Survival of Original Knowledge 1

The research (Delprato and Fuenlabrada, in press) that is the main reference for this chapter explores the problems of numbering and calculating faced by unschooled or underschooled indigenous craftswomen during their social and productive integration in spaces that are foreign to their culture. Understanding the underlying mathematical logic to these problems demanded venturing into an analysis of the social concerns that support the resolution strategies to the arithmetical problems that these women confront. The choice of research subject ² —a collective self-managed productive organization—was linked to our interest in approaching the new mathematical tools that we supposed were demanded by the processes unleashed in the constitution of a productive organization that transcends the family domain. In turn, the singularity of the social endorsement of this context (a local context of indigenous communities) demanded the overlapping of these processes with community practices and cultural wisdom. This required discussing conceptions of “mathematical literacy” that are restricted to the autonomous acquisition of problem-solving skills. In other words, it entailed the adoption of an ideological model of numeracy ³ (Street, 1984) to analyze the link between the numeracy practices observed and the specificity of the researched context: that of a collectively managed indigenous organization dedicated to the production of handcrafted objects. In the following paragraphs we will recount the trading ways of the community (bartering and incorporation of the monetary system) and of the handcrafted production. We will also devote some space to the circumstances and events surrounding the creation of the organization of women artisans. In this account we seek to recognize new practices of numeracy and the power relations that cross them within the local context (the relationship between the leader and the artisans) and within the out of community social networks (for the defense of the value of handcrafted production). We will see that the tensions that cross and crossed this domain demanded the differentiation of preceding trading practices as a way to provide legitimacy to local power relations—what Elisa refers to as “the beautiful power.”