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Peopled By Data: Statistical Knowledge Practices, Population-Making, and the State

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Abstract

On the surface, population statistics can seem like straightforward descriptions. Birth rates, for example, seem to represent phenomena—swells and ebbs in populations—that would occur with or without statistical confirmation. Population data, then, is about people. But how does that work—people turning into data, forming populations? What does it mean to say that data or statistics are ‘about’ something or someone? This chapter takes up the question of how populations come to be built and known through data and statistics. Drawing on ethnographic research in Sweden, I also offer a case study of how scientists work with and transform data to build populations—in this case, a population of Swedish twins. Following the data to the researchers who make use of it, the case study illustrates the labour-intensive and eminently social processes of creation and abstraction that allow data and statistics to be ‘about’ people or populations. Nevertheless, when some researchers offer accounts of population-making, they invoke a vernacular anthropology of ‘registry culture’ in which research participation is a valued tradition, the motivation for, rather than the outcome of national and scientific data collection.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The full question, from the STR’s 1961 questionnaire, asks, ‘During childhood, were you and your twin “as alike as two berries” or were you “no more similar to one another than siblings in general?”’ (‘Var Ni och Er tvillingpartner under uppväxtåren “lika som bär” eller var ni “inte mera lika varandra än syskon i allmänhet?”’). ‘As alike as two berries’, like ‘two peas in a pod’, is a colloquial expression that refers to two people or things that look very alike.

  2. 2.

    Norwegian twins are asked if they are as alike as ‘two drops of water’ (to dråper vann) (Kringlen 1999)

  3. 3.

    Technically, it would be more accurate to say that the assumption is that the twin study method yields an estimate of the relative weight of genetic factors (genotype) and non-genetic contributions to the variation of expression of a trait or disease (phenotype) within a population. The number produced through the comparison is known as a heritability estimate.

  4. 4.

    Twin conventions may have been, in part, a reaction to the explosion of media and popular interest in the identical Dionne quintuplets, born in 1934 in Canada. The Dionne quintuplets were subject to intense scientific and public surveillance. As babies, they were made wards of the province of Ontario, and raised by nurses in a private hospital built for the purpose of facilitating full-time psychological research on the quintuplets. The hospital was also a popular tourist attraction known as ‘Quintland’, where visitors could observe the children as they played outside. See (McKay 1994; Wright 2016)

  5. 5.

    The most ambitious early twin ‘collections’ were those of Gunnar Dahlberg at the State Institute for Race Biology in Uppsala (Dahlberg 1923, 1926) and Erik Essen-Möller at the Department of Psychiatry at Lund University (Essen-Möller 1963, 1970; Essen-Möller 1941).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the vastly generous, endlessly patient, and wise editorial guidance of Klaus Hoeyer and Brit Ross Winthereik and the insightful feedback from two anonymous reviewers. This chapter benefitted from conversations and suggestions from Georgia Cool, Donna Goldstein, Arne Höcker, and Carla Jones.

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  1. University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Alison Cool

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  1. Alison Cool
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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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Cool, A. (2022). Peopled By Data: Statistical Knowledge Practices, Population-Making, and the State. 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_17

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