This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant will fund research on connections between the emergence of national statistics and the processes of nation-state formation in Canada and Israel-Palestine in the early 20th century. Most work on the topic has located statistics as a tool of the state and shown how this tool is used to enhance the rationalization of the nation-state and to invent society. This study shows this is happening, but also demonstrates the reverse: how statistics constitutes itself through the state. Paradoxically, the study shows how state creation of a bureau of statistics contributed to development of a statistical scientific community that tried to dissociate itself from politics. The goal of the proposed research is to describe the emergence of official statistics as intertwined with the consolidation of the nation-state, and with the construction of official statistics as an objective body of knowledge. Since statistical practices not only reflect political processes, the project seeks to understand how different statistical styles and strategies helped shape power relations in both societies. The project will compare how state building in Canada in the early 20th century, and in Israel, before and after establishment of the state in 1948, have shaped national statistics and how they were applied. The comparison is based on the fact that both countries are post-colonial societies that were once part of the British Empire, and both have a history of conflict between major ethnic and national groups. Their status as erstwhile British colonies has resulted in resemblances in institutional characteristics and how scientific practices were employed. This study will focus on the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Canada, and in Israel, the Central Bureau of Statistics.
Intellectual Merits Treating these bureaus as objects of inquiry can contribute to the Science and Technology Studies literature in several ways. STS has reconceptualized universality as the result of successfully extending local socio-technical constructions rather than as discovery of a priori conditions. Analysis of a central bureau of national statistics is a study of a local institution that extends its knowledge, political, economic and demographic, and its epistemological infrastructure, beyond national boundaries. By applying STS tools to examine the intersection between science and the state, this project will illustrate that the relationship is not merely one of dependence on the government, but also a source of state legitimacy and a basis of public action. Since the Canadian census became a model for Israel, the study show that the flow of knowledge and methods was not mainly between metropolis and colony but also around the periphery, as different states and territories tried to come to terms with similar problems of knowledge and administration.
Broader Impacts The broader impact of this study is in its ambition to comprehend the political impact of different epistemological tools, mainly statistical, in shaping state policies towards minorities. Assuming that the Canadian model of dealing with ethnic conflicts was more successful than the Israeli, that would mark the differences between the two countries in developing national statistics and could help explain why the Canadian model of dealing with ethnic conflicts differs from the Israeli one. This project will illustrate that statistical knowledge and practices have the power to institutionalize and deepen ethnic conflicts, as has happened in the Israeli, or to moderate them, as perhaps in the Canadian case.
