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Criticisms and contradictions of ethnomathematics

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Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the epistemology and philosophy of ethnomathematics, and to debate its educational implications. It begins by identifying in recent literature two categories of criticism of ethnomathematics: epistemological, related with the way ethnomathematics positions itself in terms of mathematical knowledge; and pedagogical, related to the way ethnomathematical ideas are implicated in formal education. After a description of both of these categories, the pedagogical implications of ethnomathematics are considered by means of confronting the criticisms of recent research in the field. Ethnomathematics research conceives its pedagogical implications in different ways, some of them contradictory. Such contradictions are related with the societal role of school, with the idea that we can “transfer” knowledge from one setting to another and the tendency to reduce ethnomathematics to a ready-to-apply “tool” for the school-learning of mathematics. The author discusses the first two criticisms in the light of recent research concerned with the social and political dimensions of mathematics education. Concerning the latter, a typical case of an ethnomathematical research study looking at bringing local knowledge into school in the name of promoting diversity is analyzed. It is the author's contention that ethnomathematical research runs the risk of conveying an idea of culture where the Other is squeezed from its otherness. The article concludes by arguing that a deeper theoretical discussion is needed in the majority of the research currently done in ethnomathematics so that well-intentioned actions do not end up having a result opposite to their aims.

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Notes

  1. For updated information on the international research on ethnomathematics I suggest using the Website http://www.ethnomath.org/ (Ethnomathematics Digital Library).

  2. Black students in the context of the apartheid regime.

  3. See, for instance, the work of Bill Barton, Sebastiani Ferreira, Paulus Gerdes, and Marcia Ascher.

  4. See, for instance, the book edited by Powell and Frankenstein (1997), which collects a set of articles in which these ideas are deconstructed.

  5. According to Valero (2004), this research approach conveys neoliberal perspectives of school, by putting the emphasis on the individual subject barred from the social and political context in which the learning occurs.

  6. Contrary to the assumption defended by many economists (most notably Daniel Bell's post-industrial society) that we have arrived at a new type of society, where the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, “late capitalism” (Jameson, 1991) signals instead that this “new society” is a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. In this sense, every position on postmodern in culture “is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (Jameson, 1991, p. 3). Frederic Jameson, together with Slavoj Žižek, are arguably the two most powerful contemporaneous theoreticians interested in scrutinizing the ways in which capitalism has become the “concrete universal”, as Žižek (2004, p. 3) calls it, of our historical époque: “what this means is that while it remains a particular formation, it overdetermines all alternative formations, as well as all noneconomic strata of social life”. It is in this sense that I argue that education is overdetermined by capitalism.

  7. See, for instance, the work of Ubiratan D'Ambrosio, Gelsa Knijnik and Alexandrina Monteiro.

  8. In Powell & Frankenstein (1997), we can find a set of articles that articulate a critique of mathematics with a critique of society. See also the most recent writings of Ubiratan D'Ambrosio (for instance, D'Ambrosio, 2007) where he developed a social critique, based on the idea of peace.

  9. For a clear understanding of how students in school engage not in learning but in passing, see Baldino and Cabral (1998).

  10. This is possible in the context of indigenous schools that have been developed very strongly in Brazil during the last 10 years.

  11. See http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1036168.htm for a discussion of this issue.

  12. I am referring to what Jacques Lacan (2001) called the Symbolic: the intersubjective symbolic network that structures our sense of reality.

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Acknowledgments

This article is part of my PhD project, supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology of Portugal, grant SFRH/BD/38231/2007. It is also part of the Project LEARN, funded by the same foundation (contract PTDC/CED/65800/2006). I am grateful to Maria do Carmo Domite who received me during the year of 2008 in São Paulo and introduced me to a field of literature and research without which this article would not be possible.

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  1. Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Fibigerstræde 10, 9220, Aalborg, Denmark

    Alexandre Pais

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Pais, A. Criticisms and contradictions of ethnomathematics. Educ Stud Math 76, 209–230 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-010-9289-7

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