Papua New Guinea is known for its many body-based, counting systems and for people's passion for enumeration. Neither seems to require a unified concept of one. Rather the ‘instability’ (after Vilaça) of one turns out to be germane to the very facility to get from one number to another. The movement that is counting echoes replication and generation in other registers, as in the life of food plants propagated vegetatively, and in the life of people with its marked sense of displacement and replacement. Insofar as counting seemingly embellishes such processes, the latter, in turn, offer insight into practices of computation.
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