Introduction

Abstract

The first chapter (Introduction) starts with the question of why historians and philosophers of mathematics have long left out small-scale societies (often of oral tradition) from their fields of study. The intellectual/philosophical context of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century has very likely been a major barrier to the study of mathematical practices in these societies. Since the 1920s, a large number of data collected in various “traditional societies” attest however that a form of rationality occurs within different practices in these societies. It is through the analysis of such ethnographical data that the last decades have seen the development of a new interdisciplinary field of research called ethnomathematics, which aims to study cultural variations in mathematics. This introductory chapter explains why the present study is conceived as a contribution to a renewed perspective of ethnomathematics. Using methods borrowed from anthropology, mathematics, and both history and philosophy of science, this book addresses the epistemological issue of recognizing an activity as mathematical when it is not identified as such by those who practice it. This chapter ends by introducing the procedural activity of ”string figure-making” on which the latter issue is tackled throughout the volume.