Datafied Kinship

Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) produces the country’s national identity card and runs one of the world’s largest biometric-based identity databases in the world. To be registered in the database, individuals are linked through their kin relations to other uniquely identified individuals—a practice that this article terms “datafied kinship.” Datafied kinship demonstrates how individuals are not atomized bodies, ready to be captured by NADRA’s identity database. Rather, individuals are digitally constructed as a function of their relations with others. This article argues that NADRA’s reliance on kinship reconfigures our understanding of modern identification: individual identity is produced and tracked through relatedness, not biometrics alone. It ethnographically examines how identifiable individuals are produced through identity registration, focusing on the treatment of “system independents”—individuals unconnected to others in the database. In turn, it shows how such a relational logic of identification comes to condition the lives of those it identifies.