenous women crowded around were practically fawning, laughing, asking advice, touching her arm, sharing stories. "Tell us about your trip. What was it like? Is the boat as wonderful as they say?" "How do you do it? How did you win two cars?" It was hard for her to even use the facilities. A woman asked if I were part of Santos's Red, or network, then sighed, "!Dichosa! You are so lucky! She is a wonderful sponsor! So generous!"

Santos had left Joyabaj, El Quiché, at 3 AM in a rented minibus with eleven members of her Red to get to the Camino Real in time for the first day of the Omnilife Basic Course. "Usually the managers at an elegant place like this wouldn't accept people like us," she said as we walked in, gesturing to her traje, distinctive clothing identifying her as indigenous. "But Omnilife treats everyone the same." The basic course meets one weekend a month for five months and aims at self-improvement through exploring gender and other "creencias" (beliefs) via Oprah Winfrey–like discussions and audience participation. Omnilife is a Mexico-based direct-sales vitamin business, and Santos was popular in the restroom because of her personal charisma and generous nature and also because she had mastered the enterprise's multiple scales of counting and associated conversion techniques so skillfully that she had won two cars and several overseas trips, including a Mediterranean cruise. They helped make a poor rural woman "like her" feel "accepted" — like she counted — at a "place like this."

Returning to the glittering ballroom where over 1,000 women were gathered (with a similar number of men next door), we went to work under the gentle but insistent guidance of the course's psychologist-leader. Most women were concerned with home life, unfaithful husbands, wayward children, difficulties making ends meet. But one day, during the fifth month, a member of Santos'sRed went on stage. Sebastiana is also Maya-K'iche', from Joyabaj's neighboring town of Zacualpa, and, like Santos, involved in Mayan revitalization projects. Addressing the weekend's theme of "lack and abundance," she recounted how the army had tortured and murdered her father in the early 1980s. They burned her house, sending her, a little girl, fleeing with her mother and the younger children into the mountains, where they starved for months. The course leader took it in stride, but everyone around me was crying by the time she finished

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822360055
• ISBN 13: 9780822360056
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328