The Social Lives of Numbers: Statistics, Reform and the Remaking of Rural Life in Turkey.

• Author: Celenk, Bengu

By Brian Silverstein

Palgrave Macmillan: Springer Nature Singapore, 2020, 125 pages, [euro]49.99, ISBN: 9789811591952

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 analysis-based agricultural reforms implemented in the agricultural sector, based on Turkiye'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 Turkiye'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).

In particular, Silverstein, a scholar in anthropology with research interests in Turkiye, Europe, and the Middle East, questions why the "statistics" chapter was opened in the Turkiye-EU negotiating processes in this study and ponders the EU's expectations for reform in this regard. In other words, he emphasizes the critical necessity of statistics in terms of comparability in Turkiye's harmonization effort within the framework of EU norms and standards. However, in this book, he refers to the statistics reforms as "not 'neutral' in the effects they have, and that they might even be seen as 'having' politics." (1)

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