By Rajiv K. Mishra, Northwestern University in Qatar

 

This blog post aims to highlight the resurgence of biometrics as a governance technology from colonial times to the contemporary neoliberal era, and with it tries to open some provocations on the nature of knowledge. In doing so, it reflects upon the fractures in technological modernity and governance in a country like India and other countries of Global South[1]. My central argument is that the fantasy of digital modernity (digital infrastructures and unique identity) is based on the premise of providing welfare governance and development to millions of people (especially Dalits and Adivasis) living in extreme poverty. However, the compulsion to own a digital identity and enrollment in newer digital welfare programs (healthcare) in an extremely unequal and hierarchical society, especially for below-poverty line population groups, shows deep-seated fractures in this utopic fantasy; fractures that show an impinging reality faced by such population groups negotiating between historical, political, and social mistrust, and their survival dependency on the welfare state for food, social security, health, and education as key ones among other social welfare programs.

India is a post-colony projecting itself as a tech-savvy Digital India (Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, n.d.) while being entangled in a past of colonial realities and practices of control and dominance. In the last decade, India witnessed the colossal rise of one of the world’s largest biometrics identification systems—the Unique Identity (UID/Aadhaar) project. The whims and fancies of biometrics-led digital identity/identification systems are to be technologically modern through their ‘efficient’, ‘reliable’ and ‘foolproof’ use for governance and development. However, the ambition of technological modernity and the associated pursuit to be a technology nation is accompanied by fractures which have deep-seated social and human implications. These implications in return demand a more humane and sensitive approach to make sociological sense of the lived experiences of the bodies of unprivileged and poor population groups categorized as BPL—below the poverty line—by the government. It comprises of the bodies of lower Jatis (castes) and Adivasis (indigenous tribes), classified as ‘Scheduled Castes’ and ‘Scheduled Tribes’ respectively in the Constitution of India (Ambedkar & Roy, 2014).

During a recent phase of fieldwork (October 2023), I visited a remote Adivasi village in Jharkhand state. The local district administration had organized a camp with the intent of connecting the Adivasi population of the area to the ‘mainstream’ by extending the assumed benefits of government welfare schemes to them. The camp focused on updating and enrolling the residents on a health welfare program using the biometrics UID system. However, at the ground this intention reflects a distorted reality, different from the utopic fantasy on digitalization, development, and governance. This village was a former rebel-dominated area where they openly revolted against the state, its ideologies, and its ruling apparatus. Most people waiting for their turn were tribals with a history of being left out of the ‘mainstream’ and seen with suspicion and mistrust by society and the state elites. The ground realities of challenges in implementation, and enrolling people having a long history of discrimination create a different picture of actuality compared to what is fantasized of digitalization solving problems of development

Biometrics scanning hardware (fingerprint and iris scanner) and the integrated interface (software) application through a connected laptop and peripherals. The photo was taken during a UID/Aadhaar update camp explicitly organized for a tribal majority village in Jharkhand, India; fieldwork October 2023.

Seeing the assemblage of biometrics technologies as an avatar of technological modernity for the claimed welfare of lower Jatis and Adivasis, reflections of its colonial entanglements with mistrust and suspicion become apparent. Bodies potentially considered subversive and a threat to the interests of the British Empire were recorded in colonial registers and record books (Waits, 2016). Even in its second coming, re-institutionalizing suspicion and mistrust remains at the heart and soul of this governmentality. Using biometrics for governance and development also records the biometrics of these mistrusted bodies, though in the name of a more ‘just’ purpose of improving their life condition with digital access to welfare entitlements. However, unlike earlier colonial practices that served the interests of the empire, the current practice serves the interest of an alliance of the state, market, and international biometric companies. This alliance runs, operates, and perpetuates the digital empire of (mis)trust.

The reach and extent of this pervasive empire is such that it operates over millions of bodies daily. Its cogs run with the help of the technological systems of biometrics, databases, and digital identification infrastructures. It makes a living person digitally present in a database, with means and ways of authenticating the person’s ‘reliability’ and ‘existence’. However, the practice of this empire is not just technological, with the use of biometrics and digitalization. Instead, it is a sociotechnical ideological practice mixed with social and historical discrimination of lower Jatis and Adivasis by upper caste and the ruling elites from colonial times to the present, biometrically marking and algorithmically checking the tagged-digital identity of the person. I believe that the current sociotechnical practice of biometrically identifying (mis)trustful bodies adds a technological layer of inequality over a persistent social structure of deep-seated discrimination. It is a deadly cocktail of caste and tribe-based discrimination by upper caste and class elites mixed with technologies of biometrics rooted in Galtonian ideas of biometry and racial classifications (Breckenridge, 2014). Biometrics-based digital identity recorded in a centralized database is now the source of truth and trust of millions of bodies belonging to the BPL groups. However, the mediation of (mis)trust and establishing the authenticity of bodies now lies with the algorithms—the moment a person submits biometric scans to access essential services.

