Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide
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Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Who Counts?
The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide
By Diane M. Nelson
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7507-4
CHAPTER 1
### THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT NUMBERS ###
It will tell you interesting facts about many simple, ordinary things like counting, money, bones, equivalence, vitamins, pyramids, mines, conjuring, and light. ###
Politics, logic and mathematics are inseparable.
— Helen Verran
In the ornate, brightly lit women's bathroom of the luxury Camino Real hotel in Guatemala City, Santos, a Maya-K'iche' woman, was surrounded. The mostly nonindigenous women crowded around were practically fawning, laughing, asking advice, touching her arm, sharing stories. "Tell us about your trip. What was it like? Is the boat as wonderful as they say?" "How do you do it? How did you win two cars?" It was hard for her to even use the facilities. A woman asked if I were part of Santos's Red, or network, then sighed, "!Dichosa! You are so lucky! She is a wonderful sponsor! So generous!"
Santos had left Joyabaj, El Quiché, at 3 AM in a rented minibus with eleven members of her Red to get to the Camino Real in time for the first day of the Omnilife Basic Course. "Usually the managers at an elegant place like this wouldn't accept people like us," she said as we walked in, gesturing to her traje, distinctive clothing identifying her as indigenous. "But Omnilife treats everyone the same." The basic course meets one weekend a month for five months and aims at self-improvement through exploring gender and other "creencias" (beliefs) via Oprah Winfrey–like discussions and audience participation. Omnilife is a Mexico-based direct-sales vitamin business, and Santos was popular in the restroom because of her personal charisma and generous nature and also because she had mastered the enterprise's multiple scales of counting and associated conversion techniques so skillfully that she had won two cars and several overseas trips, including a Mediterranean cruise. They helped make a poor rural woman "like her" feel "accepted" — like she counted — at a "place like this."
Returning to the glittering ballroom where over 1,000 women were gathered (with a similar number of men next door), we went to work under the gentle but insistent guidance of the course's psychologist-leader. Most women were concerned with home life, unfaithful husbands, wayward children, difficulties making ends meet. But one day, during the fifth month, a member of Santos'sRed went on stage. Sebastiana is also Maya-K'iche', from Joyabaj's neighboring town of Zacualpa, and, like Santos, involved in Mayan revitalization projects. Addressing the weekend's theme of "lack and abundance," she recounted how the army had tortured and murdered her father in the early 1980s. They burned her house, sending her, a little girl, fleeing with her mother and the younger children into the mountains, where they starved for months. The course leader took it in stride, but everyone around me was crying by the time she finished (see chapter 4).
Guatemalans used to guesstimate the toll of thirty-six years of military state counterinsurgency and revolutionary mobilization by saying every extended family had lost at least one person — so everyone is minus one. Some families, like that of young Eva Morales, whom I met on my first trip to Guatemala in 1985, lost at least fourteen (America's Watch 1985). And in some areas of the indigenous highlands, entire families, indeed entire villages, were almost completely wiped out. In 1999 the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), using interview-based tallies, archival sources, and statistical projections, officially put the number of war dead at 200,000 and found the state responsible for 93% of the human rights violations. In her 2008 performance Matemática sustractiva, Isabel Ruiz tallied 45,000 white chalk marks on a red wall, one for each of the estimated disappeared, as someone followed behind, erasing them. Striving to re-present, to make present again, both the aggregate and the particular of each minus one. During the war years, and now in their after-math, people negotiate multiple scales of counting, including death tolls, vitamin profits, statistical estimates, increasingly faint memories of missing family and friends, and what sort of gain might balance out such enormous loss. What sort of account- ability?
Now, thirty years after the violence that surfaced so incongruously yet so matter-of- factly, in that ballroom, 200,000 is a "fact," reiterated in almost every discussion of Guatemala. That aggregate quantity has also been assigned a quality, as genocide against the Maya people. First by the UN, based in four cases, including Zacualpa (but not neighboring Joyabaj); and then by a Guatemalan court in May 2013, when it found General Ríos Montt, de facto head of state from 1982 to 1983, guilty of genocide against the Maya-Ixil. Yet people like Sebastiana and Eva (who received political asylum in the United States) are still working through their singular relations to that plurality of minus ones, of minus 45,000, of minus 200,000.
This book focuses on number and counting in hopes of illuminating the persistence of those minuses as they interlace with additions, conversion techniques, and even geometric gains where a Mayan woman feels adequate to enter the Camino Real (and a cruise ship!). And with ongoing attempts to erase them, to dis-count, as Ruiz displayed. Santos, Sebastiana, and others you'll meet, live simultaneously in worlds of loss and more hopeful calculations, if not abundance.
To explore such worlds we need to start from zero. Not only the ground zero of genocide, but zero as a source of enormous pride for postgenocide Mayan revitalization because their ancestors "discovered" it long before the Europeans. (Only two peoples have autochthonously developed the concept, the Maya and the Babylonians.) This matters because we all live in a world where number is the "modern fact," closely linked to raced and gendered power inequalities, themselves connected to the assemblage that stabilized the "modern zero" of double-entry bookkeeping (which may not be the "same" zero as the Mayas'). The glittery bathroom and the death toll are both effects of an ethnomathematics — mathematics practiced by an identifiable cultural group, in this case early modern Europeans. In fact, the very mathematics that informed the "everyday practices of colonial administration in the Americas, [that] rode in on the back of a new political arithmetic that gave coherence and authority to the Spanish colonial adventure." A mathematics that, Gary Urton argues, affected non-Western cultures at the "ontological level" (Urton 1997, 196–97). But those signs, values, and their manipulation now also count human rights violations, calculate their ethnic proportions and adequate reparations, reveal disproportionate suffering, and provide tools to resistance movements confronting racist exclusion and ecological destruction.
"Mathematics is the only true universal language" is a line from a movie (Contact, 1997), but it expresses common sense understanding about numbers and their cosmic truthfulness. The wordmathematics, however, is both singular and plural. While the authority of colonial adventure relied on a particular formation of numeracy and tried to insist everyone else rely on it, too, number, counting, and math remain more pluri-than uni-versal. That "common sense" was a centuries-long (and quite bloody) achievement. Yet nonetheless, many people live simultaneously, if allochronically, in worlds with several maths. We may need to get as comfortable with binumeracy as we should be with bilingualism. But this would also be an achievement, the effect of struggles to be equi-valued.
And even "Western" number isn't just about truth, sober accounting, and rational cost benefit analyses. It doesn't just "ride in" to settle things after the frenzied violence of those Maya apocalypses of the Spanish invasion or the 1980s mass murder, any more than the manic "irrational exuberance" of derivatives calculations are divisible from the wild functioning of capital itself. Numbers, of various kinds, are part and parcel of those selfsame world-making projects. Horrible, necessary, fun, crazy, and multiple, melding the banal everyday with the most existential leaps of faith and most terrifying falls. Numbers connect "ontological levels" with the mundane embodied experiences of counting money, counting chickens, checking the time, checking to make sure all your kids are there. Mathematics is and are inseparable from politics.
Numbers transverse and transect all terrains of life. They offer powerful tools of generalization and equivalence, but they are also deployed in particular instances, through situated and singular practices, and create complex relations between one and many, past and future. This book engages Guatemalans' experiences via number but also strives to unsettle readers' relations to counting itself. So I invite you to follow number through different temporalities, including twenty-first-century Guatemala, not as a judicial procedure (to determine if it is good or bad) but as a power-infused companion, abstract and embodied at once (a friend, even), in struggles to count.
CHAPTER 2Bookkeeping
[With double-entry bookkeeping Luca Pacioli] laid the foundation of the modern conception of profit, not as some vague increase in possession, as in antiquity, but as something hard, even crystalline, mathematical and open to empirical test at any time whatever through an interlocking system of books.
