Missing Illustration - 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting

Query: 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting

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Missing Illustration

Quoted text:

It is awkward to count on full parts of the body. For such purposes the digits are preferable. But even here, there are many ways to count digits. The count follows not the number of fingers or parts of the body, but what is being counted.

[Omitted text: [IMAGE OF THE ZODIACAL MAN, against the heavens.] [Caption:] This is used now more for medicine than for actual counting.]

If days of the month were the most important archaic things being counted, the vehicle for counting was the human body. The human body was divided up into counters—fingers and toes, parts of the upper body, and so forth. There is an ethnographic account of the first anthropologically inclined visitors to New Guinea, who asked the natives to count. They began with their fingers. But instead of stopping with the little finger, they kept on counting by touching the parts of their body, up the arm and across the face, then down the other arm—finally ending up with a clap of the hands, exclaiming “pongo” (Biersack and Ifrah).

There was a note here about illustrations. Can you help us find this illustration? (See also: Cosmological Body image request.)

The note was:

“[IMAGE OF THE ZODIACAL MAN, against the heavens.] [Caption:] This is used now more for medicine than for actual counting.”

This might be an image from the page.

This one is in the public domain and could be an option for insertion into this chapter, but we’re not sure if it’s the one Hudson meant.

Any image suggested for inclusion in The Creation of Order must be licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 or in the public domain if it is to be embedded in the chapter. If it is not CC4.0 or PD, please suggest a link to somewhere externally readers might find the correct image. Please include a source link and attribution information for any image suggestion (Wikimedia Commons links are preferred if available).

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