• School Mathematics
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.625-642
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• 2009

This paper presents an overview of theories about ethnomathematics to seek for implications for multicultural mathematics education. Initiated by anthropological inquiries into mathematics outside of Europe, research of ethnomathematics has revealed the facets of mathematics as a historicocultural construct of a community. Specifically, it has been shown that mathematics is culturally relative knowledge system situated within a certain communal epistemological norms. This implies that indigenous mathematics, which had traditionally been regarded as primitive and marginal knowledge, is a historicocultural construct whose legitimacy is conferred by the system of the communal epistemological norms. The recognition of the cultural facets in mathematics has faciliated the reconsideration of what is legitimate mathematics. what is mathematical competence, and what teaching and learning mathematics is an about. This paper inquires multicultral discourses of mathematics education that research of ethnomathematics provides and identifies its implications concerning multicultural mathematics education.