Bookkeeping

This chapter engages the ground zero of genocide as well as zero as a source of enormous pride for postgenocide Mayan revitalization because their ancestors “discovered” it long before the Europeans. 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. The chapter connects the conditions of possibility for the mass murder of the war with the world system of accumulation by dispossession and with the way number is used to struggle for accountability and postwar repair by linking them to an ethnomathematics—mathematics practiced by an identifiable cultural group—in this case early modern Europeans. Rather than a simple “number is good because it’s true” versus “number is bad because it’s dehumanizing,” the chapter argues for exploring the epistemological (how do we know?) and institutional (how are we organized?) infrastructures that undergird pondering itself.