N o t e s a N d C o m m e N ta ry

on the Crafting of Population Knowledge

SuSan GreenhalGh

the field of population study offers an exceptional site for thinking about questions of discipline and disciplinarity. accommodating scholars from sociology, economics, anthropology, and many other fields, population studies is perhaps the most multi-disciplinary of the social sciences. i feel fortunate to have stumbled onto the terrain of population just as i was finishing my graduate work in anthropology and china studies. in ways i never could have anticipated, the study of population has been extraordinarily productive for me as an anthropologist. at the same time, anthropology has been highly productive for me as a population specialist. and without a doubt, china has been enormously productive for me as an anthropologist and a population specialist. this occasion honors the exemplary work of olivia Schieffelin nordberg in the writing and editing of population thought.1 the focus on writing underscores the craft aspect of population study, the generally unremarked truth that behind our well-turned-out publications are particular, historically situated humans using craft-type techniquesscouring the literature for ideas, manipulating the data, reworking the textto coax population knowledge into existence. in the spirit of the occasion, i want to reflect on this craft aspect of population research. i want to talk not about the what, the findings, which are the usual focus of scholarly talks. instead, i want to focus on the how, questions of technique, of how population knowledge is assembled, out of what, in what contexts, and for what purposes. in the mode of science studies, i want to look behind the finished product to the messy human process by which it gets made, focusing in particular on how different disciplines interact in the making of population thought. Because i know it best, i want to use my own history of population knowledge-making as a case study.

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additionally, two personal concerns motivate this exercise. First, people often ask what kind of scholarship it is that i produce. my findings generally intrigue, but people are baffled by the circuitous route by which i seem to have reached them. whatever it is, my work does not fit standard categories into which knowledge is usually sorted. i want to have an answer for them. Second, i feel a responsibility to my students, the next generation of population specialists, who are asking: what can we take from this body of work on china? how can we carry out the study of population now? my hope is that a careful study of the making of this one body of population thought might help me accomplish these personal goals as well as tell us something about how population knowledge more generally is made. Standard accounts of population science depict it as the steady, systematic accumulation of knowledge about population dynamics, and their causes and effects, by disinterested, objective observers who build on the findings of others in the field to continuously expand the scope of population knowledge. as authors of articles and grant proposals in population studies, we often use such a rhetoric of science to describe how population knowledge advances. although alternative histories of the field suggest that both advocacy and value orientations have been intrinsic to the development of population study (demeny 1988; hodgson 1983, 1988, 1991; Greenhalgh 1996), the conventional rhetoric of steady scientific progress continues to dominate discussions of the creation of population thought. i could use such a narrative to describe my own work. looking back from the vantage point of today, it would be easy to tell a seamless story about my work of the last twenty-five years as a steady accretion of knowledge about how china governs its population. indeed, that is how i generally narrate my professional biography. But telling such a story would not be completely honest. Far from guiding my work all along, that label emerged only in 2004 when i was trying to think up a title for a book, which my co-author and i ended up calling Governing Chinas Population (Greenhalgh and winckler 2005). once attached to my work, the word governance recast my entire intellectual project, from the politics of population, a broad field that centered contestation and negotiation between groups, to governance, a narrower yet more pointed terrain that centered the governing strategies of the state and other actors. the new term actually fit what i had been doing, but it reorganized my thinking about it and how i presented it. more important, perhaps, it introduced a new family of concepts that reoriented my work from that point on. typical or not, my research on population has been anything but steady, disinterested, and internally driven. instead, it has been topically disorderly, profoundly personal, and deeply imprinted by larger histories that swept me and everyone else along with them. let me start at the beginning. everyones work, mine included, has been influenced by a number of subjective factors. in the language of science studies scholar donna har-

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away, our knowledge is inevitably situated, shaped by the social, intellectual, and historical locations in which it is made (haraway 1988). Biography is one such force. my writings reflect my values, social positioning (gender, class, ethnicity, and so on), and personal experiences. intellectual forerunners are another. Particular people, specific authors, even identifiable books i encountered along the way have greatly influenced how i understand population, which questions i have chosen to ask, and what concepts i have developed to answer them. Finally, historical positioningtime and placeis important. my writings constitute one of my generations responses to the distinctive set of population issues it encountered at particular historical moments. Personal biography, intellectual heritage, and generational affiliation have all led my research to follow not the straight road of the science narrative, but a winding path of real-world contingency.

