Vital events, vital relations: the structure of relations in an identity database

Abstract

The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) manages Pakistan's biometric‐based national identity database, one of the largest identification systems of its kind in the world. This article examines bureaucratic practices used during identity registration to record ‘vital events’ in the lives of citizens: birth, marriage, divorce, and death. Through an ethnographic study of NADRA's Identity Registration Centre in Islamabad, it illustrates how Pakistan's identification system uses vital events to create ‘vital relations’ by linking individuals to their next of kin. It argues that the way citizens negotiate vital event registration reveals the dynamic nature of kinship, both lived and datafied, as kin relations are continually reconstructed within the identity database. The system does so by drawing lines of descent from both parents according to a cognatic logic in order to establish individual identity. This cognatic logic represents a shift in longstanding modes of recording kinship by both the Pakistani state and the colonial state that preceded it. This article illuminates the multi‐faceted implications of such a shift, delineating how ordinary citizens navigate their datafied kin networks alongside their lived relations at the Registration Centre.