Biometric Kinmaking: Identification, Security and Belonging in Urban Pakistan

• In Event: A New/Old Technology for Governance? Questioning Big Data Surveillance - I: Big Data State & Private Enterprise

Abstract

Following the US led “war on terror”, Pakistan saw a proliferation of conventional securitization procedures: military check points, barbed wire fences, and growing walls. Equally pervasive—while less visible—was the emergence of digital infrastructures of security. The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) began its operations in 2000 by launching an electronic biometric-based identity card. NADRA claims to be one of the largest centralized databases in the world, hosting data from over 96 million citizens. More than just connecting a name and a body, each ID record has its own unique identifying number that connects its bearer with a vast set of other databases. Determining who someone is, namely identification, has been a fundamental concern for the governance and management of populations. In this case, the use of biometric technology underlines the significance of unique, bodily characteristics to determine identity. In the univocal biometrics’ claims to identification, this paper asks other non-biometric practices and processes of identification might be obscured? And what are its implications? Do individuals have to be isolated from others in order to be identified? Or are their very ties to other persons (such as their kin) revealing of who they are? In this paper, I hope to demonstrate that biometric technologies, along with the databases they rely on and produce, are necessarily “kinned” to perform their function. For this purpose, I draw on ethnographic material on state-citizen interactions and kinship practices, as refracted through identification procedures at the NADRA’s Mega-Centre in Islamabad, Pakistan. In particular, I focus on the role of fraught familial tensions and documentations of kin genealogies, of Pashtun migrants in particular, as they come to be entangled with identification. I argue that biometric technologies, which appear to be focused on the individual, are able to perform their governance function, by design, through deploying and shaping social, particularly kin, relations. At the same time, I will illustrate that in relying upon relatedness, identification practices are themselves compelled to move across registers (moral, legal, religious) and are thus continually vulnerable to contestation and transformation. In this vein, I will reflect on the implications of “kinned biometrics” for marginal communities’ concerns and strategies aimed at inclusion, access to citizenship and urban belonging.

Author

• Zehra Hashmi, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor