Yes I agree, I can’t really represent the argument of my colleagues. They are more steeped in the culture around ethnography and history of mathematics and so I think are responding to problems in those fields that they see ethnomathematics only contributing to.
For me though the lack of ethnomathematics in computing is the big problem. Yesterday I read a quote from Ada Lovelace in a book the Fabric of Interface (let me know if you need help finding a pdf). Here is the source of the quote, a note she wrote on a translation she did one of Babbage’s papers:
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Lovelace/lovelace.htm#C
Those who may desire to study the principles of the Jacquard-loom in the most effectual manner, viz. that of practical observation, have only to step into the Adelaide Gallery or the Polytechnic Institution. In each of these valuable repositories of scientific illustration, a weaver is constantly working at a Jacquard-loom, and is ready to give any information that may be desired as to the construction and modes of acting of his apparatus. The volume on the manufacture of silk, in Lardner’s Cyclopaedia, contains a chapter on the Jacquard-loom, which may also be consulted with advantage.
The mode of application of the cards, as hitherto used in the art of weaving, was not found, however, to be sufficiently powerful for all the simplifications which it was desirable to attain in such varied and complicated processes as those required in order to fulfil the purposes of an Analytical Engine. A method was devised of what was technically designated backing the cards in certain groups according to certain laws. The object of this extension is to secure the possibility of bringing any particular card or set of cards into use any number of times successively in the solution of one problem. Whether this power shall be taken advantage of or not, in each particular instance, will depend on the nature of the operations which the problem under consideration may require. The process is alluded to by M. Menabrea in page 16, and it is a very important simplification. It has been proposed to use it for the reciprocal benefit of that art, which, while it has itself no apparent connexion with the domains of abstract science, has yet proved so valuable to the latter, in suggesting the principles which, in their new and singular field of application, seem likely to place algebraical combinations not less completely within the province of mechanism, than are all those varied intricacies of which intersecting threads are susceptible. By the introduction of the system of backing into the Jacquard-loom itself, patterns which should possess symmetry, and follow regular laws of any extent, might be woven by means of comparatively few cards.
Those who understand the mechanism of this loom will perceive that the above improvement is easily effected in practice, by causing the prism over which the train of pattern-cards is suspended to revolve backwards instead of forwards, at pleasure, under the requisite circumstances; until, by so doing, any particular card, or set of cards, that has done duty once, and passed on in the ordinary regular succession, is brought back to the position it occupied just before it was used the preceding time. The prism then resumes its forward rotation, and thus brings the card or set of cards in question into play a second time. This process may obviously be repeated any number of times. A. A. L.
This is so interesting. Lovelace is known as the first programmer and carries a very typical programmer outlook. She sees a Jacquard loom working and sees how it could be made more efficient by allowing it to go backwards as well as forwards to match with symmetries in the textile.
But she is looking at an automated loom. If she understood handweaving she would realise that the computational transformation that she is trying to apply to the automatic Jacquard mechanism in order to use fewer cards would be well understood by a handweaver. The Jacquard device took computation away and replaced it with automation. Lovelace then thinks she is taking a new view of weaving as computational. As technologist she sees her job of introducing intelligence to unscientific/unmathematical tradition of weaving, but it was the Jacquard mechanism that took the science and mathematics away from weaving in the first place!
It seems like Lovelace’s profound mistake has been replicated by computer programmers ever since, and that the job of ethnomathematics/ethnocomputing is to fix this mistake.
Interestingly the Fabric of Interface book doesn’t spot Ada’s glaring mistake, despite being all about textile traditions as technology and how they can inform modern-day technology. I haven’t read it all but it seems to buy into this mythology of the Jacquard mechanism in the genesis of computing unquestioningly. Then there are the same stories about core memory being ‘woven’ and core rope being braided and so on but this is discussed in terms of manual dexterity and not computational complexity. This is a technological gaze that tries hard to take a feminist view, but without really respecting the computational nature of traditional textile practice, so it ends up being both surface level and, really, extremely confused.