November 9, 2010
My roommate came home from an English class the other day claiming that the Hopi tribes do not use any type of numbers. I was curious about this so I went ahead and did a little more research and found out from the book Cultural Anthropology: the Human Challenge, that they do use numbers for things such as counting but not to conceptualize things like time. To say that there are 3 apples is something that they use, but to say that three weeks ago you exercised for thirty minutes is completely foreign to them. The past does not matter and therefore the present and physical is what is important.
I think its important to use numbers in the way that we do because conceptualizing something so widely I feel, expands our horizons of what we are able to conceptualize. It seems like we are taught time at such a young age that we are better able to grasp the metaphysical and other things that will eventually come into use later on in life.
work cited:
Haviland, William A, and Harold E.L. Prins. Cultural Anthropology: the Human
Challenge. Cengage Learning, 2007. 113. Print.
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