The paper presents the partial results of research carried out with the aim of analysing the discourses on school and school mathematics of a group of German-descendant Evangelical-Lutheran settlers who attended a rural school in Estrela (State of Rio Grande do Sul), at the time of the Nationalization Campaign - one of the actions taken by Getúlio Vargas during the Estado Novo (1937-1945) in Brazil. The theoretical framework of the study is the field of ethno-mathematics - shaped by post-structuralist theorizing, especially Michel Foucault's thinking, and the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his work Philosophical investigations. The data examined in the article consist of narratives produced by seven settlers who studied at the school during that period and a text written by one of the research participants. The analytical exercise carried out showed that: a) the school mathematics developed in that institution was instituted as a set of language games marked by writing and formalism; b) the mathematics generated by the settlers' everyday activities shaped language games constituted by another grammar, marked by rules such as orality, decomposition, estimations and rounding, which constitute rationality criteria that are different from those of the school mathematics language games.
school mathematics; ethno-mathematics; post-structuralist theorizing
