Math lessons from Liberia

Abstract

Over five years of ethnographic research in Monrovia, Liberia (1973—8), I was engaged in research in a mud-pathed alley at the edge of the commercial district, lined with 20 shacks, housing 100 Vai and Gola tailors, their treadle sewing machines, and 150 apprentices. Given the variety of relations math entered into during the course of the tailors’ lives, it became increasingly important to explore what it might mean to understand Vai and Gola tailoring lives in their quantitatively practiced aspects. At the same time an inquiry into math in Vai and Gola tailor shops was part of a struggle I take to be fundamental to anthropology to confront and make more starkly clear our own (high-)cultural premises and commitments as part of our craft of inquiry. Very briefly, this is an account of a struggle to comprehend situated mathematical practice through critical ethnographic practice.