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Assembling Population Data in the Field: The Labour, Technologies, and Materialities of Quantification

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Abstract

The concept of ‘population’ has enabled a long parade of biopolitical interventions and experiments in the Global South. Guided by abstractions such as birth rates, GDP, infant mortality, HIV prevalence, and longevity, and underpinned by racialised calculations of life and value, these projects rely on technologies of quantification that materialise data and ways of seeing that make data matter. Ethnographic study of the relations and transactions that comprise the work of making numbers draws attention to the social lives of data. Presenting a case study from rural Malawi—where demographers return year after year to administer household-level surveys—this chapter tracks the unfolding discursive and material production of data within a specific sociotechnical assemblage that constitutes the demographer’s ‘field’. In the process, it reviews key concepts drawn from science and technology studies and anthropological literature, with particular attention to ethnographies of counting and classification, and of the field sciences. The chapter concludes with brief reflections on anthropology’s equivocal relationship to population data and technologies of quantification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Booklet accessed in the Malawi National Archives (‘The British Empire Exhibit’).

  2. 2.

    Even as audiences were made to feel part of something larger (‘mak[ing] the peoples of empire better known to one another’), the displays were rooted in representations of fundamental cultural difference that upheld racialised partitions between developed and undeveloped populations. Displays were ‘calculated to arouse public interest in all efforts to conquer disease and unhealthy conditions of existence’, for example (‘The British Empire Exhibit’). In this sense, the exhibit produced population in two senses of the word: imperial totality and (other) people boxed together as distanced object in need of intervention (Murphy 2017, p. 135).

  3. 3.

    Greenhalgh (1996, p. 29) points out that an overemphasis on the racism of demographic science, in particular, produces ‘demographic exceptionalism’.

  4. 4.

    In addition to the field-based enumeration projects described in this chapter, demographers also draw on vital statistics registries as data sources; as Jerven (2013) argues, statistical capacity and state infrastructures for making reliable and timely numbers are generally weak in Africa, making statistics registries an absent or poor source of data on the continent (see also Zuberi et al. 2003).

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the editors of this volume for their leadership and direction, and to the anonymous reviewers who provided generous feedback that helped fine-tune this chapter. Thanks also to Lyndsey Beutin for helpful suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to the authors who have produced the fine scholarship I engage here.

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    Cal Biruk

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  1. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Maja Hojer Bruun

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ayo Wahlberg

  3. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Rachel Douglas-Jones

  4. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Cathrine Hasse

  5. Center for Medical Science & Technology Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Klaus Hoeyer

  6. Department of Business and Management, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Dorthe Brogård Kristensen

  7. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Brit Ross Winthereik

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Biruk, C. (2022). Assembling Population Data in the Field: The Labour, Technologies, and Materialities of Quantification. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_16

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