We are used to thinking that numbers are the same everywhere and used in the same way to describe the physical world: we count years, money, kilometers, even calories and daily steps. But this familiarity hides a surprising fact: not all cultures use large numbers. In fact, in some societies numbers beyond three or four simply do not exist. So how do societies function without our large numbers?
Numbers as cultural constructions, not universal ones
In industrialized societies, numbers seem like a neutral, universal, almost natural language. We are in fact used to rationalizing the entire reality that surrounds us by giving it logical rigor, through geometry and mathematics. Yet, anthropology has shown that number systems are not simply technical tools, but cultural constructions deeply rooted in ways of life.
Claude Lévi-Strauss already underlined that human classifications reflect specific practical and symbolic needs. Numbers, in this sense, do not emerge everywhere with the same complexity: some societies do not develop terms for large numbers not because they are incapable of doing so, but because they do not need them.
What it means to live without numbers beyond the many: the Pirahã population
One of the most discussed cases is that of the Pirahā, an indigenous population living in the Amazon forest, in the Central Amazon region of Brazil. The linguist and anthropologist Daniel Everett, who lived with them for years and recounted his experience in the book entitled Don’t sleep, there are snakes (2008), noted that their language contains no words for precise numbers beyond two or three.
Rather, there are terms that can be roughly translated as “one,” “two,” and “many.” However, this does not prevent the Pirahā from living, trading or making decisions: rather, it reveals that high numerical precision is not central to their social organization. This observation led to questions about a central question: does language influence the way we think about numbers?
Cognitive psychologist Peter Gordon has conducted experiments in this area aimed at demonstrating that, without specific words for large numbers, people can estimate quantities but with – obviously – less precision. This, however, does not seem to mean that they cannot understand the numerousness, or the high multitude, but that the exact thought, that which distinguishes for example between 27 and 28, depends in part on the linguistic tools available and is not, ultimately, necessary to understand the multitudes.
But when counting becomes necessary
The presence or absence of large numbers does not reflect a different level of “development”, but different cultural, economic and relational priorities. But when counting is necessary, how to do it in the absence of a specific language? The answer comes to us from the examples traced back to some populations of Papua New Guinea, where there are counting systems based on other criteria which are not verbal language, but the body.
In this sense, the different parts of the body act as an abacus and possibly as a “shared cognitive map” as the different anatomical parts are used as culturally shared “reference points”, established within a sequence.
In concrete terms, counting, in Papua New Guinea, is not limited to the fingers, but continues along the body following a precise order: after the fingers it moves on to the wrist, forearm, elbow, shoulder, neck, face and then moves down to the other side of the body. Each point corresponds to a specific quantity.
This means that the number is not represented by an abstract word, such as “seventeen”, but by a concrete location on the body. From a cognitive point of view, this system exploits memory that is no longer verbal, like our system, but spatial and bodily, one of the oldest and most universal forms of human memory.
Rethinking our relationship with numbers
These examples question a profound assumption of modernity: that quantifying is a universal and necessary way of knowing the world.
In fact, in contemporary societies everything seems to be translated into numbers: productivity, value, performance, even personal well-being, popularity and so on. But these “other life possibilities” remind us that this obsession with quantification is historically situated, and probably born with the standardization of the clock, in the Industrial Revolution.
Cultures that do not use large numbers do not represent a form of lack or backwardness, but a different form of society and relationship with the world.
