
































Who “Counts”?: How Numbering Defines Who Matters (and Who Decides) 

Review by Rebecca Nelson 

Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide 

by Diane M. Nelson  

Duke University Press, 2015

Careful accounting has been used to implicate the vice president and president of Guatemala in the

activities of an embezzlement ring known as “La Linea.” Every day the number of protesters in the

streets grows, and their sheer quantity has driven the vice president into resigning and provoked the

business  community  into  renouncing  the  president.  The  force  of  counting  and  accounting  in

(re)creating  social  worlds  resonates  powerfully  in  Diane  Nelson’s  new  book,  Who Counts?:  The

Mathematics of Death and Life After Genocide. Nelson plays with the idea that if indigenous people

could only “count more” (become numerate) they would “count more” (matter to the authorities). In

addition to these differential  valuations, the book also examines “who counts,” in the sense of the

institutions that collect and utilize data, and the “counter counters,” those who use numbers to combat

the dehumanization of victims. Rather than viewing quantitative thinking simplistically as either factual

or dehumanizing, Nelson seeks to take a genealogical, epistemological, and institutional approach to

the act of counting, which naturally raises questions of categorization and membership. A key concept

for Nelson is “adequation,” the act of trying to make abstract numbers commensurate with material

reality. She links it to Gayatri Spivak’s (1987) term “super-adequation,” the process of defining people

by their ability to produce more than they need for themselves. That extractable surplus can convert a

group of people into a resource to be exploited, a process that Nelson decries.

This book is the third entry in what Nelson calls her “genocide trilogy” (279), following  A

Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999) and Reckoning: The Ends of

War in Guatemala (2009), with each taking a more expansive ethnographic and theoretical approach



than the last. It struck me as an interesting choice for a famously logocentric scholar like Diane Nelson

to focus on numbers. While words are generally considered creative and personal, she notes that it is

jarring to think of numbers that way.

The book is divided into four sections. The first, “When You Count You Begin with 1, 2, 3,”

comprises Chapters Minus One and Zero (a playful affectation in the table of contents that epitomizes

Nelson’s iconoclastic style). Here, “ethnomathematics” are defined as systems of calculation identified

with a distinct ethnic group, the way we associate the Classic Maya with the independent discovery of

the  concept  of  zero.  In  an  admittedly  “quick  and dirty  run” (17)  through history,  Nelson reviews

literature suggesting that the mechanical model of the world as a set of interlocking parts that can be

separated and reorganized coincided with the increasing individuation of society. The ability to note

gains  supported  the  growth of  a  culture  of  accumulation.  In  this  section,  Nelson emphasizes  that

numbers are a human institution invested with meaning that are manipulated, invoked, and contested.

The second section, “Bonesetting,” refers to the etymology of the word “algebra,” which comes

from  the  Arabic  word  al-jabr for  bone  setting  or,  more  generally,  restoring  broken  parts.  In  the

Guatemalan genocide, the government targeted and killed non-indigenous people as individual units,

whereas it killed indigenous people as aggregates. At the same time, the mass effect of indigenous

groups’ numbers can also give them strength in protests. This section focuses on scenes from the efforts

to prove that genocide occurred in Guatemala, including La Verbena, an ossuary in a public cemetery

where forensic  anthropologists  are  slowly reuniting the scattered bones  of missing people and the

National Police Archive, where calculations of the volume of messages are being used to make the case

that senior officials had prior and constant knowledge of the acts being carried out in their name. Math

is used in defining whether genocide took place in projecting the percentage of the population that

would have died naturally and determining whether the difference between actual and projected deaths

is significant.

This  section  veers  into  a  discussion of  traditional  Mayan counting systems,  which are  rich

sources of information about social valuation. The count differs depending on what is being counted:

adult  humans  are  marked  grammatically  in  a  way  that  objects  and  preverbal  children  (foreign

anthropologists) are not. Mayan counting is also progressive, in the sense that rather than counting

something already completed, they mark the next number to which the count is progressing. Nelson

argues that, just as algebra is meant to repair a broken equation, reparations for state violence are meant

to rectify a situation of imbalance. However, the money from reparations is seen as blood money that

absolves the government for its atrocities, stains recipients with the appearance of financial interest in

victimhood,  and  imbues  any  use  of  the  money  with  the  stink  of  death.  One  woman  took  the



government’s check as evidence, finally, that she was not guilty for allowing the army to forcibly take

and murder her son, and kept it uncashed on an altar. Rape reparations were particularly controversial

because of the stigma of rape; Nelson writes that accepting a payment in compensation for rape can

“turn a victim into a whore. What else is a woman who accepts money for sex?” (114). Her macabre

sense of humor (for example, one section is entitled “it takes a pillage”) risks coming off as flippant –

she recognizes that reckoning with something as unfathomable as mass murder can be “simultaneously

horrible and funny” (102) – but her long-term commitment to Guatemalan struggles for equality shines

clearly through every anecdote.

