D’Ambrosio on Culture

It is a fact that, even without recognizing it, just about everybody deals with mathematical practices, incorporated into their daily routines. When walking or driving, people memorize routes, in most cases optimizing trajectories. When dealing with money, with measurements and quantification in general, we recognize in intrinsic mathematical component. The same is true of classifying, ordering, selecting, and memorizing routines. These practices are generated, organized and transmitted informally, as is language, to satisfy the immediate needs of a population. They are incorporated together and operational, and this is what is called culture. Culture thus manifests itself indifferent, interrelated, forms and domains. Cultural forms, such as language, mathematical practices, religious feelings, family structure, and dress and behavior patterns are diversified. They are associated with the history of the individuals, communities and societies where they are developed. A larger community is partitioned into several distinct cultural variants, each with its own history and responsive to differentiated cultural forms.

D’Ambrosio, U. (2000). A historical proposal for non-western mathematics. In H. Selin (ed.). Mathematics across cultures: the history of non-western  mathematics, 83- 84. Kluwer: Great Britain.