ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to address some of the fall-out springing from the modernist preoccupation with mathematics and the visualization of spatial cognition which was born out of the nineteenth-century rediscovery and popular acceptance of axiomatic representation. It deals with an excursion into the ethnography of the knot of which the best example is arguably to be found in contemporary architecture. Anthropological theory never quite got hold of topology as it never quite understood why it should concern itself with the look of things, yet thanks to Alfred it may yet be able to catch up. Anthropology’s delayed reaction to the demise of Euclid’s world is even more surprising given the importance ascribed to spatial conceptualization as central to human cognition. In anthropology, one may point to the late nineteenth-century writings of Rivers and collections made by Haddon in the Torres Straits as testifying to an equal preoccupation with knowledge technologies which are responsible for the externalization of spatial cognition.
