Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
10. When you learn so much about mathematics, about numbers, you want to start
counting everything because this is what matters out there. There are many things
we can measure to show we are autonomous Peoples: our original lands, that
stretched all the way from Argentina and Paraguay all the way to the Amazon!
Lots of documents out there show huge Guarani migrations centuries ago.
Then we can also count to show how many of our people were killed, enslaved,
placed in boarding schools, and now live in favelas. This is using mathematics
to document genocide.
Inspired by this debate, Marcos Tupã, headman and teacher of the Guarani-Mbyá
of the Boa Vista Village within the municipality of Ubatuba, took the initiative and
started reporting on the mathematical knowledge of his own people:
The Guarani use mathematics every day. For the construction of houses, we use
our own mathematics. To construct a house, the measurement that we use is the
palm. We also count with steps. If a family wants a house they say: “I want a
house that has this width and this length.” They wouldn't know that a palm has
20 centimeters, but they know that it is exactly the width of a straw mat. There
are those responsible for forming the work teams and dividing up the work to
build a house, making sure everyone is well fed during the construction. It falls
to the teachers to record these different forms of mathematics.
My father doesn't read or write but when he receives a basket of goods he
distributes everything. Oil, for example, he would distribute approximately
three cans for each house. Whatever was left over went to the prayer house or
for the work teams.
It falls onto our shoulders, the teachers, to conduct this survey and record Guarani
mathematics. There is a basket we make in the village using a thick type of
bamboo. Half of the bamboo strips are painted and the other half are not. The
bottom of the basket is marked by this division between the painted parts and the
non-painted parts. Therefore division is very important for us as a people.
Energized by this statement, Guarani teachers brought up a basic feature of the
circulation of goods in their communities, best captured in the words of shaman
Cândido Ramirez: “
poverty is having nothing to give
.” Ramirez was referring to
the economy of reciprocity of the Guarani people (Melià 1987), which entails the
circulation of goods, rather than their accumulation in the hands of a few, as in
capitalism. Generosity and solidarity are basic principles of a gift economy, as
French anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1990) first proposed in 1925 - principles that
helped orient the collective learning process of workshop participants.
Guarani Reciprocity and the Economy of Gift-Exchange
We then moved to discuss professor Jaime Lllulu Manchinere's statement, in the
book
Madikauku
(Ferreira 1998a), on the power of love in mathematics: “Love is
