The Social Lives of Numbers

This book examines the changing role of statistics in institutional reform in Turkey, and the unanticipated ways in which such changes transform livelihoods as well. Turkish agriculture is undergoing its most profound transformation since the establishment of the Republic in the 1920s. Seemingly minor technical adjustments in farmers' reporting requirements and practices to collect better data on agriculture for statistics are also having a rapid and massive effect on farmers' practices and livelihoods. The attempt to understand agriculture in Turkey in new ways is changing agriculture itself. The relationship between statistics and social and natural phenomena is thus performative, and such performativity undergirds a great deal of socio-technical change in the world. Drawing on fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, farmers and agricultural extension technicians, the book shows how alongside deliberation about reforms, it is in and through this performativity that much of the work of institutional commensuration actually happens.

Examines processes by which institutions, worldviews, and lifestyles are transformed through reform, involving phenomena like norms, formats, standards and statistics Contributes to recent anthropological and interdisciplinary work on science, expertise, economy and livelihoods Draws on extensive original fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, farmers and agricultural extension technicians

Autorentext

Brian Silverstein is Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, where he is also the inaugural Director of the Arizona Center for Turkish Studies.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: What Do Statistics Do?.- 2. Knowing the Countryside: Statistics and Society.- 3. Commensuration: Re-Formatting the Political.- 4. Performativity, Economy and the Remaking of Agriculture.- 5. Conclusion: Reform and the Anthropology of Technopolitics.