Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)

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. "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 is never clean; rather, it is always 'cooked' during its production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce it. 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."-- Provided by publisher "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 is never clean; rather, it is always 'cooked' during its production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce it. 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."-- Résumé de l'éditeur COOKING DATA is an ethnographic study of how demographic data is collected, handled, processed, and manipulated by fieldworkers, researchers, policymakers, and NGOs in Malawi and internationally. Crystal Biruk's fieldwork with people at all levels of major survey projects explores how survey-based research projects call truths about the populations they work with into being, transforming data from answers to survey questions into statistics that appear self-evidently true. Beginning with the assumption that clean data is a myth, Biruk uncovers the hidden relationships between the knowledge work that produces data and its value to various audiences. Specifically, her work considers how health-related data have become financially valuable both to NGOs and to the young Malawians who work as data collectors and, later, supervisors--and how the commodification of health information intersects with local social worlds 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