Self-Organization: Fractals in the Heart of Africa

I'll bet there are a couple of readers out there wondering if I really am an anthropologist given all the stuff about technology and professional development I've been posting lately.  I haven't forgotten, I've just been a bit side-tracked.

 

Royal palace, Logone-Birni, Cameroon (Musee de l'Homme, Paris)

This morning I received an interesting email that brought together a few subjects near and dear to me - Africa, indigenous knowledge, and fractals.  "Fractals?" you say.  Yes.  Fractals.  They are everywhere in nature, art, architecture, and even, as I will discuss, African society.

 

Queen Anne's Lace - Daucus carota - More images at WebEcoist

The email came from a listserve for folks interested in indigenous knowledge that is based at Penn State - ICIK.  It seems that in June 2007, Dr. Ron Eglash, an ethnomathematician gave a TED talk and someone in the forum found it, sent it to the co-director of ICIK, and she (Dr. Audrey Marezki) posted it round to the listserv.

Eglash's talk started out with some background about the history of fractal math in Europe and what exactly fractals are.  "Pathological curves" are one definition used by mathematicians, but really they are self-organizing systems/patterns.  Each part looks like the greater whole - a property of self-similarity, where recursion continues into infinity.  He then went on to talk about African architecture, art, and social organization.  His work, beginning with a Fulbright to explore why African villages and towns, used fractal math to organize, shows that while some of the use is unconscious, much of the use of fractal mathematics in Africa is deliberate.  And the village layout patterns are repeated in the clustering of houses and organization of rooms within homes.  Fractal algorithms even appear in the seasonal cycles of religious ceremonies, funeral ceremonies, and spirit/ancestral houses.

“When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”  - Eglash, Designers 421

Eglash then moved on to discuss fractal math used in the game Mancala, wind screens made in West Africa for desert winds, and the origin of binary code in Bamana Sand Divination.  Yes, even the humble code that allows me to produce this blog finds its origins in Africa.  According to the talk, explorers carried the Bamana Sand Divination to Moorish Spain where it was picked up by alchemists and incorporated into their geomancy divination practices.  Later, Leibonitz derived binary code from geomancy.  If you watch the video I've posted below, you will see that Eglash makes the story far more interesting with inclusion of giving out gold to 7 lepers and sleeping with a kola nut.

Dr. Eglash ends with a discussion of how this knowledge is being applied in American classrooms - encouraging black students to connect to their mathematical roots - and how the robust, self-organizing algorithms found in indigenous knowledge could be applied to finding solutions to many of the African continents' problems.



More links:

Eglash, R.  2008.  Bamana sand divination: recursion in ethnomathematics.  American Anthropologist 99(1): 112-122.

Eglash, R. 1999.  African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design.  Rutgers University Press.

TED Profile on Ron Eglash with the link to the original video talk.

Ron Eglash's African Fractals homepage.

• Link to CDST page with teaching applets (cultural design and math).

 

From the Electronic Visualization Laboratory UIC

White Hair & Other Distractions

I noticed yesterday in the mirror that my patch of white hair is returning. The patch sits a little to the left of center at my hairline. Over the past 10 years it has appeared and disappeared depending on my stress level. It appeared before my comps and then started to fade before returning for my prospectus. Well now it is back. I suppose I should get used to it because I'm not getting any younger. The best I can hope for is that the winter sun will bleach the rest of my hair semi-blonde and it won't be so noticeable. Ha! Ha! Ha! I suppose it could always be worse. I could be going bald.

Whenever I start to freak about something that isn't worth freaking out about, I try to find a good distraction. So here are some photos of Maputo.

Avenida Karl Marx - looking north from the Baixa (waterfront and old town)

Mercado Central - located on Avenida 25 de Setembro in the Baixa. You can buy just about anything here and there is a section just for handicrafts (although the Saturday market is better). I love how the salespeople try to sell me ivory bracelets and entire sea turtle shells. I tell them that I would be arrested if I ever brought it home when they try to play on my sympathy to support a poor country. The fact is that it really grosses me out - dead animals just don't do it for me. No matter how many times and ways I try to tell them that these animals are rare and endangered and therefore illegal to transport across national borders (esp. to the US) they just look at me incredulously. Other buyers from western countries must be either uniformed, uncaring, or both.

This train station was build in 1910 and designed by Alexandre Gustav Eiffel (as in the Eiffel Tower guy). There is also an iron house here that was designed by him. He never set foot in Mozambique though. If he did, he would have known that building an all iron house (walls, roof, etc) was not a good idea for the tropics. Unless, of course, you want to cook the residents in a giant easy-bake oven.

Parasailing on the bay on a windy day.

Jumma Masjid, on Rua da Mesquita, is Maputo's oldest mosque. I think it dates from the late 1700s or early 1800s but I am not 100% sure. The Saudis have put a lot of money into restoring this mosque to its former beauty. I saw it back in 2004 when they started the reconstruction - peeling paint, dirty walls, crumbling. You could see the original beauty and only despair at the state of disrepair it had fallen into. I'd love to see the inside, but I haven't visited when anyone was around and I would hate to be disrespectful by entering uninvited.

I only wish that similar efforts would go into restoring many of the old buildings in the surrounding neighborhood. The Baixa is the original port town of Lourenço Marques that grew into Maputo. The colonial architecture remains in much of this part of the city and it could be a huge tourism draw.



Some of the doors on the front of the Jumma Masjid open into small stores and restaurants. These were locked up, so I'm not sure if they've been rented out or are used by the Jumma community for something else.

This is the sign for one of my favorite shops. It is a capulana shop - stacked floor to ceiling with in a multitude of colors. The shop is located directly across the street from Mercado Central and is in an old building. I haven't had the opportunity yet to ask if the name indicates a past use of the building (ivory sorting and storage) or was named this because the owners are of Indian ancestry.