Crystal Biruk

Seeing like a research project: producing "high-quality data" in AIDS research in Malawi.

Numbers are the primary way that we know about AIDS in Africa, yet their power and utility often obscure the conditions of their production. I show that quantification is very much a sociocultural process by focusing on everyday realities of making AIDS-related numbers in Malawi. “Seeing like a research project” implies systematically transforming social reality into data points and managing uncertainties inherent in numbers. Drawing on 20 months of participant observation with survey research projects (2005, 2007–2008), I demonstrate how standards govern data collection to protect and reproduce demographers’ shared expectations of “high-quality data.” Data are expected to be “clean,” accurate and precise, data collection efficient and timely, and data collected from sufficiently large, pure, and representative samples. I employ ethnographic analysis to show that each of these expectations not only guides survey research fieldwork but also produces categories, identities, and practices that reinforce and challenge these standardizing values.

‘Aid for gays’: the moral and the material in ‘African homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi *

In recent years, ‘African homophobia’ has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that ‘homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion – partially expressed through homophobic discourse – in Malawi. The article analyses the cascade of events that led to a moment of political and economic crisis in mid-2011, with special focus on how a 2009 sodomy case made homophobia available as a new genre of social commentary. Employing discourse analysis of newspaper articles, political speeches, the proceedings of a sodomy case, and discussions about men who have sex with men (MSM) as an HIV risk group, I show how African homophobia takes form via interested deployments of ‘cultural’ rhetoric toward competing ends. This article lends a comparative case study to a growing literature on the political and social functions of homophobia in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cooking Data Culture and Politics in an African Research World

Book Review Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World Crystal Biruk 2018, Duke University Press, Durham, USA 296 pages Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8223-7074-1 Paperback, ISBN 9780-8223-7089-5 US

Community engagement in an economy of harms: reflections from an LGBTI-rights NGO in Malawi

99.95 (hardcover) US

Studying up in critical NGO studies today: reflections on critique and the distribution of interpretive labour

26.95 (paperback)

Ethical Gifts?: An Analysis of Soap‐for‐data Transactions in Malawian Survey Research Worlds

Abstract Drawing on our experiences as an anthropologist and a researcher-activist working with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) rights NGO in Malawi, this paper presents reflections on the ethics of engaging LGBTI-identified Malawians in research and other projects. While community engagement is normatively discussed as a tactic for creating meaningful dialogue and collaboration between researchers and the researched, this paper advocates a broadening of the term ‘research’ to encompass NGO work and activities with LGBTI persons in order to complicate normative discussions of harm – rooted in biomedical research or clinical trial contexts – that cast it primarily as visible bodily or mental suffering that befalls research participants. First, we discuss some less obvious risks faced by LGBTI-identified volunteer peer educators as they go about their work, and, second, we show how seemingly minor benefits such as provision of per diems for attending workshops generate patron/client relations and mostly unfulfilled expectations for future financial or other support that might be construed as a form of harm. Throughout, we emphasize how LGBTI people learn to navigate an ‘economy of harms,’ a network of social relations that hinge on transactions and obligations that are simultaneously risky and potentially profitable. A more capacious interpretation of harms and benefits – from the perspective of those on the front lines of projects – that arise through modes of engagement can nuance our thinking about the ethics of engagement with key populations living in impoverished and rights-constrained settings such as Malawi.

“Gay for Pay” in an Economy of Harms

Drawing on work with a human rights NGO in Malawi, this article considers the politics of anthropological knowledge production in Africa in the wake of Laura Nader’s classic essay. First, I briefly elaborate on the role of scalar metaphors (namely ‘studying up’) in the anthropologist’s toolkit, with special focus on how such metaphors might stabilize a normative mode of critique as negative orientation to objects of study. I then analyse two vignettes drawn from my collaboration with an NGO to show how activists and peer educators interpret and analyse their circumstances – studying ‘up, down, and sideways’ – to navigate local landscapes through which increasingly diverse resources, people, and ideas circulate. Throughout, I analyse my dual role as critic and participant in the apparatus, and conclude by suggesting that the enduring power of ‘studying up’ lies in its invitation to view social problems – in Africa or elsewhere – from various angles, and to learn from our interlocutors how individuals and communities make life more liveable. Reflection on the changing circumstances of ‘studying up’ in Africa today from the perspective of an anthropologist of and in NGOs highlights the division of interpretive labour among diverse actors and destabilizes normative definitions of scholarly critique.