Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropological Investigation of Biometric Identification

纽约大学博士候选人维贾扬卡·奈尔（Vijayanka Nair）在艾米丽·马丁（Emily Martin）博士的指导下，提议开展一项研究，探索生物识别系统的文化含义。奈尔将在德里、中央邦和卡纳塔克邦进行为期12个月的实地研究，以检验世界上最大的生物特征数据库建设的社会文化显著性。2009年，印度政府开始向其10亿居民每人发放一个唯一识别号码（UID），通过一个数据库将居民的人口统计和生物特征（虹膜扫描、指纹、照片）信息与一个12位数的号码联系起来，方便识别。在社会和法律人类学以及科学和技术研究的基础上，这项博士研究有两个中心问题。首先，通过与注册者以及负责计划、注册和生物识别存档的政府官员合作，它提出了这样一个问题：在这个项目中，是否存在独特的、新兴的个人身份观念？其次，本研究询问UID如何重新配置与印度国家和治理相关的理想。UID的大规模技术化是否引发了官僚、技术官僚和公众对后自由化印度国家的重新想象？本研究关注的是国家积累个人知识的新过程，从而促进了对信息、伦理和当代治理之间多层次联系的理解。该研究将结合社会科学方法，包括参与观察、半结构化访谈、文本和话语分析。这项研究很重要，因为它采用了一种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。资助这个项目是为了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.