Zehra Hashmi

I am an anthropologist and historian who researches identification technologies in South Asia. My research explores the everyday workings of surveillance in Pakistan at the intersection of digital identification, biometrics, kinship, migration, and governance. I examine how the individual became identifiable and the technological history of this process in South Asia. My first book is a historical ethnography of Pakistan’s national identity database. I study how this information infrastructure came to use data as a kin-making substance that redefines who counts as kin and, by extension, who counts as citizen. I argue that this reliance on kinship and genealogy reconfigures how we can understand modern identification both in South Asia and beyond. 

With an interdisciplinary training in Anthropology, History, and Science and Technology Studies, I draw on multiple methodologies to unsettle disciplinary boundaries. I follow how historical practices of identification and information collection congealed into technological objects such as the identity card and the identity database. I examine how seemingly separate domains, such as the family and the state, leak into one another over time. My work incorporates the practice of moving between ethnography and archives to trace the longstanding interconnections between identity, kinship, and informational technologies of the postcolonial state. 

My interest in identification and surveillance has led me to begin new research on tracking technologies in the domain of public health. This research brings together a history of public health surveillance in Pakistan with an ethnographic focus on the nascent Integrated Disease Surveillance System (IDSR). This project sits at the intersection of health bureaucracy, information systems, epidemiology, and the intertwined politics of empire and global health.