Statistics and population counts are a ubiquitous part of the landscape of modern life. In the last two decades the confluence of a number of theoretical developments—poststructuralist political theory, particularly studies of governmentality; science and technology studies; and critical demography—together with the generalized interest in the politics of representation have paved the way for an interdisciplinary inquiry into statistical measures—their history, uses, and political effects. Census and Identity makes a valuable contribution to this emergent body of work, bringing together a well- integrated collection of studies that focus on that most iconic form of state-sponsored enumeration: the national census. For anthropologists interested in statecraft and the social construction of collective identities, this book is a must-read.

The editors offer a lucid introductory overview of the analytical approach and central questions that tie this interdisciplinary collection together. States, as they note, have been counting in a variety of ways for a very long time. But what motivates the census of the modern state—the regular, periodic enumeration of individuals we know today—is not only an interest in extracting resources but also an attempt to create an ordered map of the population. It is the worldview generated by this map and its consequences for collective identities that occupy center stage in this volume. Counting, as the editors explain, inevitably involves reductionism and simplification of a messy and complex reality. But along what lines does a census choose to carve up a mass of people? What does a state census want to know (or not know) and why? The six case studies approach these questions for the most part from a social constructionist perspective that rejects statistical realism—the notion that the object to be counted exists prior to and outside of statistics. Contributors historicize the making of census categories and approach these as complex processes of political struggle and debate.

The first three chapters, by Melissa Nobles, Calvin Goldscheider, and Dominique Arel, take a look at census data gathering on race, ethnicity, and language, respectively, in a variety of countries. Nobles, for example, offers an insightful comparison of the intersection between racial discourses and census counts in the United States and Brazil. Her analysis shows the very different ways race has been tabulated in the two countries and also makes a convincing case that census bureaus need to be recognized and studied as active participants in racial politics. The comparative perspective of this and other chapters helps to illuminate the influence political ideologies have on the kinds of official statistics gathered. Goldschieder, for example, shows that in Israel, where immigrants are expected to be absorbed into a common Israeli identity, ethnic (but not religious) cleavages disappear from the official record, whereas in Canada, the ideology of multiculturalism has done just the opposite, encouraging a proliferation of possible ethnic categories. Part of what plagues census counts (and makes them fascinating to study) are the controversies and meanings invested in them. Arel shows this well in his comparison of language questions in national censuses. Language has often been used as a surrogate for nationality, leading to quite intense debates over what to measure: the language(s) learned in the home (but perhaps now forgotten or repressed) or the language habitually spoken in the present?

Readers will encounter cases where certain kinds of counting are resisted, as Alain Blum shows in his analysis of ethnicity in France, and also where they have been an accomplice to deadly violence. The latter situation is explored in a gripping article by Peter Uvin on the history of the census in Rwanda and Burundi, where population counts managed to mask the massive ethnic genocide. David Abramson closes the volume with a superb analysis of the history of census taking in Uzbekistan during and after the Soviet regime. Of all the contributors, he and Uvin speak most directly to the central question of the volume: namely, the relationship between census questions and categories and collective identity formation. Both argue that the effects of the census are difficult to isolate from other categorizing practices and policies that precede and interact with it. As Abramson says, people do not “magically” come to see themselves as having a collective national identity simply from answering a census question. But census designs can be instrumental in contributing to a political culture that frames social experience in terms of nationality, for example, while downplaying other ways of drawing alliances. Understanding the impact the census may have requires at the very least a broader analysis of how these categorizing practices are embedded in the institutions and policies of the state and beyond. For, as Uvin and Abramson are keen to point out, development agencies and international NGOs increasingly are key actors in technologies of counting, imposing on newly independent and impoverished nations standardized systems of counting and categorizing whose effects can be felt, as Abramson’s study shows, at quite intimate levels of neighborhood life. A fitting close to the volume, Abramson’s study is especially relevant to anthropologists in pointing to the utility of ethnography as a tool for answering the very question the book seeks to pose: how officially sanctioned terms of identity do or do not make their ways into the everyday lives of social actors once the census taker has left.