Biometrics scanning hardware (technology) and a connected laptop’s integrated interface (software) application. Used for biometrics scans to provide healthcare access under the national universal health coverage program (PM-JAY). Jharkhand, India; fieldwork October 2023.  

Without possessing a biometrics-based digital identity, it is practically impossible for millions of bodies belonging to the BPL groups to survive. Within this group, the Adivasis form a significant chunk, totally dependent on the welfare state for food, healthcare, social security, livelihood programs, and education. Having no digital identity or facing problems with their digital identity brings the severe repercussions of being again left out of the ‘mainstream’. A tribal farmer said aptly during my fieldwork, “I do not exist if I do not enrol for the UID/Aadhaar”, and “I am not a human of flesh and bones, but a suspected human reduced to a number, with the onus of proving my identity—to digitally prove that I exist” (Field Diary Notes, 2017).

The implications from the operation of this digital empire are not just at the individual and social level faced by these bodies in India but hold wider ramifications in the context of the increasing push for biometrics for development in other countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A study of these demands, an analytic and methodological focus that is more ‘global’ in Global South than in the Global North! The level of knowledge, concepts, and methods of understanding this contextual ‘globalness’ thus also requires a sociological imagination that is rooted in people’s everyday lived experiences and unique circumstances. This is a moment of further introspection and intellectual engagement for a crucial network like Global Sociology and Qualitative Research.

Many canons of the social sciences in general, and Sociology in particular, along with the narratives of ‘modernity’, developed in the West (Europe and the United States) (Adas, 2014). The persistent and unwavering Western notions and canons of understanding social realities placing the postcolony(s) at the peripheries, creates a perpetual market of development and research (Bhambra, 2016)! Moreover, the narratives of newer ideas and practices of development considered, technologically modern states are still largely controlled and dominated by the countries, institutions, and actors from the West. The control of knowledge, narrative and ‘benchmarks’ by the West, continuously makes the postcolony(s) aspire to become ‘developed’ with their newer whims and fancies on technological modernity.

Failure to do so perpetuates the categorization or the classification of a country as underdeveloped and still developing. Moreover, in this well-knit ideological, political, and economic control, the postcolony(s) become the thriving grounds for the market of (digital) development governance, especially in the developing world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Schiller, 2000). This leads to the formation of an alliance of postcolonial states, neoliberal institutions, and multinational technology companies, perpetuating this digital empire of (mis)trust and constantly re-inventing capital and capitalism. It’s not surprising to see programs such as ID4D (Identification for Development) and ID4Africa (Identification for Africa) being increasingly pushed in the countries of Global South, with the aims of bringing and connecting millions of bodies to the ‘mainstream’. In the context of colonial history and newer forms of market-driven neoliberal practices, we need to rethink the Western notions of ‘modernity’ and the way social sciences canons emerge and revolve around it. The bodies of people belonging to historically discriminated groups by the local elites and colonial masters tend to be discriminated and controlled time and again.

Thus, it is important to bring analytic focus on the way bodies become objects and subjects of a new pervasive digital empire, rapidly carrying its flags in the so-called developing world. Moreover, the analytic focus provides a methodological opportunity (not in a positive sense) to be more sensitive in the ways of making sense of the lived experience of such bodies. Is it enabling or disabling to conduct fieldwork with ‘scientific’ and established practices of studying the field? Or do we need to find ways through which we can reflect the essence of the reality lived by such bodies? Our thoughts and minds are not only colonized by the notions of modernity and development from the West but also by the surrounding realities (Latour, 1993). A dilemma and a challenge that impinges more on researchers and academics at the crossroads of a ‘globalness’ of knowledge and knowledge creation. Can the ‘globalness’ of global Sociology help to make us more aware of the challenges we face? Does it implore researchers who stand at such crossroads to ask if it is the same to do social research in India, Ghana, and Indonesia as it is in England, Germany, and France?

[1] I do not use ‘The Global South’ in a specific manner, because I believe there cannot be one homogeneous clubbing of ‘the’ Global South.

