Identifying Kin Biometric Belonging and Databased Governance in Colonial South Asia and Postcolonial Pakistan

Abstract

This dissertation is an inquiry into practices of identification in their historical and contemporary form. Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), which produces Pakistan’s biometric-based identity card, is the subject of this historical ethnography. NADRA integrates and verifies data from individuals as well as kin units to determine who is and is not a Pakistani citizen. Identifying Kin develops and uses the concept of “datafied kinship” to describe how NADRA deploys blood relations to construct a databased model of individuation. While this technology is geared at producing a singular identifiable individual, this dissertation argues that such an individual can only ever be constituted through its relations with others. This apparent paradox—where one is constituted through many—animates this dissertation’s concern with how identification as securitized state practice becomes a transformative force in social relations, including and especially in the domain of kinship. Whereas most scholarship on biometric technology analytically centers the individual body and its unique markings, Identifying Kin examines how Pakistan’s state-run identification regime uses information about kinship to redefine who counts as kin and, by extension, citizen. In so doing, it reveals how modern identification practices, historically and at present, rely on relatedness to produce uniquely identifiable individuals.

Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I trace the rise of identification technologies from early paper-based information systems through databased identification in Pakistan today. Tracking technologies across the colonial/postcolonial divide through archival work in Pakistan’s National Archives and the India Office Records, this dissertation follows the shifting landscapes of identity, identification, citizenship and governance in modern South Asia. It asks how and why certain forms of colonial governance persist while others recede. To this end, this dissertation ethnographically tracks the interconnections between governance and identification practices at the NADRA Registration Office, Headquarters, and Projects Division, as well as in three Pashtun neighborhoods in Islamabad. It traces the historical and current navigations of Pashtun migrants to show how national identification procedures reproduce the frontier as a spatial and a political category in Islamabad. I analyze how this mode of governance conditions the possibility of political and ethical claims upon a security state.

This dissertation contributes to the anthropology of bureaucracy and kinship, science and technology studies, and the history of modern South Asia in three ways. It interrogates how identification deploys relatedness to reconstitute kinship, ethnic dynamics and citizenship status in ways neither intended nor imagined. By attending to internal shifts in frontier rule and postcolonial history in Pakistan, it foregrounds the emergence of new governance techniques and reconsiders legacies of taxonomic representation beyond the historical classificatory schemas so vital to imperial rule, knowledge making and identity in colonial South Asia. Lastly, it ethnographically engages the recursive process by which Pashtun migrants shape protocols of identification and surveillance technology in Islamabad. Thus, this dissertation offers historical and anthropological insights into the comparative implications of biometric identification, networked databases, and surveillance technologies in everyday life.