Biruk challenges the abstract universality of data, seen as unanchored from its site and relations of produciton, by demonstrating through her ethnography how Malawi and Malawians shaped it. (page 27).
Biruk notes extensive research fatique by Malawi participants and states: "residents across sub-Saharan Africa have now become accustomed to projects in their midst," (23). In her conclusion, she notes that this includes anthropologists ("the researchers (including anthropologists) continue to come, again and again") (216) so she doesn't seem to see this as unique to the field of demography (echoing my own experiences as well).
Biruk highlights that the demographic surveys she studies "raise the specter of the exploitation, extractive logics, racism, and ethnocentrism that have underlain science in Africa," (22). Citing Riedmann (1993) she highlights that global demography presumes a "right to invade" in the name of knowledge production. She seems to be suggesting here that the colonial logics of science continue to pervade.
Biruk highlights that "a main point of controversy between anthroplogists and demographers is how they might answer the question: "what is the relationship between data and social reality it claims to represent or count?" (20). She notes the history of the field of demography as emerging as a way to govern (statistics as a tool through which the state sees and knows its citizens). So the data that demographers generate needs to be seen as objective, "clean", and reflecting reality. She compares this to how anthropologists view data which is as a classificatory exercise that creates reality or "makes up" people. However, there is a contradiction inherent there because anthropologists are also in the "data making" game and also have particular investments in ideas of a particular kind of "good" data.
Biruk notes her own complicity in the systems she is critiquing highlighlighting how "anthropologists make global health in the process of studying in, and continue to be as "doubly ambivalent, perhaps, as our colonial predecessors - in quiet collaboration with power and institutions even as we critique them." (page 18). She also notes how because she was in the field and administering the questionnaires together with the demographers she also has another level of complicity in the actual work she is critiquing as well.
Biruk hones in on quantitative demographic health data in Malawi as the "science" she chooses to study. Throughout the book she draws on her experience as an anthropologist and compares the epistemic cultures of demographers and anthropologists.
In Biruk's appendix, she includes a questionnare titled "sample household roster questions" (pages 217 - 219). These are the questions that the quantitative researchers she was studying were using (and which she also helped them to administer). However, she does not include any of her own analytic data gathering questions that she used to guide her own study other than the initial 3 research questions that she details in her introduction ("How do raw units of information - numbers written into a questionnaire by data collectors - acquire value as statistics that inform national AIDS policy and interventions? How do on-the-ground dynamics and practices of survey research cultures mediate the production of numbers? How are qunatitative health data and their social worlds coproduced and with what consequences for local economies, formulations of expertise, and lived experience?") (page 6).
Biruk's first footnote states: "All project and personal names in this book are anonymized. ... Researchers were, for the most part, amenable to being mentioned by name and having their projects mentioned by name, but I maintain anonymity as much as possible in line with my IRB protocol. Data from my field notes or events that may put any of my informants at risk in any way are not included in the book." (page 223).