Presented by the IHGC Personhoods Lab, this talk examines how and why Pakistan’s national biometric-based identification regime came to use an individual’s blood relations to construct and track uniquely identified persons. Through the concept of datafied kinship, it proposes that the uses of kin networks in Pakistan’s identity database, as information, can reconfigure our understanding of contemporary identification practices at large and what they mean for making individuals: individual identity is generated and tracked through relatedness, not unique bodily characteristics, or biometrics alone. To demonstrate this, it first examines how the database design works to construct personhood through kin, and specifically how it excludes individuals on the basis of their kin through technological categories such as that of the “family intruder.” Second, it shows how this mode of individual identification differs and departs from the longstanding classificatory schemas that were so foundational to taxonomizing identity along the lines of caste, tribe, and religion in South Asia. It traces this diverging logic—between classification and individuation—to the emergence of individuating technologies in 1970s Pakistan, in the aftermath of civil war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan and during the escalating Cold War in the region. In so doing, it illustrates how the political stakes of Pakistan’s identification regime lie not only in its new possibilities for surveillance, a function of its individuating and tracking technology, or its classificatory refusal, but their interconnections.
Zehra Hashmi (University of Pennsylvania) studies identification technologies in South Asia and their intersection with surveillance, kinship and governance. Her current book project is a historical ethnography of Pakistan’s national identity database. It follows how this information system uses data as a kin-making substance to redefine who counts as kin, and ultimately, a citizen. Her work brings an anthro-historical understanding to bear on debates concerning a central feature of life today: digital identification.
Hasmi's research examines how the individual became identifiable and the technological history of this process in South Asia. With an interdisciplinary training in Anthropology, History, and Science and Technology Studies, she draws on multiple methodologies to unsettle disciplinary boundaries. Hashmi follows how historical practices of identification congealed into technological objects such as the identity card and the identity database. She examines how seemingly separate domains, such as the family and the state, leak into one another over time. Her work incorporates the practice of moving between ethnography and archives to trace the longstanding interconnections between individual identity, kinship, and informational technologies of the postcolonial state.