Paper short abstract:

Ethnomathematics was an educational movement in favour of 'equity' between cultures. But its theorisation is meant for the use by the West and it appeals to anthropology as a discipline. Here the debate on 'ethnosciences' reappears which certainly concerns even our 'scientific' culture.

Paper long abstract:

Europe exported towards the rest of the world the scientific knowledge elaborated in the West. In this movement of one-sided expansion, mathematics was presented and stood out as an exclusive creation of Western civilization. Against the "primitivism" of ethnologists and the "eurocentrism" of historians and scientists, a movement developed these last twenty years on the margin or in the trail of decolonization and globalization which called itself "Ethnomathematics". Its aim is to promote and to illustrate by examples borrowed from many different cultures the idea that mathematics exists elsewhere, outside the spheres of direct influence of the West. But this "ethnomathematics" rests on a paradox : on one side, it is postulated that very different cultures produced, each for their own account, modes of mathematical knowledge elaborated according to standards which differ from the European scientific tradition but on the other hand "ethnomathematicians" try hard to find in germ in each of these "other" modes of knowledge the main discoveries of the West : principles of geometry in some product of traditional weaving or traditional pottery, an illustration of sophisticated calculations in some native kinship system or an application of the theory of fractals in the architecture of African villages. This is possible only using another paradox: these "native" modes of knowledge are identified as separate modes of knowledge (according, paradoxically, to a "western" view of knowledge...) despite the fact that they are embedded in practice or a product of the general functioning of symbolic thought. "Ethnomathematics" was, first of all, an educational movement in favour of "equity" between cultures. But its theorization is meant for the usage of the West or at least the academic institutions of western type wherever they are, and it appeals to anthropology as a discipline. Here, then, reappears the debate on science and "ethnosciences", knowledge and "pensée sauvage", which certainly concerns even our "scientific" culture. The communication will concentrate on this latter point.