Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropological Investigation of Biometric Identification

纽约大学博士候选人Vijayanka Nair在艾米丽马丁博士的指导下，提议进行研究，探索生物识别系统的文化含义。Nair将在德里、中央邦和卡纳塔克邦进行为期12个月的实地研究，以考察建设世界上最大的生物特征数据库的社会文化意义。2009年，印度政府开始向其十亿居民中的每一个人发放一个唯一身份号码，通过一个连接人口统计和生物特征的数据库来促进身份识别。（虹膜扫描，指纹，照片）居民的信息到一个十二位数的数字。通过社会和法律的人类学，以及科学和技术研究，这项博士研究有两个核心问题。首先，与注册者以及负责规划，注册和生物特征存档的政府官员合作，它问：通过这个项目，是否有独特的，新兴的个人身份概念？其次，本研究探讨了UID如何重新配置与印度国家和治理相关的理想。UID的大规模技术化是官僚、技术官僚和公众对后自由化印度国家的重新想象吗？本研究关注国家积累个人知识的新程序，从而促进对信息，道德和当代治理之间分层联系的理解。本研究将综合运用社会科学方法，包括参与观察、半结构式访谈、语篇分析和语篇分析。这项研究很重要，因为它采用了创新的民族志方法来研究我们这个时代的一个关键问题-技术化国家与个人之间的关系。资助这个项目支持社会科学家的教育。

New York University doctoral candidate, Vijayanka Nair, supervised by Dr. Emily Martin, proposes to undertake research that explores the cultural implications of biometric identification systems. Nair will conduct 12 months of field research in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka to examine the sociocultural salience of the construction of the world's largest biometric database. In 2009, the Government of India set out to issue each of its billion residents a Unique Identification Number (UID), where identification would be facilitated through a database linking the demographic and biometric (iris scans, fingerprints, photograph) information of residents to a twelve-digit number.Informed by social and legal anthropology, as well as and science and technology studies, this doctoral research has two central concerns. Firstly, working with enrollees as well as government officials charged with planning, enrollment and biometric archiving, it asks: are there distinct, emergent ideas of individual identity being articulated through this program? Secondly, this study asks how the UID might reconfigure ideals associated with the state and governance in India. Is the UID's large-scale technologization occasioning a reimagining of the post-liberalization Indian state by bureaucrats, technocrats and the public alike? This research pays attention to the novel procedures through which states amass knowledge about individuals, thus advancing an understanding of the layered connections between information, ethics, and contemporary governance. The study will use a combination of social science methods, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, textual and discourse analysis. This research is important because it takes an innovative ethnographic approach to studying a key issue of our times - the relationship between the technologizing state and the individual. Funding this project supports the education of a social scientist.