Numbers are an important feature of almost all known cultures. In this detailed anthropological study, Thomas Crump examines how people from a wide range of diverse cultures, and from different historical backgrounds, use and understand numbers. By looking at the logical, psychological and linguistic implications, he analyses how numbers operate within different contexts. The author goes on to consider the relationship of numbers to specific themes, such as ethnoscience, politics, measurement, time, money, music, games and architecture. The Anthropology of Numbers is an original contribution to scholarship, written in a clear and accessible style. It will be of interest to anthropologists who study cognition, symbolism, primitive thought and classification, and to those in adjacent disciplines of psychology, cognitive science and mathematical social science.

‘The book makes a lively, well-informed, and thoroughly unconventional contribution to its subject … it should and will be read by any with an interest in this branch of anthropology.’

R. H. Barnes Source: Anthropos

‘Crump has soothed, stimulated, and occasionally transported me in the contemplation of numbers and mysteries.’

Eric Korn Source: The London Review of Books