The concrete numbers of ``primitive'' societies: a historiographical approach (Q2145710)

This historiographic paper inspects the (often culturally biased) writings by mathematicians, anthropologists, and philosophers about numeration in allegedly ``primitive'' societies. Specifically, the paper focuses on the contrast that many such writings depicted between the ``concrete'' numbers of those societies and the ``abstract'' numbers of supposedly more ``advanced'' societies. The author of the paper under review finds that various authors construed this perceived concrete/abstract distinction in different ways. Four case studies are presented, spanning a period from the 1840s to the 1930s.