Francisco Gustavo Pazzarelli

In the highlands of Jujuy, Argentina, Indigenous herders participate daily in the relational making of their world through distinctive practices of counting and measuring that engage humans, animals, mountains, anddeities. These relations, what I call more-than-human mathematics, show that imbalance, calculation and care, precision and uncertainty, coexist within a single ecology of practice. Refusing to fix numbers or distances, herders measure through movement, speech, and relation: counting animals may threaten fertility; distances are known by conversing with sacred places; even censuses hinge on whether children can independently feed the deities. These practices reveal that quantification is never neutral but rooted in imbalance, a condition that generates vitality and relation rather than error. The project examines and compares two highland communities to understand how local systems of knowledge interact with modern regimes of number. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, collaborative mapping, and archival research, it explores how instability and friction become creative forces in world-making. From this perspective, more-than-human mathematics emerges not as a mere alternative reasoning system but as a relational field of experimentation, that offers an alternative to the universalizing impulses of modern capitalism, while cultivating new forms of engagement that expand anthropology’s understanding of how knowledge and relation take form