Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide
Diane M. Nelson is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and the author of A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala; she is also the author of Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala and coeditor of War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala, both also published by Duke University Press.
Chapter Minus One
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Published:October 2015
This chapter builds on guesstimating the toll of the civil war by saying every extended family had lost at least one person—so everyone is minus one. But it also introduces the way some Mayan people have come to count, including feeling welcomed at the luxury Camino Real hotel and accepted by nonindigenous people, through participating in the complex accounting procedures of direct sales. It sets up both negative and positive valences of number and suggests that numbers traverse and transect all terrains of life. They offer powerful tools of generalization and equivalence, but they are also deployed in particular instances...
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