Abstract
In 1967 a book was published which stimulated a great deal of research and development. The New Mathematics and an Old Culture (Gay and Cole, 1967) reported research undertaken in Liberia by an American team of researchers who were intrigued about the difficulties experienced by the young Kpelle pupils in handling the concepts and processes demanded by ‘the new mathematics’ in their ‘Westernised’ schools. The motive grew to try to understand more about the indigenous mathematics of the Kpelle — and to this end the researchers devised many experiments and ran many interviews to find out about the Kpelle’s use of classifications, numbers, operations, geometry, measurements, spatial language and logic.
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Notes
See Lean, G.A.: Counting Systems of Papua New Guinea in the references. Lancy’s original typology of counting systems is now no longer adequate for classifying purposes, according to Lean.
See, for example, Kozminsky, 1985, for an introduction to various numerological ideas.
See for example, Michell, 1977, Pennick (1979) and Critchlow, 1979, for some of the documentation.
It is no accident that another profound book about shape by Doczi (1981) is called The Power of Limits and is written by an architect.
See, for example, Falkener (1961) for an excellent coverage of games and magic squares.
This, of course, is similar to the notion of Yin and Yang in ancient Chinese writing. See Ronan (1981) for more details.
A similar kind of analysis has been undertaken by Saunders MacLane in his 1981 paper in the American Mathematical Monthly.
Freudenthal has reminded me, however, that the ‘quadrivium of the mathematical arts’ in the ancient Pythagorean tradition was composed of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy (Freudenthal, 1973, p. 80). They were the ‘original’ four mathematics, in the plural. The more relevant construct for the ideas in this chapter is ‘ethnomathematics’ (d’Ambrosio, 1985b).
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© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Bishop, A.J. (1991). Environmental Activities and Mathematical Culture. In: Mathematical Enculturation. Mathematics Education Library, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2657-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2657-8_2
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