The most ethnographically rich section, for me, was “Mayan Pyramids,” which brings together

the stories of two pyramid schemes: the multi-level marketing structure of nutrition brand Omnilife and

a classic Ponzi con job. Nelson struggled with her own discomfort at a long-term friend’s transition

from  working  for  a  bilingual  education  advocacy  organization,  work  that  anthropologists  find

understandable and laudable, to hawking expensive vitamin supplements. Skeptical of the claims she

heard from her friend and other community members about Omnilife’s spectacular curative properties,

Nelson nonetheless came to recognize it as fitting into the medical pluralism common to people who

are marginalized within formal healthcare systems. Her participants also viewed Omnilife sales as very

“Maya” because the company’s complicated sales networks and motivational workshops reinforce the

sense that health is social and provide a space for people to remake themselves in the aftermath of war.

However,  she  argues  that  the  exquisitely  complex  structure  of  percentage  earnings  based  on

hierarchical position within the organizational pyramid make it difficult for the vendors to calculate

their earnings accurately, and that there may be other incalculable losses as vendors deploy their social

capital to sell vitamins. The second pyramid in this section refers to the near-lynching in 2008 of a

mysterious  figure  known  as  El  Millonario.  His  “Mayan  development  project”  (which  he  initially

described as international aid and subsequently as a form of divine benevolence) provoked a cult-like

bubble of unfettered investment that left entire villages in debt

The final section, “Yes to Life = No to Mining,” focuses on the accounting used in the public

consultations for international mining projects, both by the proponents, who left many people lacking

formal government identification out of the count, and the opponents, who repeat the calculation that

“98% said no” in their anti-mining activism. Quantification is also used to document the deleterious

effects of mining, such as arsenic levels in the water. The chapter on Mayan activism plays with the

concept of “resistance,” which can be both electrical and social. Nelson was nonplussed that, in the

face of violent suppression of anti-mining activism, Mayan activists testifying in the People’s Tribunal

of 2008 focused on the failings of the national electrical infrastructure. However, she rationalizes this



claim for equal access to the new global “currency,” the electrical current that powers Internet access,

by relating it to the use of ancient Mayan knowledge as a source of power.

Reading this book provoked the same question I often have with Diane Nelson’s work: Is clever

wordplay equivalent to advancing anthropological theory? I began maintaining a running pun count but

I quickly lost track; a few notable words whose multiple meanings are teased out include:

• count: “to number”/count: “to matter or have value”

• mangle: “an antique iron used to smooth clothes”/mangle: “to deform or maim”

• qualify: “antonym of quantify”/qualify: “to be eligible”

The  book  flits  restlessly  from example  to  example,  drawing  tenuous  connections  between

concepts and cases through (often coincidental) conjunctions in the meaning of terms. At times, these

can become strained; for example, the page-long technical description of electrical resistance pertains

to nothing but a slight metaphor for social resistance to oppression. This leads to my biggest critique of

the  book:  ultimately,  while  Who Counts? is  entertaining,  nuanced,  ethnographically  grounded,  and

thought-provoking,  any  substantial  contributions  to  the  anthropological  literature  on  Guatemala  or

quantification it might make are frustratingly slippery. Despite these concerns, I highly recommend the

book  to  anyone  interested  in  Guatemala,  post-genocidal  reconstruction,  environmental  justice

movements, or the social embeddedness of economic rationality.

References Cited

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

1987. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” In  In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural

Politics. London: Routledge, 212–43.

Rebecca Nelson recently  graduated  with  a Ph.D.  in  cultural  anthropology from the  University  of

Connecticut. Her research focuses on volunteer tourism in Guatemala and how it is opening up new

avenues for tourists and hosts to develop more cosmopolitan understandings of the world (as well as

creating new forms of friction over the circulation of knowledge). She is also examining how non-

governmental organizations encourage Guatemalan women's participation in the public sphere.

© 2015 Rebecca Nelson 