Cite this article as: Mishra, R. K. (2024, January 23). The whims and fancies of technological modernity: Biometrics and the digital empire of (mis)trust. Global Qualitative Sociology Network. https://global-qualitative-sociology.net/2024/01/23/the-whims-and-fancies-of-technological-modernity/

 

References

 

Adas, M. (2014). Machines as the measure of men: Science, technology, and ideologies of Western dominance (2014 edition, with a new preface). Cornell University Press.

 

Ambedkar, B. R., & Roy, A. (2014). Annihilation of caste (S. Anand, Ed.; Annotated critical edition). Verso.

 

Bhambra, G. K. (2016). Whither Europe? Postcolonial versus neocolonial cosmopolitanism. Interventions, 18(2), 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1106964

 

Breckenridge, K. (2014). Biometric state: The global politics of identification and surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the present. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139939546

 

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.

 

Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology. (n.d.). Digital India. Retrieved January 23, 2024, from https://digitalindia.gov.in/

 

Schiller, D. (2000). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. MIT Press.

 

Waits, M. R. (2016). The indexical trace: A visual interpretation of the history of fingerprinting in colonial India. Visual Culture in Britain, 17(1), 18–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2016.1147978

By Rachel Rinaldo, University of Colorado Boulder

Like many majority Muslim countries, Indonesia has experienced an Islamic revival over the past three decades, which has brought changes such as the widespread adoption of headscarves and clothing deemed “Islamic” for women, an emphasis on Islamic actors and ideas in the public sphere, a boom in Muslim educational institutions, and the institutionalization of the Islamic court system. The Islamic revival in Indonesia is multi-faceted in its impact on gender relations, encompassing the emergence of a dynamic Muslim feminist movement, but also Muslim actors who emphasize the domestic sphere as women’s primary responsibility (Rinaldo, 2013). More recently, some Indonesian women increasingly see marriage as a partnership and have higher expectations for their husbands’ involvement in family life than previous generations (Rinaldo and Fehr, in process). Yet many Indonesians are ambivalent about changes in gender norms and practices. Indeed, some women play down their careers by adhering to a gendered script of obedience to their husbands (Rinaldo, 2019). While Indonesian women’s educational attainment and workforce participation are higher than most other majority Muslim countries, some research shows a decline in the age of first marriage, suggesting that the renewed emphasis on Muslim women’s marriage and family obligations may be having an impact. Thus, Indonesians are navigating complex and contradictory trends related to gender, family, and religion.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges for women around the world because it dramatically increased the burden of unpaid carework for women. Mothers especially struggled with caring for children who were out of school or assisting children doing online school. Post-pandemic, it is unclear how the trend of remote work will impact mothers. Most of the research on the gendered consequences of the pandemic has been conducted in Europe and North America. This begs the question of how the pandemic and its aftermath is playing out in the Global South, especially in contexts where gender and social norms render women primarily responsible for domestic labor. Given the recent social trends in Indonesia, it is an essential place to understand how women are negotiating work and family during and after the pandemic.

The research team – clockwise from left to right: Dr. Fina Itriyati, Hartmantyo Pradigto Utomo, Dinda Kamilia, and Dr. Rachel Rinaldo.

Between September 2022 and September 2023, my research collaborators (Dr. Fina Itriyati, Hartmantyo Pradigto Utomo, and Dinda Kamilia, all from the Sociology department at Gadjah Mada University) and I conducted over 140 interviews and extensive observations with women and men working in a wide variety of occupations and economic sectors in Yogyakarta, Central Java. We recruited a diverse selection of interviewees, with an emphasis on mothers of children under 12, as research has shown that this demographic is most heavily impacted by the competing demands of work and family. We talked to them about their work and family lives, their experiences of the pandemic, their domestic division of labor, and much more.

We are just beginning to analyze this data, but a few findings already stand out. First, some women who had not previously engaged in paid work, or who had only done a small amount of paid work, began to do so during the pandemic. Second, most women, whether they were doing paid work or not, continued to do the majority of unpaid work in the household, particularly taking care of children and preparing/cooking meals. Third, most women could not afford paid childcare, with most relying on family members to care for children if they were working outside the house when children were home.