Formative influences
Before joining the Population council in the early 1980s, i had virtually no exposure to the study of population. when i entered the population world, as a researcher in the councils center for Policy Studies, i joined a remarkable interdisciplinary team dedicated to the study of population issues, broadly defined, with a focus on questions relevant to public policy. unlike those unfortunate assistant professors in academia, who had to play by the rules of their disciplines to get tenure, i was not bound by the conventions of any particular discipline. certainly, i was not constrained by the rules of population studies, since i had no formal training in the field. For me, no disciplinary rules applied. instead, i had the opportunityrare indeedto pursue any topic i deemed important, using whatever concepts and methods seemed productive. i had the chance, in short, to innovate an approach to population study essentially on my own. there was only one guiding thought, as the chinese might put it, and that was center director Paul demenys oft-heard entreaty to Bring glory to the council! Particular individuals whom i encountered around or shortly before that timein person or through their writingshaped the kind of population research that i would pursue. of the many influences on me in those formative years, two stand out. in his book The Challenge of World Poverty, the economist Gunnar myrdal (1970) laid out ways social science research could address the big questions of the day. this book sent me to graduate school with a clear mission. i was also inspired by margaret mead. long before i met her in graduate school at columbia, i had been deeply influenced by her autobiography, Blackberry Winter (1972), which showed how an anthropologist studying ordinary people in faraway places could become a public intellectual, who addressed important issues in ways both the public and policymakers could grasp. it was meads book that inspired me to go into anthropology.

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with its ethnographic methods involving fieldwork and engagement with ordinary peoplenot just numbersanthropology held much more appeal to me than did, say, development economics. in demography proper, researchers often start with the data. the datasets available determine the questions that can be asked and, in turn, the answers that can be found. i came away from those formative encounters with a quite different approach. i would start not with the data, but with the questions and then, in typical anthropological fashion, gather the data i would need to answer them. and it could not be just any questions; it had to be the big questions of the day, the questions that mattered, including those that fell outside the scope of population studies proper. as an anthropologist, i prioritized those questions and issues that concerned the well-being of ordinary people, especially underprivileged or disadvantaged groups. looking back, i see the trajectory of my writing on population not as a history of findings, but as a history of questions. what questions would i ask? with the advantage of hindsight, i can see clearly the formative role of the historical context, both of world affairs and of trends in contemporary social and political thought. my training in chinese studies would mean that the world affairs of greatest interest to me were those concerning the Peoples Republic and its momentous transformations since the death of mao. with its vast population, controversial birth planning program, and tumultuous political history, china was an intoxicating place to be studying population.

The question of coercion

the entire trajectory of my research on population was shaped by two historical accidents: first, i happened to enter the field a few years after the one-child policy was put in place; and second, the introduction of that draconian policy coincided with the rise of the new Right in american politics. as those who lived through the Reagan era know, the one-child policy became a huge and hugely controversial issue in american politics. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, western journalists troubled by ethical violations in the chinese program created a compelling, yet partial, narrative focusing on the coercion imposed by a cruel communist state on a hapless population (for some details, see Greenhalgh 2010, pp. 36, 101102). in the early to mid-1980s, this story was given sharp new teeth by an emerging coalition of conservative Republicans and right-to-life advocates, many with strong anticommunist sentiments, who made chinas policy their cause clbre in a very public crusade against abortion at home (crane and Finkle 1989). the intense politicization of the issue by the new Right would mean that the questions of greatest concern to me, as a budding china population specialist who was an american, were first and foremost political ones. From its inception, my study of population would be a politics of population.

