Zehra Hashmi

My research explores technologies of identification in their historical and contemporary forms. The case of South Asia—with a colonial regime historically invested in classifying and enumerating population, and yet never developing adequate techniques to identify unique individuals—presents an ideal site to interrogate the relationship between identity, identification, citizenship and more recently digital personhood. Drawing on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, my dissertation, Identifying Kin: Biometric Beloning and Databased Governance from Colonial South Asia to Postcolonial Pakistan, argues that modern identification practices relied not on technologies directed at discrete individuals (and their unique bodily characteristics) but on documenting their genealogical and kinship relations. I trace the rise of identification from early paper-based information systems, such as colonial registration regimes, through digital identification practices in South Asia today. Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), one of the largest national identity databases in the world that produces Pakistan’s biometric-based identity card, forms the subject of my historical ethnography.

In my work, I develop the concept of “datafied kinship” to describe how NADRA, in a post 9/11 context saturated with security concerns, deploys citizens’ kinship data to structure its database. In this schema, biometric technology only fulfils a partial function. Coding kinship, in order to produce individual identity, reconstitutes bonds of kinship and ethnicity in ways neither imagined nor intended. It is commonly assumed that an identity database flattens or erases otherwise messy lived social relations. Instead, I argue that this state-led system puts into motion its own set of emergent social and political processes. Foregrounding the politics and ethics of identification technologies, I examine the historical and current navigations of migrants, specifically those from the north-west tribal areas of Pakistan who now live in Islamabad, as they make political claims. Tracking technologies and practices across the colonial/postcolonial divide, this project pushes past the binary of continuity and rupture that usually frames historical enquiry into decolonization to explore the shifting landscapes of identity, identification and governance in modern South Asia. In doing so, my research offers insights into the forces that shape our daily informational lives, with comparative implications on the role of biometric identification, networked databases, and surveillance technologies across the globe.

• 20th C South Asia
• Science and Technology Studies
• Anthropology of Governance and Bureaucracy
• Kinship Studies