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 Marian Burchardt, Leipzig University

Many sociologists have begun to recognize the necessity to provincialize Western sociology. Some have done so mainly out of ethical and political reasons while others have begun to take seriously the epistemological constraints that Eurocentrism has imposed upon sociological research and theory. In this context, global sociology and postcolonial sociology have emerged as two agendas which partly overlap and converge but which also entail some divergent assumptions and emphases. The relationship of these scholarly agendas, however, requires some further clarification. Such a clarification, I suggest, is imperative with a view towards depicting more clearly how sociological research practice after Eurocentrism, as it were, can look like.

I am a sociologist and ethnographer of East German origin but I have regional concentrations in Africa and I carry out much of my fieldwork in South Africa and Ghana. In April 2022, I participated in the congress of the African Studies Association of Africa in Cape Town in South Africa. Given that this is the meeting where mostly African social scientists meet to discuss African societies, I thought that this was an appropriate place to present my own work, which adopts—as Julian Go (2016) has called it—a Southern standpoint through its empirical focus and methodological orientation. What that means exactly, however, was not always clear to me. In one of my current projects, I am interested in the ways in which infrastructural innovations change healthcare provision in Ghana and Malawi. In particular, I am interested in far-flung digitization projects that are currently going on in healthcare systems—in Africa and elsewhere. We started with digitally driven logistics focusing on the use of drones for the delivery of vaccines, essential medicines and blood products used in medical emergencies (Umlauf & Burchardt, 2022).

Essential for the operations of medical drones are data: micro-weather data, GPS data, logistical data. Significantly, digitization projects in healthcare systems which have become pervasive on a global level, are often linked to one another: digital patient files, which construe people and populations as data, and digital supply chain management, which turn all transactions and uses of medicine as data have all led to a tremendous production of data—to the datafication of health (Ruckenstein & Schüll, 2017), as it were. Such data play major roles in the digital economy feeding platforms of all sorts. And they are extremely valuable not only for insurance companies but also for all sorts of platform providers who not only seek to make their services available to national healthcare systems but who also aim to make these systems dependent on them. Hence in our project, we also to explore how exactly people’s bodily functions and the prescription practices of nurses and other health professional are turned into data that feeds platforms, what happen with these data and who benefits from them. In the project, we collaborate with research teams from the University of Ghana as well as a research consortium from Malawi.

As a qualitative cultural sociologist, I have been trained to let the field drive the conceptualization, to follow—as Alfred Schütz called it—the relevance structures of the actors I am interested in, instead of imposing a predefined set of concepts and categories upon the field. But of course, as Michael Burawoy (2000)—among many others—suggested: without any conceptual lens we cannot even find and see the field. So, what as sociologists we are called upon to do is to adopt conceptual lenses that are locally adapted and use concepts that emerge from or have proven to be useful in a given local setting.

Distribution center of the drone-delivery service Zipline in Ghana.

Photo: Courtesy of Dr. René Umlauf.

But what exactly was the local setting in my case? I was studying the work of a drone operator that had its headquarters in Silicon Valley, where much of the computing was done in Belgium; a business that worked through service agreements with the national governments of Rwanda, Ghana and Nigeria and that was variously serving rural health centers in these countries. All of these sites were connected through a specific object, namely a technology, and through data. So what exactly was the locality? What was the locally adapted concept I could use? What I am describing here is a problem that sociologists and anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai (1996) encountered in the late 1980s and 1990s when they were first confronted with new ways in which the territorial boundaries of what they considered the field or the locality were blurred or even dissolving. The field was subjected to globalization as a form of spatialization, which left deep imprints on the “local.” And so, one of the questions that arises from this is this: is the relation of global sociology to sociology the same as globalization to locality or the nation-state? Is global sociology primarily a spatial disciplinary category, an orientation towards a spatial reality of social relationships that stretch the planet? Or is it, rather, a global conversation among sociologists from all parts of the world—such as those going on in the Global Qualitative Sociology Network—intent on working through concepts and universals? Or is it a kind of sociology that seeks to address this awareness of the multitude of forms of organization, and disorganization, of divergent forms of knowledge, local or regional epistemologies, and types of domination that have been absent from what, in many parts of the world, is considered “general sociology”? How can global sociology be a new way of building sociological theory?

The focus of the Global Qualitative Sociology Network is indeed on these questions—and it is on the kind of operations we use in qualitative social science to build theory, to construct the kind of sociological theory that brings the social worlds of the Global South more powerfully into the picture of general sociology than before. In other words, the main question is really, not only—as we have learnt to do—how to start from the ground, from the local, how to start from specific concepts developed from the material as suggested by the grounded theory approach for instance, but also: how do we generalize from there? How do we go further from specific cases to slightly more abstract real types, or even more abstract ideal types, a methodology that Max Weber had used in very fruitful ways in his comparative sociology of religion and of forms of authority? There is a need to engage in dialectical forms theorizing in which new findings are always used for the respecification of earlier hypotheses, dialectical forms of analysis in which the concrete leaves echoes in the more general concept and the concept echoes in the interpretation of new material.