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Reading the news from new York, i saw a rare opportunity for me, as an anthropologist and a china specialist, to find out what was really going on. instead of seeing chinas policy through the prism of the conservative foreign policy narrative that dominated the media and political discourse, i would be able to see the policy through the eyes of chinese themselvesnot only of elite policymakers and scholars in Beijing, but also of ordinary peasants in villages around the country. From the beginning, population for me was not a matter of numbers. instead, it was a matter of uSchina relations; of the nature and workings of the chinese state; and, at the local level, of women and the family, the sites at which state policy connected up to individual bodies and lives. clearly, the first question that compelled answers was that of coercion hardly a standard demographic topic. was chinas government in fact using coercionthat is, physical forceto compel couples to limit themselves to one child? were the conservative commentators correct to depict the onechild policy as evidence of a brutal totalitarian state with no concern for the health and physical safety of chinese women and unborn children? Because the western media reports told only part of the storythough of course an important partand because they overgeneralized from individual anecdotes to the whole country, i had doubts. a related set of questions concerned the nature and workings of coercion. if the regime relied on force, whether blunt or subtle, how did it produce consent? more generally, what mix of methods was actually being used to implement the policy? if the question of coercion emerged from the political context, it was broadened and given sophisticated formulation by a new body of social theory. in anthropology and other, more humanistic social sciences, by the early to mid-1980s the ideas of michel Foucault had become increasingly influential. although i did not read Foucault seriously until the early 1990s, after i left the council, his ideas became enormously important for me as i worked through the data i had gathered over many years. Briefly, Foucaults pathbreaking work on the history of the modern west suggested that population was a central terrain of politics and governance in the modern era (especially Foucault 1978; also Foucault 1997a and b; more recently, Foucault 2010). at the time i took up his work, hardly anyone had followed his lead in studying what he called bio-politics, a field of politics concerning the administration and optimization of the vital attributes of human life, especially at the aggregate level. and china, with its gigantic apparatus of population administration aimed at speeding the nations integration into the global capitalist economy, seemed to be trying to out-Foucault Foucault, though in its own, distinctively illiberal way. this line of theorizing put another question on the agenda as well, the question of coercions effects, which speaks directly to the issue of why coercion matters. Public discussion had focused on the immediate effects

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damaged health, dashed family-building hopes, and the like. Yet critical work on the state suggested that the most important effects of huge state projects of modernization were the unintended ones (Ferguson 1990; Scott 1998). this research prompted me to look for the broader social consequences of the one-child policyfor gender relations, statesociety relations, and others that had been left out of the public debates over the policy. this set of questions preoccupied me for some fifteen to twenty years. the answers, too complex to review here, reveal a broad historical shift from what my co-author and i call leninist biopolitics, involving heavy reliance on coercive campaigns, to an increasingly neoliberal biopolitics, marked by the growing use of more indirect, market-oriented techniques that work by reshaping individual desire (Greenhalgh and winckler 2005). observers of chinas birth planning program had been so focused on the issue of coercion that they had not noticed the shiftalbeit still partialto more indirect methods. as for the consequences, beyond its effects on fertility, family size, and social suffering, the policy has remade chinas society and politics in ways no one had noticed, deepening gender and urban/rural inequalities, strengthening the state, and reshaping chinas global relations in troubling ways. the policy has been much more consequential than anyone had realized. what seems remarkable, in retrospect, is how simply posing fresh questions about china exposed the existence of social and political arenas that no one had thought to look for.