— James Buchan
Fortune
Doing number is doing the relation one-to-many. — Helen Verran
This is a book about counting. Counting the dead after genocide — and those who survive. Counting losses and damages. Negotiating what will count as adequate compensation. Calculating resources and investment opportunities. Figuring input to output. Computing interest rates vis-à-vis current collateral and hoped-for future earnings. Trying to engage with the market forces that are transforming (what's left of) subsistence agriculture. And counting one's blessings.
"!Dichosa!" Manuel said, laughing, over his beer. "Lucky!" We were crowded around the only table in a small neighborhood sundries store on a late rainy August afternoon. Manuel and Francisco were utterly exhausted. They'd just finished many days of running the Dance of the Conquest for the Virgen de Tránsito, patron of Joyabaj, El Quiché. Francisco, with Manuel as his second, had taken on the yearlong responsibility/burden/sacrifice/honor. This entailed rising at 4 AM, performing brilliantly in the most demanding athletic roles of Tekum Uman and Pedro Alvarado (sometimes twice if the alternate didn't show), encouraging the other dancers, providing food and drink for everyone, and ensuring the expensive rented costumes were all right. Plus paying for it all. And they weren't done yet; there were still the debts incurred. Francisco said he would probably have to cut cane on the south coast.
With Marvin Cohodas, their ethnographer, we'd been discussing my next-day plans to visit friends on my way back to Guatemala City. Fidelia, an antimining activist; Adelita, whom I've known since she was seven, now interning at the Santa Cruz hospital hematology lab; and in Tecpán, Chimaltenango, Don Cristobal, an ajq'ij, or daykeeper, whom I'd met a few weeks before at a workshop for Maya people on how to read Maya glyphs. I'd been thinking the day was going to be kind of arduous but it made Manuel exclaim "!Dichosa!" meaning fortunate, prosperous, happy.
His comment focuses me on scale, a reminder that something I barely registered was a privilege. This chapter is called "Bookkeeping," meaning to take care or heed in keeping (financial) records — for which the fundamental goal, called the "golden rule," is the zero balance between debts and credits. Yet here was an imbalance to which I'd been heedless. To have the time and money to hop on and off the bus. To have friends and acquaintances scattered across the countryside. To come and go as I please. He didn't seem envious or angry, but "dichosa" marks a nonequivalence that pushes me to take care with those historical networks and devices that distribute "luck" and fortune (which are not the same as value) unequally across time and space. The fact that I can travel (and legally, not risking the perils of undocumented border crossings) to marvel at the effort and memory condensed into the dance or sit for months on end to "keep" all that knowledge by writing this book, is no accident. It's not a one-to-one credit-debit relationship, either, given the many layers of the imperial pyramid that link us. Yet my privileges are connected to their difficulties. Both are produced by a post-1492 planetary system that learned to conceive profit as something hard and mathematical.
The bookkeeping here, concerning equivalences and inequalities, quantification and its qualifications, emerges from that space of jokes and sharing and disparity between a Mayan person and a gringa anthropologist in a world deeply structured by — yet always entangled in various — mathematical systems and conceptualizations. Our disparities in luck are somewhat measurable by comparing GNPs, Gini coefficients, poverty indexes, debt payments, and the like. But the subtle pathways and violently inserted funnels that extract prosperity from "subprime" places like Guatemala and accumulate it in "centres of calculation" like the United States can be hard to trace with any accuracy (Latour 1987). That doesn't mean people don't know they're there. "!Dichosa!"
Like Santos and Sebastiana, the people I'll tell you about — much like you and me — are trying to hedge their bets in a world of risk and uncertainty. We are trying to figure our ways through different and simultaneous regimes of counting, measurement, and logic. These regimes include insurance, fault, actuarial accounting, free trade, derivative, and even that odd nongovernmental organization reasoning in which they just give things away. Such regimes entangle us in various horologies (timekeeping) as well as the logics that led Francisco, Manuel, and their families to expend so much time, energy, money, and enthusiasm on the dance — which even some fellow community members see as a waste. This is also a book about counting Maya (how many are there?) and making them count: through voting, protesting, revitalizing Mayan math, selling vitamins, coming to matter. "Who counts?" can mean literally who knows how to count or how to do math but also, more existentially, whose lives "count" — whose lives are meaningful and valuable?
