Number ecologies: numbers and numbering practices

In putting together this Special Issue we seek to contribute to the social study of number, a field which has acquired renewed significance in recent years with a revival in forms of selfand collective-experimentation, the rise of the digital and big data sets, and changing boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ forms of knowledge production. As Guyer et al. noted in a previous collection of Anthropological Theory on this topic, ‘The “modern” world sometimes describes itself in seemingly magical numbers that hang in mid-air, unconnected either to a grammar or a grounding’ (2010, 37). These developments make the question of how to understand our relationships with numbers and numbering practices particularly pressing. The field of the social study of number is interdisciplinary and includes cognitive studies of the situated use of numbering (Lave 1988), histories of statistics, large numbers and probability (Porter 1986; 1996; Hacking 1990; Desrosières 2002; Galison 2003), the study of statactivism and the politics of indicators (Didier 2005; 2010; Espeland and Sauder 2007; Power 1999), the ethnographic and comparative investigation of numeracy (Crump 1992; Mimica 1988; Stafford 2009; Zaloom 2003; 2006), the study of numbers in art, money, technology, and science (Simmel 1990; Hart 2000; Zelizer 1994), the philosophy and history of mathematics (Whitehead 1968; Badiou 2008), and the exploration of numbers as signs (Rotman 2000) or enumerated entities (Verran 2001). All these studies – whether from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, art, digital software, and media studies – consider numbers in terms of what numbering does, rather than what numbering is. Following in this tradition, we wish to adopt a felicitous analogy from Helen Verran and think of numbers in the same way as anthropologists do kin: numbers both are and have relations just as people are and have relatives in ordinary English (Verran 2010, 171; Lave 2010). Accordingly, it makes sense to ask how we live with or in rather than by numbers. The ground-breaking 2010 special issue of Anthropological Theory, ‘Number as inventive frontier’ (cited above) identified a contemporary ‘profligacy’ of numbers which provoked the contributors to explore challenges associated with ‘thinking in numbers’ (Guyer et al. 2010, 37). They adopted a variety of perspectives to address numbering in different knowledge practices, as operations and markers of social situations; private and public numbers, formal and informal, dodgy and provisional as well as precise and persuasive; numbers as symbols, indices, and icons. To build on these understandings, we add, in