Anthropology theory seminar: The Anthropology of Measures and Numbers

Kuvaus

Numbers “belong” to mathematics, statistics, engineering, and other exact disciplines. Anthropology, on the other hand, has regarded numbers, at best, as a curiosity (“the number frontier”) and at worst as a realm of universalist implications so fundamentally opposed to anthropology as to make numbers a no-go zone. In this course, we look at numbers, measuring, and quantification as something that people everywhere practise – something that can be studied ethnographically. The aim of the course is to provide ideas and tools for better understanding just what it is that numbers do for us and how they contribute to the worlds we inhabit. Course reading will cover a broad range of material from 21st-century bureaucracy to 19th-century trade goods, or from socio-cultural anthropology to science studies and political economy, in order to provide a comparative anthropological view of quantity-making as thoroughly embedded in social life.

Aikajakso	3 syysk. 2024 → 17 lokak. 2024