Some of this counting is arithmetical, basic adding and subtracting (where changes differ by a constant amount), while some is geometric (differing by a constant ratio: 2, 6, 18, 54), with exponential growth in, say, profits from a gold mine, a sugarcane plantation, or privatizing the national electricity grid. Or exponential loss, as a parent's murder in 1981 sets back generations in terms of schooling, nutrition, life expectancy, and even the ability to feel enthusiasm for one's own life. Yet over the three books I've written about Guatemala — what I've come to think of as the Genocide Trilogy — there is something that feels incalculable. The degree zero, the darkest time, the years 1980 to 1983 of both frenzied and systematic mass murder of mostly — but not only — indigenous people. It continues to reverberate through the years, bursting forth in the most unexpected times and places (like Sebastiana's testimonial). The number of war dead keeps growing, along with the backlog in unexhumed mass graves. And new corpses are added from a different war, the tolls taken by unemployed armed men, poverty, drug trafficking, kidnapping, armed robbery, femicide, gang initiations, and political assassinations. Guatemala's murder rate is now equal to the worst years of the war.
This grinding, continuous, "everyday" war affects everyone I speak to and work with in Guatemala. The home invasion where friends were tied up while the place was divested of everything of value, including their Mayan clothing; the terrifying anonymous calls to a Mayan publishing house from people surveilling their comings and goings to try to extort protection money; the carjackings; the man who didn't show up for our meeting because his brother had been kidnapped for ransom and they were negotiating for his life; the woman whose teenage daughter has had seven friends kidnapped and two killed even though the families paid the ransom; the time the proprietor of a parking lot was killed and my friend stood outside for hours, afraid the police would steal her car; muggings in broad daylight, the men also copping a feel; the neighborhood playground suddenly transformed into a no-child's land by gang territory disputes; the terror of riding the buses because over nine hundred drivers have been murdered by extortionists but not having the money for a cab. These are the everyday calculations of a world in which the military state's relation to territory, borders, and the profits to be made off various circulations were part of the infrastructure by the late 1960s and by the ease with which narco-money can buy elections, mocking the divisions between the state and organized crime (González 2014; McAllister and Nelson 2013; Tilly 1985).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Who Counts? by Diane M. Nelson. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface xi-1. Chapter Minus One 1
Part I. When You Count You Begin with 1, 2, 3
0. Bookkeeping 7
1. Before and After-Math 37
Part II. Bonesetting
2. The Algebra of Genocide 63
3. Reunion of Broken Parts 93
Part III. Mayan Pyramids
4. 100% Omnilife 121
5. Mayan Pyramid (Scheme) 157
Part IV. Yes to Life = NO to Mining
6. A Life's Worth 189
7. Beyond Adequacy 227
Notes 265
References 281
Index 297
What People are Saying About This
"What work do numbers do in calculating catastrophic loss? What other modes of counting are needed to remake the world in light of ongoing violence? No algorithm can capture the conceptual richness or importance of this book. Diane M. Nelson’s special form of bookkeeping is nothing less than a revelation."
"'Life is painting a picture not doing a sum,' Oliver Wendell Holmes once said; the diversity of human experience and the complexities of culture can’t be explained by formula (no matter what our social scientists say). Holmes's observation is wonderfully brought to life by Diane M. Nelson in her compelling new ethnography, Who Counts? Building on her previous path breaking scholarship on Guatemala, Nelson creatively and empathetically documents the many ways in which a postgenocidal society struggles against the stifling cunning of neoliberal regimentation—against, in other words, extinction by other means."