The Social Lives of Numbers: Statistics, Reform and the Remaking of Rural Life in Turkey
Künye
Çelenk, B. (2023). The Social Lives of Numbers: Statistics, Reform and the Remaking of Rural Life in Turkey.Özet
Ensuring food security is essential
in terms of strategic significance
for a nation as well as protecting
the public’s health throughout the
entire food production and consumption process. Due to reasons
like the COVID-19 pandemic in
recent years, Russia’s occupation of
Ukraine, the “breadbasket’’ of many
nations, mainly Europe, and climate change, it
is imperative to painstakingly collect data on
agricultural productivity and formulate strategic strategies in accordance with that data.
By considering statistics and data analysisbased agricultural reforms implemented in
the agricultural sector, based on Türkiye’s EU
accession process within a framework of the
relationship between techno-politics and society, Brian Silverstein, in his brief piece, has
sought to demonstrate the power of numbers
to transform societies and politics. The central
claim of this book, which describes how agricultural and rural lifestyles have changed particularly in recent years, as a result
of statistical reforms, is that even
if the political integration phase of
Türkiye’s EU accession process has
stopped, infrastructure and technical harmonization initiatives are
still ongoing and reshaping society.
In this context, he asserts that statistical changes affect people’s behavior, ideas, and even emotions. In this regard,
he describes as “performative” the act of creating links between agricultural statistics and
social and political dynamics. However, Silverstein did not use the term “performative”
in his study in a theatrical sense. He defines
performativity as “to emphasize that an act of
description can have effects that rearrange the
relationship between the description and the
phenomena the description is purportedly
about” (p. 3).
