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Notes
On his early trip, Saxe was accompanied, among others, by Maryl Gearhart, who later became his companion in life. His other research and travel companions, each of whom participated in one trip, were Tom Moylan and Virginia Guilford, at that time graduate students working on their dissertations in anthropology, Indigo Esmonde, Saxe’s PhD student, and Josh Saxe, Geoff’s son.
It is beyond the scope of this review to present the details of this ingenious method. However, thanks to Saxe’s former work, the Oksapmin body-part counting is probably well known today to most mathematics educators. Those readers who would like to learn more about it even before reading this book are encouraged to watch the tale-telling clips at Saxe’s personal website.
The book has received awards from the Cognitive Development Society, from the American Psychological Association, and from the Society for Psychological Anthropology (American Anthropological Association).
It is only after completing this review that I learned about Saxe’s fourth visit to Oksapmin, which Saxe undertook earlier this year without waiting for my encouragement. In the light of this, he would now be able to either confirm or refute my prediction. To know which is true, let us wait for a sequel to his present book.
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Sfard, A. Book Review: When Oksapmin number system met Western arithmetic - Answering the question of how cognitive and cultural change induce each other.. Educ Stud Math 88, 283–290 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-014-9586-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-014-9586-7