By Geraldine Coutts of Radio Australia News
Counting by using your fingers is well known in many societies. But in remote Papua New Guinea villagers have been using a whole range of body parts to do daily calculations.
Around Telefomin, in the far west near the Irian Jaya border, people have traditionally counted objects by starting with their fingers, and then moving on up their arm to the elbow, the shoulder the eyes, and down again – to total 28 steps in all.
Professor Geoffrey Saxe, of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, explained the method to Radio Australia‘s Pacific Beat.
He studies the social history of mathematics and has toured PNG.
The traditional numerical system is Oksapmin, which uses 27 body parts, but one wrist is counted twice, to make 28.
Valuables
People of seven or eight distinct language groups used the same method. As the academic says, the system worked fine when simply counting valuables or other objects, such as explaining how far away your house might be from your uncle’s dwelling.
But when complex calculations became required in a modernising world, Oksapmin had a problem. For a while users tried a secondary “body counting” system to help add or subtract from their first lot of objects.
Also, “in traditional life,” the professor said, “people did not engage with (complex) ‘number’ in any way.”
From 2001, he has noticed the Oksapmin method disappearing among old people.
But knowledge of it has reappeared among young people in an intriguing way.
Professor Saxe said elementary schools are obliged to teach not only reading, writing and arithmetic, but to impart knowledge of local history. And Oksapmin has thus become part of the modern curriculum as children learn about their village traditions.