Abstract: " 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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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)....Read more
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...Read more
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,...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
