Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World
Duke University Press, 2018. 296 pages.
Biruk’s Cooking Data is a sensitive ethnography of demographic research in Malawi. Based primarily on ethnographic research with projects to collect survey data and HIV tests from rural Malawians, it presents a story about the “cooking” of data, or their …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
In this book forum, we review three ethnographies of critical global health – Crystal (Cal) Biruk’s Cooking Data, Ramah McKay’s Medicine in the Meantime, and Noémi Tousignant’s Edges of Exposure – and ask the authors to reflect on the nature of labor, the public-private, and race in critical global health, as well as the future of the field. …
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, editors
Intellect Ltd./University of Chicago Press, 2016, 256 pages, 500 color plates
The first reaction to an encounter with Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa is likely to be …