Social scientists have found that women’s workforce participation makes women more economically valuable to their families, results in improved health for women and girls, and is correlated with increased political representation for women, among other benefits. Yet what we were seeing in Indonesia was that women were doing more paid work as well as unpaid domestic work. While a few women seemed unhappy with this situation, many embraced or saw it as normal. Thus, women’s increased involvement in the workforce did not seem to be resulting in men taking on more domestic work, or in women’s income earning being fully valued by their families or the society at large. Given how significant women’s income is for many Indonesian families, and the fact that surveys show that men in many countries are taking on more domestic labor or expressing the desire to do so, we wondered why things seemed so stuck in Indonesia.

The research team interviewing women who have returned from working overseas as maids and nannies.  

For example, Dewi is a 37 year old mother of three children. Her husband has a good job as a civil servant and they can live a middle class life on his income. Dewi used to work as an accountant, but her husband wanted her to stay home when they had children. She agreed, but she also missed her job, and she keeps a foot in the labor market by doing freelance accounting work, usually from home. She is responsible for everything involving the household.  As she commented wryly, “For my husband, apparently, I got a husband who doesn’t really care about the household chores. So, the point is for domestic matters, taking care of the kids it’s all my responsibilities, including picking up the kids to and from the school, if there’s any meeting at school, parents meeting or something like that, it’s all my responsibilities.”

The pandemic seemed to have made Dewi interested in working more, and she spoke about returning to work in some capacity when her children are older. But for now, she seems to have given up on hoping that her husband will help with the household: “If he can’t help then just let him be, we also can’t be demanding. I mean I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to fuss, so I just let things be since I don’t like debating.”

We identified two key processes that contribute to situations like that of Dewi.

First, women are increasingly doing paid work from home. This was particularly the case for educated middle class mothers similar to Dewi. They are increasingly earning income through home-based businesses, often relying on social media to advertise and sell their products. Some of these small businesses have become the primary income for the family. Many women we interviewed sought out such paid work because it is compatible with the gendered division of labor that they believe is mandated by Islam. They can work from home and still take care of their children and household. This form of paid work may be partly what has accounted for the recent uptick in Indonesian women’s labor force participation. It means that women are earning income and gaining work experience, but in a way that reproduces the cultural norm of women being responsible for domestic work.

An employee of a ceramic shop in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Many women in the city work in service sector jobs in shops and restaurants. 

Second, many working mothers rely on unpaid female caregivers. Indonesia has a very large informal economy, and many lower-class women have few employment options in the formal sector. We found that nearly all of the lower-class women we interviewed were engaging in paid work, mostly in the informal sector. Few of these women are able to work from home, and most of them continued working during the pandemic. An advantage of this kind of work for many women is flexibility. Most of the women we interviewed who worked in the informal sector tried to arrange their work around their children’s school hours, and if this was not possible, they relied on their mothers, mothers-in-law, or other female kin to babysit. We found that this was the case even when husbands were unemployed or working fewer hours due to the pandemic. Thus, the reliance on unpaid female caregivers means that the work of caring for children remains strongly associated with women, even when men are home.

What can we learn from this Indonesian case? Generalizing and theorizing from Global South cases such as Indonesia is a thorny issue for sociology. While canonical sociological theories have been rightly criticized for erasing imperialism and colonialism, there is nothing inherent in sociological theory that requires inattention to the Global South. Indeed, early sociologists such as Weber and Durkheim were interested in non-Western societies, even if their analyses were problematic. But as sociology developed alongside its companion discipline of anthropology, a division of labor developed in which sociology became the study of “modern” societies while anthropology became the study of so-called “traditional” societies. In recent years, such binaries have been challenged but their legacy persists for sociology in the oft-repeated question – “How does this matter?”—which is less often applied to cases from within the Global North. This question embeds two assumptions: 1) that cases in the Global South, even if they concern a phenomenon that is not unique to the Global South, are not of interest to sociologists because the Global South is fundamentally different, ie “not modern”; and 2) phenomena that are unique to a Global South context are not of interest because sociology is only interested in generalizable phenomena. The vast amount of sociological research on social dynamics particular to the US suggest that this second assumption mainly applies to research in the Global South.

A woman selling drinks at a street kiosk in Yogyakarta. The majority of Indonesian women work in the informal sector. 

Since the late 1990s, sociologists have sought to theorize from Global South cases. Burawoy’s Extended Case Method (1998) encourages sociologists to use ethnography to examine the dynamics of a local setting and to understand how that setting is shaped by global forces. Transnational feminist sociology investigates global-local linkages and global power/inequalities related to sex/gender (Parrenas, 2015). More recently, postcolonial sociology (Go, 2016) aims to challenge Eurocentric social theories by rooting social theory in the experiences of people and societies at the bottom of the global social hierarchy, examining the interconnections between Global North/Global South, and emphasizing colonialism and imperialism as central dynamics in the development of modernity and capitalism. All of these approaches have generated compelling new research based on Global South cases. Rather than theories in and of themselves, they are frameworks for theorizing.

