Dissimilar Coffee Frontiers: Mobilizing Labor and Land in the Lake Kivu Region, Congo and Rwanda (1918–1960/62)

Abstract

someone to tow us out of some unholy mud. Here, Biruk looks at the logistics of doing fieldwork in a place like Malawi, including the vehicles necessary to undertake research, return visits, visits to check data, and the frustration of an informant changing answers mid-stream. In a neat play on the term “imposter syndrome,” experienced by many (but not exclusively) women academics, Biruk describes how people would assume the identity of a potential informant in order to extract some notional benefit from the survey process. Chapter 5 is surprisingly poignant, as it points to the afterlives of collected data, when that data is necessary for the construction of evidence-based policy (168). In this chapter, Biruk shows how some data comes to be understood as empirical fact, while other data is too wild and messy to make it in the “clean” world of policy formulation. She also examines how even empirical data that survey teams have struggled to collect can be trumped by the aggregated (and sometimes erroneous) knowledge of local experts. The conclusion circles back to the profound ambivalence that researchers like Biruk experience in relation to their work, as well as all the disappointment felt by researchers who see their recommendations, based on field data, rejected or not acted upon swiftly enough. The book is very readable. Biruk explains her concepts well, and alternates between what she experienced in the field, with vignettes based on field experience; first-person accounts from office and field-based researchers; and a discussion of survey participants. This style of writing helps to break up some of the denser theoretical text, including references to the conceptualization of the field as contingent, colonially formed, and a more complex space than many who “do” fieldwork like to imagine. It also interrogates the politics of knowledge production, which elevate “knowledge” produced by funded researchers in the North above that produced by Malawian-based researchers, whose low levels of remuneration mean that a daily subsistence allowance (a per diem) often exceeds a monthly salary. Over the last two years, since the advent of Covid and large Covid-focused research projects, the issues she highlights have only become more stark.