Penny
Harvey (University of Manchester)
Producing Data to Shape a Better World –
Mathematics and Engineering in Southern Peru
This paper looks at how civil engineers engaged
in road construction projects produce ‘data’ as the basis from which to make
decisions about how best to transform the material world. Such data are crucial
for the facilitation of the unfolding of rational, technical practice. They are
painstakingly produced to facilitate ‘good’ choices in how to proceed in
projects which are always highly political and overtly contentious. The
abstraction of number is a crucial element in the production of descriptive
accounts and of predictive models. The value of accurate numerical data lies
not only in the possibilities they afford for the generation of reliable and
stable structures. Such data are also needed to detach the engineers from the
complex social worlds in which they work. Data in this respect are produced to
transcend the social and to produce a reliable platform for building public
trust. For in so far as decisions are taken in relation to the principles of
mathematics, there is no need to bring in the endlessly proliferating
complexity of social context to render such decisions intelligible or
justifiable. Ethnographic work in the field laboratories of road construction
projects in Peru reveal how difficult it is to divest number of the social in
contexts where mathematics is assigned a social role. By following the
processes of disaggregation and re-aggregation to which the soil from which
roads are built is subjected, the paper discusses how engineers manage the
relation between number and substance and the work that mathematics does in
papering over the gaps in a bumpy and fractured social world in order to
produce the sense of singularity on which their reasoned intervention is
premised.