These frameworks lend themselves best to examining obviously transnational phenomena such as migration or global factories or social phenomena that highlight a crucial aspect of the global economy or global power relations. Yet given that many people’s lives unfold within local and national social structures, such approaches risk overemphasizing the global and transnational. In an era of renewed nationalisms, it is essential to examine local and national asymmetries, inequalities, and power relations. Moreover, such emphasis on global economies and power relations risks neglecting culture and religion, aspects of social structure that are likely to be embedded within a nation-state.

A weekly women’s prayer group meeting at a local mosque in Yogyakarta. 

The recent calls for a more global sociology (Hanafi, 2020) demonstrate an interest in building on such predecessors but with a more eclectic approach to theory and an aim to understanding rather than assuming the relationship between micro and macro/local and global. I would add that a global sociology should also value cases outside the West/Global North in and of themselves. Yet global sociology has not yet provided a method for how to generalize from cases.

In thinking about how to generalize from the case of women and work in Indonesia, I am inspired by recent methodological discussions in qualitative sociology. Such discussions are not so much focused on the geographic location of cases, but on how to generalize from qualitative cases. Recent methodological approaches such as Tavory and Timmermans (2012) “Abductive Analysis” as well as Small and Calarco’s discussion of how to evaluate qualitative research (2022) suggest a way forward. They suggest an approach to qualitative research and theorizing that mixes induction and deduction, toggling interactively between theory and data so that questions can be constantly revised to account for surprising findings. In particular, Small and Calarco propose that cases are always unique, but that processes, mechanisms, and relationships may be common to a variety of situations, and this provides a way to generalize.

Building on this, I propose that scholars studying the Global South seek a deep understanding of the local context in order to develop knowledge about local processes that may be found in a variety of contexts. For example, the two key processes that I highlight from Indonesia — women doing paid work from home and reliance on unpaid female caregivers — can be found widely. In Indonesia, women’s efforts to make paid work flexible often result in their continued responsibility for domestic work. In a place where cultural and religious pressures encourage women to see the domestic sphere as their responsibility, the double burden constrains women’s ambitions, limits their options, and makes many women feel that they must choose between work and motherhood. Yet while the specific context of Indonesia is unique these processes and their outcome can be found in many places. Despite women’s increased income earning, in many societies they still bear the primary responsibility for the domestic sphere, and they are valued primarily as mothers and wives. Changing this situation will require efforts on many levels: revaluing the labor of care, redefining masculinity to include care work, and encouraging work flexibility for all people, not just women.

Cite this article as: Rinaldo, R. (2024, January 11). The gendered dynamics of women’s work in Indonesia: Theorizing from Global South cases. Global Qualitative Sociology Network. https://global-qualitative-sociology.net/2024/01/11/the-gendered-dynamics-of-womens-work-in-indonesia/

 

References

 

Burawoy, M. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 4–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/0735-2751.00040

 

Go, J. (2016). Globalizing sociology, turning south: Perspectival realism and the southern standpoint. Sociologica, 2. https://doi.org/10.2383/85279

 

Hanafi, S. (2020). Global sociology revisited: Toward new directions. Current Sociology, 68(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392119869051

 

Parreñas, R. S. (2015). Servants of globalization: Migration and domestic work (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press.

 

Rinaldo, R. (2013). Mobilizing piety: Islam and feminism in Indonesia. Oxford University Press.

 

Rinaldo, R. (2019). Obedience and authority among Muslim couples: Negotiating gendered religious scripts in contemporary Indonesia. Sociology of Religion, 80(3), 323–349. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sry045

 

Rinaldo, R., & Fehr, T. (Forthcoming). “I have a right to a better imam”: Women, divorce, and Islam in Indonesia. Manuscript currently under review.

 

Small, M. L. (2009). “How many cases do I need?”: On science and the logic of case selection in field-based research. Ethnography, 10(1), 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138108099586

 

Small, M. L., & Calarco, J. M. (2022). Qualitative literacy: A guide to evaluating ethnographic and interview research. University of California Press.

 

Timmermans, S., & Tavory, I. (2012). Theory construction in qualitative research: From grounded theory to abductive analysis. Sociological Theory, 30(3), 167–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275112457914