Intimations of Infinity by Jadran Mimica

Author:Jadran Mimica [Mimica, Jadran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mathematics, Number Systems, Social Science, Anthropology, General, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9781000323009
Google: pPj3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-08-18T05:03:26+00:00

Chapter 6

Iqwaye Counting, the Mathematical Infinite and the Problem of the Understanding of Other Mathematical Realities

The foregoing discussion of the reality of the infinite in the Iqwaye cultural life-world has also amplified the general character of their view of the cosmos, namely its profound anthropocentricity. For the Iqwaye man is the ontological yardstick of reality, its alpha and omega. Reflecting back upon their counting system we can now clearly see that it is inextricably bound to the grand vision of the cosmic life processes and the human ‘ontological situation’ (Eliade 1954) in the cosmos. The Iqwaye counting system appears as a microcosmic metaphor of the cosmic process, but it is a metaphor the meanings of which are neutralised by the very objectivity of that system. That is, its meanings are fully sedimented so that they exist solely as a particular operational form — a mere calculation technique. It is almost like a dead metaphor. Therefore, when one counts, one doesn’t recount the cosmology but carries out more unassuming cognitive operations which, however, historically became constituted and thus symbolised within the purview of the mythopoeic consciousness. It was only by the recourse to mythopoeia, that is through the enactment of the strata of this consciousness, that we revived the meanings through which the counting system emerged as a formalised schema, a method for numbering of things in the world.

Every Iqwaye, like any of us, is heir to the long historical tradition evidenced by the cultural products such as a counting system and the whole cultural world as an objectively existing external world. In learning to count the Iqwaye child tacitly learns to think of, and to act upon, his/her body as an abstract schema and thus to relate it to other objects in the world whereby they become enumerated. But in a cosmological sense, Iqwaye enumeration can be seen as a projection of human identity into the world. Different things can be expressed as same numbers — n of this or n of that — not simply because they all are cognised as the different instances of the same abstraction, an n cardinal number as a cognitive entity sui generis. Rather, from within the Iqwaye universe it may be said that all things partake of the same ontological universality — the cosmic genus Man — and it is this fundamental homogeneity of all things that permits of binding of different multiplicities of things to the same numbers, as they are articulated in the numerical series.

This interpretation faithfully situates itself within the Iqwaye meanings of the world. Of course, it would be easy to interpret their counting in terms of our sophisticated logical cum developmental, psychological concepts of number and cognitive schemata through which this category is constituted. But to give this conceptual system some kind of explanatory priority would really mean to trivialise the authentic meanings of number in the Iqwaye culture. Yet the question is how shall the Iqwaye category of number be understood in relation to our own intellectually belaboured concept of number (e.

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