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

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Description

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, in addition to in Mayan revitalization and grassroots environmental struggles. Within the aftermath of thirty-six years of civil war, to count—both numerically and Within the sense of getting 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 sufferers, Ponzi schemes, and antimining movements. Challenging the presumed objectivity of Western mathematics, Nelson shows the way it flattens social complexity and becomes a raced, classed, and gendered skill that colonial powers regarded as beyond the snatch of indigenous peoples. Yet the Classic Maya are famous for the precision in their mathematics, including conceptualizing zero long before Europeans. Nelson shows how Guatemala’s indigenous population is an increasing number of returning to Mayan numeracy to critique systemic inequalities with the goal of being counted—in each sense of the word. 
 
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