Anthropology of mathematics

Offshoring and outsourcing have become the buzzwords of the IT community and the popular media discourse about the current era of globalization in services. Acknowledging the geographic perspective expressed in these dominant terms, in this article I examine the processes and activities that are oriented in the opposite direction. Capturing this inversion, I develop the concept of ‘onshoring’ and use research material from fieldwork conducted with IT firms in St Petersburg, Russia and their affiliates, agents and clients in the USA to provide an empirical case study. Onshoring encompasses the corporeal, representational, material and legal practices of offshore firms developing a presence onshore, with Russia as offshore and the USA as onshore in this case. The lack of an established Russian professional diaspora in the USA created a context in which developing a recognizable onshore presence was necessary for firms based in Russia. By explicitly recognizing that the efforts, risk-taking and experimental strategies of offshore firms to create connections, networks and contacts onshore in the USA are a constitutive part of offshore outsourcing, I document and examine the less acknowledged complex flows and practices of onshoring. I argue that although these actors and processes may seem marginal to the widely recognized narrative of offshore outsourcing, in fact, they are creative and strategic compensations that reveal how the globalization of services is enacted at the micro-level.

M Phil Dissertation                                                                                       

This short dissertation on Claude Levi Strauss is an attempt to underline the complexity inherent in his use of the nature/culture opposition. The question I have asked is how does this opposition functions in his anthropology? What emerges in my discussion, I hope, is that Levi Strauss’ use of the nature/culture opposition is dynamic and creative in nature. It is used as a tool to construct a multi-layered and complex logical-schema and my point is that the movement and process denoted by its efficacy must be clearly grasped. At one level then it is futile to question that what it signifies rather it is much more rewarding to see how by means of it certain things are constituted as objects of thought and brought into the ambit of scholarly attention and discussion.

As a social practice mathematics remains shrouded in mystery and seems inaccessible for outsiders. It comes across as a closed formal system that is largely considered independent of the people who practice it and hence totally impervious to sociological investigation. This paper seeks to question these assumptions and is offered as a contribution to an emerging sociology of mathematics and abstraction. The argument unfolds on an ethnographic register and follows the reactions to a particular mathematical symbol in two different contexts. The first stretch of the description tracks the responses to this symbol on an online forum devoted to discussing mathematics and the other draws from a classroom context the author was part of as a participant observer. Thus focussing on just one aspect of mathematical practice, the way in which symbols are handled by practitioners, it attempts to underline the character of mathematics as a distinctive form of sociality. In the process it raises and seeks to address the following questions. What do controversies over and reactions to mathematical symbols tell us about mathematics as a practice? What role do symbols play in the mathematical discourse? And, can a broader sociological perspective on mathematical symbolism be developed?
Keywords: Metonymy, metaphor, symbol, partial differentiation, ethnography, controversies.