Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World by Crystal Biruk (review)

Data are ubiquitous in global health. Charts, statistical calculations and trends provide evidence for intervention need, for policy direction and of program effectiveness. But where do the underlying numbers come from? And, central to Crystal Biruk's Cooking Data, what kinds of worlds and persons do quantitative health data reflect and bring into being?

Cooking Data is an ethnography of demographic survey research in Malawi. It is "research on research" (15), as the Malawian fieldworkers, who Biruk embedded herself among, so often joked. In a context where rural residents widely associate the term AIDS with the word kafukufuku – Chichewa for research or survey – Biruk follows the life course and materiality of public health data: from crafting of survey instruments in Chapter 1, to training Malawian fieldworkers in Chapter 2, to deployment in the field in Chapter 3, to "raw" data's return to the office for data entry in Chapter 4 and to the dissemination of data in Chapter 5.

Biruk's volume takes its title from the concept of cooking data, the falsification or fudging of information by presumably lazy or incompetent fieldworkers, an often-racialised accusation long levelled against African research assistants. Resultant "dirty data" are unreliable (neither accurate nor valid). But, Biruk argues, the idea of raw, "clean" data – representative of reality, measured and counted accurately and bias-free, in standardised units, comparable across time and space – is fictional. All data are produced, negotiated and thus "cooked," often through demographers' own processes and practices of production to fit research templates. Only, in fact, through African fieldworkers' responsiveness to the messiness of lived reality, which requires improvisation, creativity and other diversions from research protocols and survey "recipes," and only because of their dedication to and embodiment of clean data paradigms can demographers obtain their clean data at all.

On that point, it is worth noting the quiet symbolism found in the cover image of the volume – cardboard boxes of yellowing survey forms in a project storage room. On the outside of the repurposed boxes, three prominent brand names are visible: Xerox, Kazinga and Omo. The Xerox paper was necessary to produce data collection forms. Kazinga is a popular brand of oil and an essential ingredient in Malawian cooking. Omo is a popular brand of washing powder. Combined, these products embody Biruk's central argument – that it is only through the process of cooking, by demographers and fieldworkers both, that clean data can be produced. The metaphor is splendid.

While encouraging scepticism of numbers, especially when reality is quantified by those seeking to control a population, and a wariness of fetishising statistics as representative of lived realities, the volume is notably not a polemic delivered against demography and the enterprise of statistical assessment. Indeed, Biruk adopts demographic standards for clean data when she carries out and reports the results of a randomised survey. A good portion of Chapter 5 also defends the validity of data that have been dismissed by Malawian colleagues due to their unexpectedness. Data, Biruk notes, can do important work. The author's aim is not to expose the uncertainty of numbers (though this is certainly a by-product of the ethnography) but instead to account for what, beyond counting, numbers actually accomplish.

Biruk brings to her account the lens of critical global health studies, which exposes the uneven power relations that many researchers rely upon and (re)produce, and which shapes the expectations, identities and relationships that emerge as a result. Chapter 1 considers how Malawian co-principal investigators are often taken on by foreign researchers in a manner that is "additive, rather than substantive" (50) and that overworks and undervalues Malawian social scientists. Chapter 2 observes that boundaries between Malawian fieldworkers and foreign researchers are constructed through the arena of "local knowledge," through which fieldworkers are attributed expertise only where this status stems from their cultural difference. Biruk argues that Malawian fieldworkers are instead "knowledge workers" (67) whose innovations are essential for survey research...