Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World

Description

In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always “cooked” during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information—such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers—acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise. Acknowledgments ix Introduction. An Anthropologist among the Demographers: Assembling Data in Survey Research Worlds 1 1. The Office in the Field: Building Survey Infrastructures 31 2. Living Project to Project: Brokering Local Knowledge in the Field 67 3. Clean Data, Messy Gifts: Soap-for-Information Transactions in the Field 100 4. Materializing Clean Data in the Field 129 5. When Numbers Travel: The Politics of Making Evidence-Based Policy 166 Conclusion. Anthropology in and of (Critical) Global Health 200 Appendix. Sample Household Roster Questions 217 Notes 223 Bibliography 237 Index 269