This talk uses ethnographic and archival materials to examine the identification technologies that made individuals trackable and securitization ubiquitous in Pakistan. It explores the production of “datafiedkinship”: how blood relations come to be deployed by Pakistan’s national identity database to construct uniquely identified individuals. The figure of the “family intruder” emerges as a technological category in the database, as well as one that is negotiated by Pashtun migrants in Islamabad—the direct targets of militarization and surveillance in Pakistan. In turn, this identification regime builds on a longer history of kinship’s role as a scalar technology that enabled individuation in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Parsing the layered imperial history of technologies that weaponize kinship, I argue, can lead us to reconsider the relationship between identity, information and statecraft.

Dr. Zehra Hashmi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University. Her research is a study of identification technologies in Pakistan at the intersection of surveillance, kinship, migration, and colonial and postcolonial governance. She received her PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in 2021.

Sponsored by the Anthropology Department and the Center for Visual Anthropology.