Description
Book SynopsisIn
Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi in which she rethinks how quantitative health data is produced by showing how data production is inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce it.
Trade Review“A brilliant example of an ethnography of global health. Crystal Biruk offers a very insightful, convincingly argued and well-substantiated account of the effects of what has become the most common type of research not only in global health but the development industry more generally.”
-- Anna Wolkenhauer * LSE Review of Books *
"Bookended by a thoughtful introduction and conclusion . . . I recommend this book to anyone who does survey work in Africa. . . . Its prose is scholarly but accessible and Biruk does a good job of marrying theoretical concepts to real world examples." -- Kevin Fridy * Journal of Modern African Studies *
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Cooking Data succeeds . . . by giving life to the trajectory of data from raw to cooked and troubling what we think we know about what happens in the field." -- Monica Grant * Population and Development Review *
"Impressive in its focus and scope,
Cooking Data makes a clear and compelling case for the social thickness of numbers. . . . This is a substantive contribution to our understanding of the role of data in global health." -- Damien Droney * Somatosphere *
"
Cooking Data is a powerful critique of the understanding that survey data are an objective and complete representation of reality. . . . I strongly recommend using this publication as a required reading in undergraduate and graduate courses in Anthropology, Demography, Sociology, and related social sciences that teach students to design and conduct qualitative as well as quantitative research. Further, those interested in African Studies, Global Health, and International Development will tremendously benefit from reading this publication as these disciplines are strongly influenced by survey research. The book is also a must-read for agencies, policy makers, and funding agencies. . . ." -- Alexander Rödlach * Anthropos *
“The continued relevance of Biruk’s work is clear in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic…. At a time when trust in numbers is increasingly shaken, Biruk offers nuanced insights on the production of numbers that prompts discussion about the role of feminist science studies to both critically examine how numbers attain their authority and simultaneously build capacity for fact based decision making in a post-truth era where powerful leaders intentionally spread harmful misinformation.” -- Angela Okune * Catalyst *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
