[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# Datafied Kinship

## Details

**Authors** Hashmi et al.

**Year** 2026

**Publisher** Cultural Anthropology

**Discipline** Anthropology

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.14506/ca41.3.01) 
10.14506/ca41.3.01

## In authors' words

### Abstract

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.

### What they found (results)

Ethnographic analysis of Pakistan's NADRA biometric identity system finds that individuals are registered as nodes defined by kin-relations rather than as biometrically self-sufficient bodies, and that being unconnected to others in the database ('system independent') itself becomes a distinct, consequential status.

## Commentary

### In short

Individual identity is constituted through relations to other identified individuals rather than by attributes alone (R), and a person's status depends on their position within the whole registration system, visible precisely when that relational link is absent (S).

**Patterns it shows** S, R

**Added** 2026-08-19

**How to cite this** Hashmi et al. (2026). Datafied Kinship. Cultural Anthropology.