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By Root 602 0

he was to provide them. I became exasperated. It was unclear if underlying his responses was French intransigence, academic pedantry or simply a general contrariness. I stopped my line of questioning and we moved on to other subjects. It was only when, a few hours later, we talked about what it was like to come home after so long in the middle of nowhere that he opened up. ‘When I come back from Amazonia I lose sense of time and sense of number, and perhaps sense of space,’ he said. He forgets appointments. He is disoriented by simple directions. ‘I have extreme difficulty adjusting to Paris again, with its angles and straight lines.’ Pica’s inability to give me quantitative data was part of his culture shock. He had spent so long with people who can barely count that he had lost the ability to describe the world in terms of numbers.

No one knows for certain, but numbers are probably no more than about 10,000 years old. By this I mean a working system of words and symbols for numbers. One theory is that such a practice emerged together with agriculture and trade, as numbers were an indispensable tool for taking stock and making sure you were not ripped off. The Munduruku are only subsistence farmers and money has only recently begun to circulate in their villages, so they never evolved counting skills. In the case of the indigenous tribes of Papua New Guinea, it has been argued that the appearance of numbers was triggered by elaborate customs of gift exchange. The Amazon, by contrast, has no such traditions.

Tens of thousands of years ago, well before the arrival of numbers, however, our ancestors must have had certain sensibilities about amounts. They would have been able to distinguish one mammoth from two mammoths, and to recognize that one night is different from two nights. The intellectual leap from the concrete idea of two things to the invention of a symbol or word for the abstract idea of ‘two’, however, will have taken many ages to come about. This occurrence, in fact, is as far as some communities in the Amazon have come. There are tribes whose only number words are ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘many’. The Munduruku, who go all the way up to five, are a relatively sophisticated bunch.

Numbers are so prevalent in our lives that it is hard to imagine how people survive without them. Yet while Pierre Pica stayed with the Munduruku he easily slipped into a numberless existence. He slept in a hammock. He went hunting and ate tapir, armadillo and wild boar. He told the time from the position of the sun. If it rained, he stayed in; if it was sunny, he went out. There was never any need to count.

Still, I thought it odd that numbers larger than five did not crop up at all in Amazonian daily life. I asked Pica how an Indian would say ‘six fish’. For example, just say that he or she was preparing a meal for six people and he wanted to make sure everyone had a fish each.

‘It is impossible,’ he said. ‘The sentence “I want fish for six people” does not exist.’

What if you asked a Munduruku who had six children: ‘How many kids do you have?’

Pica gave the same response: ‘He will say “I don’t know”. It is impossible to express.’

However, added Pica, the issue was a cultural one. It was not the case that the Munduruku counted his first child, his second, his third, his fourth, his fifth and then scratched his head because he could go no further. For the Munduruku, the whole idea of counting children was ludicrous. The whole idea, in fact, of counting anything was ludicrous.

Why would a Munduruku adult want to count his children, asked Pica? The children are looked after by all the adults in the community, he said, and no one is counting who belongs to whom. He compared the situation to the French expression ‘ j’ai une grande famille’, or ‘I’m from a big family’. ‘When I say that I have a big family I am telling you that I don’t know [how many members it has]. Where does my family stop and where does the others’ family begin? I don’t know. Nobody ever told me that.’ Similarly, if you asked an adult Munduruku how many children