Text page
Comparative Ethnomathematics and Divination Systems
"Comparative Ethnomathematics and Divination Systems" treats networks, swarms, or distributed systems as the real medium through which control and contagion circulate.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The section's swarm texts argue that distributed systems think and act without requiring unified subjects. Networks, packets, and collective behaviors become the real terrain of control.
They work by shifting from individual agency to emergent pattern. Data streams, information trading, architecture, and swarm composition all become ways of describing adaptive coordination.
That matters because the archive's virotechnical imagination is never only biological. Swarms and networks are what make contagion social, infrastructural, and planetary.
How to read this text
Read for the move from individual actor to distributed pattern. Once that shift is clear, the page's more technical language becomes easier to parse.
Keep an eye on how scale changes. The page is often strongest when tiny signal transfers are tied to wider emergent systems.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 5
An Ethnomathematics Comparison of African and Native American Divination Systems
Definition · paragraph 19
Westerners are likely to conclude that such information does not deserve the status of “knowledge” because it lacks intentionality. But intentionality itself is culturally defined: in the Western tradition we expect a particular invention to be attributed to particular individuals, because that is how social and economic rewards for innovation are distributed.
Definition · paragraph 19
But intentionality itself is culturally defined: in the Western tradition we expect a particular invention to be attributed to particular individuals, because that is how social and economic rewards for innovation are distributed. Indigenous societies, on the other hand, traditionally used concepts of collective intentionality, with economic systems that match such broader distribution.
Definition · paragraph 1
Like Paul Gilroy's fractal Atlantic, Donnel Walton's invocation of African divination traditions- of listening to the future- is not only useful in its call for greater ethical responsibility, but also as a reminder fo the surprising links between traditional swarm 1 Nick Land-Meltdown 1.
History · paragraph 39
12 required by divination, there are many striking parallels—for example in the combination of negative and positive feedback in African religious systems, in their use of recursion in cosmologies of infinite variation, etc. I have outlined these analogous structures extensively in Eglash (1999).
Appears in sections
Control, Virotechnics, and Swarm Systems Primary section
Control processes, viral language, swarms, and abstract dynamics as a media-theoretical cluster.