But what are the implications of these methodological principles for understanding the drone distribution centers in Ghana where we do our fieldwork, and the people working there? In general, it became clear that the kind of problems with which people in charge of moving medicine from stores to clinics are faced are not entirely different between, say, the rural South or mid-West of the US and central Ghana. Challenges to logistics involve weather contingencies, hurricanes that flood roads and decaying or underdeveloped road infrastructure. On that level there was no need to develop concepts that are somehow uniquely focused on what happened in Ghana.

However, there is more to the story once we shift our attention to the question what drives the datafication of health and healthcare. It is clear that data are harvested primarily by Western companies—especially the big five platforms (Amazon Webservices, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook’s Meta Platforms) or some subsidiary, in collaboration with governments in Africa and elsewhere, and these data are then used to develop AI driven medicine of all kinds, for instance what is called precision medicine and other types of medical therapies based on big data and algorithms. And in this context, we clearly see the ways in which a global order of health governance and medical capitalism is made of regional concentrations of capital and expertise, of a distribution of labor which assigns different tasks to different regions and which yield highly unequal economic outputs for these regions. We see new forms of data extractivism that operate not least by putting the burden of data production, for instance, on the shoulders of nurses in rural Malawi. With their enrolment in the national electronic health record program that is part of the country’s e-health agenda, they have to hammer into their tablet not only the usual data collected in regular maternal health check-ups but also lots of other data on the habits of mothers and children. AI research companies need these data for their business model. Big data is not only traces in the internet, it is also labor provided by health workers. We can call this division of labor “colonial” and conceptualize it through the lens of the “coloniality of power” as Aníbal Quijano (2000) suggested, and we ask the question of what is gained by calling it that way.

Such kinds of analysis, however, seems to suggest that social life in the Global South only matters for sociological theory, or general sociology, if it is located at the receiving end of global commodity chains, if it consists of labor supplied for global health science, as medical anthropologist Johanna T. Crane (2013) called it. It seems to suggest that in global sociology we would only need to pay attention to structural features in the Global South and the social practices that produce them if, and to the extent, they are linked to, and sustain, structural features elsewhere, within the framework of global orders of different types.

The merit of postcolonial sociology is precisely to call attention to these global orders of colonial power, who are themselves central components of global capitalism in its financialized and digital iteration. In doing so, postcolonial sociology appears to privilege narratives of continuity, the continuity of global power relationships from the period of formal colonialism into the present, and it privileges genealogical critique over ethnography and interpretation. Yet in some of its presently dominant forms, it is mainly interested in unsettling certain visions of the metropole, and thus also cements inherited understandings of what metropole and colony, or center and periphery are. It is therefore sometimes more about confirming, elaborating and commenting on existing theory instead of creating new theory.

The relationship between postcolonial sociology and global sociology may thus perhaps be construed in matters of emphasis. Both are closely related but surely not. Both agendas share concerns regarding the critique of Eurocentrism, of Eurocentric theories of modernization, urbanization and industrialization and of modernity at large, and both share the notion that Eurocentrism is primarily an epistemological problem. Postcolonial critical sociology reminds us of the fact that under the global condition, no social relationship unfolds outside of power relationships that are global in scope. Global sociology, by contrast, reminds us of the pitfalls entailed in the idea that this global power relationship always needs to be the central subject of our studies. Such a focus reduces actors in the social worlds of the Global South to passive subjects of global capital whose everyday life is determined by that subject position. And it thereby reiterates the aporia of earlier structuralist determinisms of divergent theoretical shades. In contrast, I suggest that the social worlds of healthcare workers and those who run logistics centers in Ghana matter to general sociology not only to the extent we can trace the colonial power relations that shape their lives but also as objects of study and theorization in their own right.

Cite this article as: Burchardt, M. (2022, June 17). Global sociology and postcolonial critique: Notes on affinities, divergences and ways forward. Global Qualitative Sociology Network. https://global-qualitative-sociology.net/2022/06/17/global-sociology-and-postcolonial-critique/

 

References

 

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

 

Burawoy, M. (2000). Introduction to part one. In Global ethnography: Forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world (pp. 43–47). University of California Press.

 

Crane, J. T. (2013). Scrambling for Africa: AIDS, expertise, and the rise of American global health science. Cornell University Press.

 

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

 

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005

 

Ruckenstein, M., & Schüll, N. D. (2017). The datafication of health. Annual Review of Anthropology, 46(1), 261–278. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041244

 

Umlauf, R., & Burchardt, M. (2022). Africa-as-a-service: Digital health and the rise of drone infrastructures (No. 46; Working Paper Series des SFB 1199 an der Universität Leipzig). Leipziger Universitätsverlag.