The question of categories

a second big question, one i pursued for a few years, was theoretically driven. as part of the social-constructionist movement in the human sciences, researchers across many fields have become interested in the productivity of social categoriesin how the categories into which social life is sorted for accounting, scientific, and governing purposes tend to produce the very things they are meant to organize, measure, and govern (e.g., hacking 1986; Bowker and Star 1999). Racial/ethnic categories in censuses are a prime example (Kertzer and arel 2002). i had not given much thought to the question of categories before around 1998, when i was invited to give a paper at an iuSSP conference on the topic. thinking about the chinese case, i had one of those rare aha moments. it dawned on me that the central category in chinas birth planning programplanned births versus unplanned births (that is, authorized births that occurred inside the state plan versus unauthorized births that were outside the state plan)produced not just the planned singletons who would lead the nations modernization effort, but also a class of births unplanned and unwanted by the state. how many such unplanned infants were there? what became of them? no one in the research field had asked such questions. nor did the chinese state want them to. the birth planning

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establishment counted unplanned births, but no agency of the state was responsible for tracking what happened when those unplanned infants turned into unplanned children and then adults. unrepresented in the statistics, these peopledubbed black children or black householdsformed a black hole in the states social accounting scheme. with no household registration, these youngsters had no access to the benefits of citizenship and faced a host of daunting existential dilemmas. this line of research led to the discovery of a huge class of what i call unplanned personstens of millions strongwhose existence had never been brought to light (Greenhalgh 2003, 2004).2

The question of policy origins

a third big question i asked is one that seems obvious, yet had never been pursued in a serious and systematic way. this is the question of the origins of the one-child policy: how did the chinese communist Party come up with the patently bizarre idea of limiting all couples in a country of one billion to a single child? this question was rarely asked, i imagine, because the answer was too obvious, although different groups had different obvious answers. throughout the 1980s and 1990s most people assumed that the one-child policy was the product of a power-obsessed communist state; a wise response to chinas excessive population size and growth rate; or some combination of the two. no problem, no question to ask. the origins question proved extraordinarily fruitful, yet i cant quite say how i came up with it in 2001. it did not come from the media or a big political development in china or uSchina relations. at most i can say that a series of things came together at a particular time to yield that question. i had just finished another project on a very different subject and was casting about for a new question to ask about chinas population politics. i was searching for a topic that was interesting anthropologically and that i could address with data i had already collected over some fifteen years of doing fieldwork in china. what did interesting anthropologically mean? after several years in an anthropology department, i had developed a serious interest in science studies and in studies of governance beyond the state (esp. dean 1999; Rose 1999). these emerging fields of inquiry saw science as humanly made and governance as deeply shaped by political thought, especially of a scientific sort. Put differently, both scientists and scientific ideas play a big role in policy and in governance more generally. inspired by Foucault, a group of mostly political sociologists interested in governance in this broad sense were writing what they called histories of the present (miller and Rose 2008). their project was to focus on a troubling aspect of contemporary life that was taken for granted and make it strange and unfamiliar. then, through an historical retracing, they would show how it was humanly produced, the result of a particular history, not just how things are.

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thinking about this new kind of history-writing project in the chinese context led me to wonder how chinas one-child policy had come into being. was it really just a product of a power-obsessed, modernity-driven state? what was the role of chinas population scientistspart of the so-called governance beyond the statein its making? From many years of engaging with chinas population specialists, i knew they played a central role of some sort in the policys making. moreover, i could answer that question because i had years of fieldnotes from my conversations with them during my decade as a council researcher utterly preoccupied with every twist and turn in chinese population politics. it was a perfect match of theory and data, which i later supplemented with documentary research and focused interviews with key insiders in china. although it took several years to figure out the tangled, stillhard-to-believe story behind the making of the one-child policy, the pursuit of that simple question, through the analytic lens of science studies, unearthed a subterranean mangle of science and politics that no one had imagined existed (Greenhalgh 2008). the one-child policy turned out to be a product not of communist logic (though that permeated the policys enforcement), but of western cybernetic science, which was sinified to fit the chinese context.

