6.15%: Taking Numbers at Interface Value

Abstract

This article discusses a number, 6.15%, as it comes into being in the course of an evaluation study of education in a southern Afghan province. This number indicates that out of 100 school-aged girls 6.15 go to school. While this kind of number may invite refl ections on its epistemic accuracy, more often it draws attention to its inherent negative — the girls that do not go to school — substantiating a need for sustained international commitment. As this article will show, numbers work to establish girls as research entities, as part of populations, and as a concern for the Afghan government and the international intervention. This interfacing work of numbers — between girls, states, interventions, and research protocols — is often absent from academic work that takes numbers to be stable and passive tools with which the world can be known. This article, instead, takes numbers to have an internally complex multiplicity and to actively engage with their environments. In this article, I use the interface between numbers and environment as a space for ethnographic exploration of world-making. By describing three moments in the lifecycle of the number — data cleaning, analysis and presentation — I describe three distinct moments of interfacing in which the number comes to act in three capacities: effecting reference, constituting proportional comparison, and evoking doubt and certainty. Detailed understanding of numbering practices provides an opportunity to not just critically assess numbers as end products but to carefully assess the worlds that emerge alongside numbering practices and the ways in which numbers contribute in processes of governance.

Escaping Numbers?

“…Each new generation of numbers cumulatively produces new calculations of trends and narratives of growth and decline. The new numbers are not a threat to the old -instead, by accumulating within the same stable framework, they strengthen the assemblage (this resonates with Holtrop's (2018) account (this issue) of the ability of uncertain numbers to strengthen a policy report).…”

Ontologically dirty knots: The production of numbers after the Srebrenica genocide

“…Digging in the soil and cleaning bodily remains in a forensic lab strongly resonate with the concept’s second element, that of dirt. While many regard dirt as disorder (see Douglas, 1966), and others have aligned it with territory (Nyers, 2012), I define the adjectives dirty and dirtier in combination with the adverb ontologically to signal that material semiotic things like numbers are never finished – they constantly evolve through being associated with ever more objects and subjects (Holtrop, 2018; Merry, 2016), and this is also the case in international legal processes. This point also resonates with Haraway’s (1997: 127) remarks about ontologically dirty objects and subjects that ‘are made up of provisionally articulated, temporally dispersed, and spatially networked actors and actants’.…”

“…This is in contrast to the ontologies of demography and forensic genetics. Demography and listing became associated with making categories – for example, when the lists were reviewed and selected on date and place last seen alive (see De Goede and Sullivan, 2016; Holtrop, 2018; Merry, 2016). In addition, emotional and physical fatigue, duplicates, entry mistakes, and the manual, visual and individual assessment of records all inhabited the worlds of the list.…”

Respect for Numbers

“…They live in the paradox of stability and instability, being stable enough to effect, yet unstable enough to be interrogated. Tjitske Holtrop (2018), in her article on the number 6.15% in Dutch foreign policy interventions in Afghanistan, captures these two sides aptly: Importantly, numbers are caught in an oscillation between evoking referential doubt and evoking confidence or action (until they don't anymore and someone or something throws the numbers back into a pool of questions and uncertainty, demanding clarification, and so on). Rather than weakening the power of numbers, it is in this contradictory oscillation, as interface, that numbers are generative.…”