ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to emphasise that looking into the practical requirements that the Iqwaye social life makes for the use of counting will not in fact enlighten us as to the actual structure of their counting system and its correlative, the notion of number. The few examples of the practical use of counting clearly indicate the concreteness of this operation and the preference for the immediate presence of various tally devices and the concrete number-objects. The Iqwaye memorise quantities with ease and in their recounting of past exchanges they tend to reproduce meticulously the most minute quantities of things in numerical values. The numerical series is predicted upon the body but as a cognitive configuration that series is an abstraction — a concept. The chapter outlines the background of number use, namely the Iqwaye perception of quantities in their appearances as deemed equivalent and different, substitutable, exclusive or commensurate.