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Working with Navajo Indian informants in Arizona, USA we became aware of the capabilities of children and adults to find their way in vast and clearly "chaotic" canyons. One thing we did was describe what people actually did and said about their ways to find the way back home in such contexts. A second one was to use these data in order to build a curriculum book for a bicultural school on the Navajo reservation. We start from this example to ask what the political choices are, which we confront when working with such material: how much mathematics (or is it Mathematics) is needed in daily life? And what mathematics should we promote or develop, without becoming colonialist again? In Section 2, we discuss the meaning and the status of ethnomathematics, proposing that it would be the generic category which allows for a more systematic and comparative study of the whole domain of mathematical practices. In Section 3, we introduce the concept of multimathemacy (after multiliteracy) to discuss the political agenda of ethnomathematics. We argue that multimathemacy should be the basis of the curriculum in order to guarantee optimal survival value for every learner.

In this article we examine and discuss the relationship between intercultural education and Complex Instruction (CI) (as a speci® c form of co-operative learning). The goal of our examination is to gain a clearer idea of how CI can be used as a means for the enhancement of intercultural education. As a starting point for our discussion we re¯ect on learning as a fundamental cultural processÐ one that is conditioned by the basic intuitions that exist in the ® eld of western education. This framework allows for a more appropriate conceptualization of intercultural educationwithin what we refer to as a ª pragmatic perspectiveº . Starting from a rede® nition of intercultural education, we will examine the concepts and practices of CI in its relation to intercultural education.

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