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Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University Anthropologists are seeing numbers in the present social world as labile, ambiguous, containing moral remainders, numerological rather than arithmetical and altogether more inventive than theories of modernist convergence can readily account for. Such creative social numbers pervade economic exchange and accounting mnemonics, world lottery and casino practices, equivalences in legal culpability and calculation of cosmic debt. Calculations can undergird and justify rank order. And conversely, devotional qualities in religious life may open up new areas of mathematics. This conference will address number in quotidian social life and thought through the three concepts in our title: Equivalence, Accounting and Calculation. While not necessarily exclusive of the concepts we address, these three provide an opening to consider examples and analyses that span anthropology’s classic subfields together with its emergent concern with how elements erupt, are cultivated and circulate across the domains of social life.
Internal Funding: Johns Hopkins Evolution, Cognition and Culture Project (funded by the Metanexus Institute, John Templeton Foundation and Krieger School of Arts and Sciences) http://numberasinventivefrontier.blogspot.com/ |
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