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Growing from my years as a lecturer in a Nigerian university in the early 1980s, the stories which begin this paper evoke puzzling, small moments in the life of contemporary Nigerian (Yoruba) classrooms, particularly in the teaching of mathematics and science. Conventional wisdom would pass these by as irrational glitches, yet because they challenged my assumptions about numbers, they shook me, and this effect was magnified because no one else seemed to feel anything amiss. These moments of disconcertment sometimes spontaneously expressed themselves in an up‐welling laughter. In responding to the stories I argue that keeping the disconcertment is important, it alerts us that here is an occasion for telling stories which might generate new possibilities for answering moral questions of how to live. I go on to juxtapose three accounts of quantifying: a universalist account; a relativist account; and finally an account of quantifying as realized through embodied routines and repetitions. We can understand the last as a version of an ‘actor network’ account. I argue that the problem with the universalist and relativist accounts of quantifying is that they explain away the disconcertment in distributing praise and blame and legislating answers to the question ‘How should we live?’. An embodied account of quantifying brings with it the possibility of in/foresightful stories and showing how the truths which numbers make, came to be.

Taking number as material and semiotic, this article considers the enumeration of Australia's water resources as both a form of audit and a form of marketing. It proposes that a scientific enumeration utilizes the relation one/many while an economic enumeration utilizes the relation whole/parts. Working the tension between these two forms of enumeration can be understood as an inventive frontier in contemporary Australian life.

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