Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Although the production of national spaces, citizens, and populations through enumerative practices has been well explored in a variety of disciplines, anthropological methods and analysis can help to illuminate the everyday practices of enumeration, their unexpected consequences, and the co-construction of identities through these processes by both the ‘‘counted’’ and the ‘‘counters.’’ The authors in this special issue illustrate how enumeration inflects lived experiences, produces subjectivities, and reconfigures governance. Focusing on the spatial, temporal, ideological, and affective dimensions of the techniques of enumeration, the authors also provide insights into the multiple forms of biopolitical expertise and knowledge that accumulate legitimacy …

Using ethnographic data, I focus on how people living with HIV/AIDS in Miami, Florida come to know and govern themselves through quantification and categories of risk, race, and ethnicity. I explore the various levels of surveillance that structure HIV/AIDS prevention programs and highlight how ‘‘numerical subjectivities’’ circulate, how identity and subjectivity become entangled in numerical considerations, and how particular groups of people come to be identified with certain diseases such as HIV/AIDS. By examining the deployment and interpretation of AIDS statistical data among Haitians in Miami, I illustrate how identities, through categories such as ‘‘heterosexual’’ and ‘‘high risk groups,’’ circulate, …