Concluding reflections
So, then, what have i been doing in this body of research on china? i think of what ive put together not as a stable sub-discipline, but as a loose, flexible, and opportunistic assemblageof concerns, logics, techniques, methods, and ethicsthat has been guided by some of the big questions posed by chinas post-mao transformations and global ascent. Reflecting the context in which it was born, my research has centered on problems of politics and governance, constituting a terrain of inquiry i call the governance of population. taking an opportunistic approach to the use of disciplines has been extraordinarily fruitful in my research. while my work has been quintessentially anthropologicalin its questions, concepts, and sensibilitiesi have located myself in the interstices between disciplines, drawing elements of this assemblage from any field that offered useful tools. For logicsconcepts, hypotheses, narrativesive borrowed shamelessly from many and diverse fields: from the more conventional disciplines of political science and policy studies; from the more critical arenas of political sociology, science studies, and feminist studies; and finally, of course, from my regional home terrain of china studies. ive developed a multi-method, largely qualitative approach, borrowing techniques not only from anthropology, but also from history, media studies, and so forth, and innovating specific methods to answer the questions at hand. i see this approach to population research not as inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinaryterms that imply the use of several disciplines, each retaining its defining characteristics. i see it rather as post-disciplinary, a situ-

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ation in which disciplines no longer matter except as sources of knowledgeproducing elements. unlike disciplines and inter-disciplines, i see population studies as a post-disciplinary assemblage that is neither unified nor stable, with coherent boundaries; instead, its contents and boundaries are flexible, varying with the practitioner and the research question being explored. Finally, all these inquiries have been driven by fundamentally political and ethical concernsmost centrally, a deep concern about the impact of the one-child policy on the lives of ordinary chinese, especially the most vulnerable groups: rural people, women, infant girls, black children, and now poor rural men who cannot find brides. i see this scholarship as a form of political critique, both a witnessing to some of our times more deplorable moments and a deconstructing of the present aimed at showing that the world we live in now has been humanly created and so can be recreated in ways we find more just. this analysis of one persons research trajectory supports alternative histories of the whole population field that show a strong shaping role of historical contexts and personal values in the making of population thought (esp. hodgson 1991). if anything, the role of such forces emerges with even greater clarity in a single career. if my history is typicaland i think it is typical in at least some waysit shows that population knowledge is more clearly shaped by contingency (broad historical trends as well as personal positioning) and sheer serendipity than is generally recognized. if we looked at the trajectory of other individual careers, or of entire sub-fields, such as the population of sub-Saharan africa, or of low fertility, i believe we would see the same shaping role of personal positioning and larger histories in the scholarship that gets done. telling more of these histories would help us recognize the diverse pathways by which population knowledge is made and the different purposes for which it is pursued. what then should i tell my students who wonder how they can pursue the governance or politics of population now? how might they apply this assemblage kind of approach to understand other population issues in different parts of todays world? let me suggest just a few orienting principles. i would urge them to attend closely to the question of questions: which ones we ask, where they come from, what work they do, and, most important, for whom they matter. in my own case, simply posing novel questions led to unanticipatedin some cases quite surprisingdiscoveries, and opened up whole terrains of social life that no one (in the research or governing fields) even knew existed. in turn, the field of population thoughtwhat counts as populationhas grown. as a general theoretical orientation or method, i would encourage students of population politics to write more histories of the present. By showing that todays social arrangements are not inevitable, such histories would suggest pathways by which better futures can be created.

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i would hope also to foster a self-reflexivity, a habit of turning the critical gaze inward that is nurtured in anthropology. constantly questioning our own assumptions, methods, and politics not only fosters a sense of humility in us, it forces us to see the situatedness of our work, the influence of our own histories, training, and biases on the research we do. i would urge them to openly acknowledge the craft nature of their work. instead of aiming for disinterested objectivity, they would embrace the inevitably subjective nature of their work and try to understand how their own personal positioning colors the topics they choose, the approaches they prefer, and the results they reach. Such work seeks not a complete view, but rather a partial perspective that is locatable and so accountable for what it claims.

Notes
1 Remarks by the author on receiving the olivia Schieffelin nordberg award for excellence in writing and editing in the population sciences. the awards ceremony occurred on 28 november 2011 at the Population council in new York. 2 Some groups within the black population had been studied. a good example is abandoned children (e.g., Johnson 1996).

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