Keith Breckenridge. Biometric State

For scholars provoked by Theodore Porter’s ideas about government statistics and public trust, and for those of us inspired by Alain Desrosières’s writings on the power of large numbers to create political and conceptual spaces of equivalence, Keith Breckenridge’s Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present must count as essential reading. Based on exhaustive research with unpublished documents and letters, Breckenridge brilliantly demonstrates the great extent to which South Africa has contributed to the global history of statistics, eugenics, and biometric systems—systems that use bodily markers and computers to identify people. Building on Sara Berry and Frederick Cooper’s work, Breckenridge describes the South African state as a gatekeeper state fixated on trade, taxation, and labor control. Like other colonial states in Africa, it did not perform the kind of cultural work associated with the French state. In this sense, Breckenridge makes an important intervention in the mainly Western-focused literature on statistics and state power.

Biometrics · Computer security · Identification (biology) · Intervention (counseling) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Ecology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies