Anthropology is a discipline often considered wary of or even antagonistic towards quantitative data. In the book Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World, C Biruk addresses this in a nuanced way, not by merely showing how quantitative data “gets it wrong,” but rather by rendering visible the knowledge it produces and how this in turn produces our shared world: “Numbers – and the standards by which they are evaluated – not only misrepresent real worlds but make new ones” (p. 212). Based on thorough ethnographic fieldwork on the production of HIV-AIDS demographics in quantitative health survey data in Malawi, Biruk explores these new worlds by studying the “social lives of numbers” (p. 3), troubling their status as “clean,” “raw” data and objective, pristine proof. This opens up an analytical space to reflect on broader questions of knowledge production, fundamentally unequal research worlds, and international research collaborations. Firmly rooted in the anthropology of global health, this accessible and well-written book speaks, however, to anthropology and academia as a whole.

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书评：烹饪数据：非洲研究世界中的文化与政治

人类学是一门常被视为警惕甚至反对定量数据的学科。在《烹饪数据：非洲研究世界中的文化与政治》一书中，C Biruk以细致入微的方式解决了这一问题，而不仅仅是展示定量数据是如何“弄错了”，而是通过可视化它所产生的知识以及这又如何产生了我们共享的世界：“数字-以及依据的标准对它们进行了评估–不仅歪曲了真实世界，而且创造了新世界”（第212页）。Biruk基于对马拉维定量健康调查数据中产生的HIV / AIDS人口统计数据的详尽的人种志田野调查，Biruk通过研究“数字的社会生活”（第3页），探索了这些新世界，使他们的地位变得“干净”，“原始”数据和客观原始证据。这开辟了一个分析空间，以反映知识生产，根本不平等的研究世界和国际研究合作等更广泛的问题。扎根于全球健康人类学，