The Biometric Border World Technology, Bodies and Identities on the Move Routledge Studies in Anthropology Series

Since the 1990s, biometric border control has attained key importance throughout Europe. Employing digital images of, for example, fingerprints, DNA, bones, faces or irises, biometric technologies use bodies to identify, categorize and regulate individuals? cross-border movements.

Based on innovative collaborative fieldwork, this book examines how biometrics are developed, put to use and negotiated in key European border sites. It analyses the disparate ways in which the technologies are applied, perceived and experienced by border control agents and others managing the cross-border flow of people, by scientists and developers engaged in making the technologies, and by migrants and non-government organizations attempting to manoeuvre in the complicated and often-unpredictable systems of technological control.

Biometric technologies are promoted by national and supranational authorities and industry as scientifically exact and neutral methods of identification and verification, and as an infallible solution to security threats. The ethnographic case studies in this volume demonstrate, however, that the technologies are, in fact, characterized by considerable ambiguity and uncertainty and subject to substantial subjective interpretation, translation and brokering with different implications for migrants, border guards, researchers and other actors engaged in the border world.

Introduction; I. In the laboratory; 1. Body Cartographers: Mapping Bodies and Borders in the Laboratory; 2. The ‘Biometric Community’: Friends, Foes and the Political Economy of Biometric Technologies; II On the border; 3. Vision, Faces, Identities: Technologies of Recognition; 4. ‘Is it a donkey?’ Presences, Senses and Figuration in Human-technological Border Control; III. En route; 5. Fleeting (biometric) Encounters: Care and Control at Italian border Sites; 6. ‘In-formation’ and ‘Out-formation’: Routines and Gaps en route; IV. In the family; 7. Biometric Verification vs. Social Validation of Relations of Kinship: Somali Refugees in Denmark; 8. Mouth Swabs and other Techniques of Verification: Determining Refugees’ Rights to a Family Life; Conclusion

Karen Fog Olwig is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Kristina Grünenberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Perle Møhl is Researcher at CAMES – Copenhagen Academy for Medical Education and Simulation, Denmark.

Anja Simonsen isAssistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.