Statistics, Reform, and Regimes of Expertise in Turkey

Abstract

Statistics is one of the chapters in Turkey's EU entry negotiations, and the country is transforming what statistics it collects, using what methodologies, at what intervals, how it publishes them, and how it uses them. It is in light of the new statistical knowledge that the country is reforming its institutions and practices. This paper argues that the relationship between statistics and social forms is not solely one of description. To the extent that statistics do not merely study or represent the objects they are purported to be about, but are intimately involved in intervening in/on those objects (e.g. social, economic, or ecological processes) and in fact in remaking them through reform and/or development, they have a performative nature. In this sense, statistics are less a methodology and more a technology—a technology of governance. The paper draws on the fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, technicians, and agricultural experts working on the design and implementation of EU-inspired reforms to develop new apparatuses for the collection of data on agriculture in the country.

Acknowledgements

My thanks first and foremost to those statisticians, technicians, and farmers, as well as others working in these fields in Turkey who generously agreed to talk with me and tolerated my being in their midst. Financial support for this research came from the Institute of Turkish Studies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the University of Arizona SBSRI, and a faculty sabbatical from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the School of Anthropology, both at the University of Arizona. I am happy to gratefully acknowledge this support. For helpful comments and suggestions, I am also grateful to: Fikret Adaman, Ali Çarkoğlu, Ali Burak Güven, Can Açıksöz, Zeynep Korkman, Tim Finan, Ståle Knudsen, Aomar Boum, Chris Dole, Elif Babül, and Aslı Iğsız. Thanks also to Elisabetta Carfagna at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, for alerting me to more global trends in agricultural data, and to Sinan Ciddi and Paul Levin for their invitation to present my work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Brian Silverstein is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He is the author of the book Islam and Modernity in Turkey, and articles in journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History and Cultural Anthropology. Currently, he is conducting research on Turkey's reform of statistics. He is the inaugural director of the Arizona Center for Turkish Studies at the University of Arizona.

Notes

1. Hunter, “Assembling the School,” 154.

2. Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, 35.

3. Babül, “Training Bureaucrats, Practicing for Europe”; Navaro-Yashin, Yael. “The Materiality of Sovereignty”; Öncüler, Globalization and the Networks of Expertise in Turkey.

4. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.

5. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine.

6. See also Barry and Slater, The Technological Economy; Mitchell, Rule of Experts.

7. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 259–60. In his lectures on neoliberalism, Foucault has a fascinating discussion of its career in postwar Germany. He refers to Eucken's 1952 work on agriculture, which he proposed to govern through a “framework policy,” that is to say, not through direct interventions in what seem to be agricultural processes themselves, but rather through policies relating to “population, technology, training and education, the legal system, the availability of land, the climate.” In other words, “governmental intervention must be light at the level of economic processes themselves, so it must be heavy when it is a matter of this technical, scientific, legal, geographic, let's say, broadly, social factors which increasingly become the object of governmental intervention” (The Birth of Biopolitics, 140–1).

8. Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers; Porter, Trust in Numbers.

9. Murray Li, Will to Improve.

10. Hacking, Representing and Intervening.

11. “Hayatta en hakiki mürşit ilimdir, fenndir. İlim ve fennin dışında mürşit aramak gaflettir, dalalettir.” [The truest guide in life is science. Seeking a guide beside science is negligence and error.] Shortened to “The truest guide in life is science” in the large epigraph above the entry gate to the Ankara University faculty of Languages, History and Geography.

12. The latest budget figures I was able to find date from 2010. ERAWATCH, Platform on Research and Innovation Policies and Systems.

13. The prominence of engineers in Turkish society and—especially after the 1960s—politics has been noted. See Göle, Mühendisler ve İdeoloji.

14. To be sure, this can also be an asset to those doing research on statistics; besides the issue of their “manipulation”, they are not usually considered an obviously “political” topic, and as the stakes are perceived to be low, the intensity of debate about them is similarly low.

15. In 2009, the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP was revised from 3.7 to 12.5 percent, and then again to 15.4 percent. The EU defines “excessive” budget deficit as 3 percent.

16. See his discussion in Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, 217–26.

17. Hacking, Taming of Chance, 2.

18. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.

19. Pamuk, “Agriculture and Economic Development in Turkey, 1870–2000”; İlkkaracan and Tunalı, “Agricultural Transformation and the Rural Labor Market in Turkey”.

20. Keyder and Yenal, “Rural Transformation Trends.”

21. Ibid.

22. Güven, “Reforming Sticky Institutions.”

23. See Rose, Powers of Freedom, on encouraging individuals to be ‘enterprising’ as a modality of liberal governance.

24. Food and Agriculture Office, Action Plan.

25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

26. Ibid., 136–8.

27. Power, Audit Society.

28. On cultures of audit, see Power, Audit Society and Strathern, Audit Cultures.

29. Europa press release, “Positive EU-Turkey Agenda.”

30. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics.

31. Hacking, “Making up People.”