Aadhaar (literally ‘foundation’) is the largest national biometric identification drive the world has witnessed. An Aadhaar is a twelve‐digit ID number linked to its holder's iris scans, fingerprints, facial photograph, and demographic information in a centralized database. In but a decade, India has expeditiously enrolled over 90 per cent of its billion‐strong population into a Central Identities Data Repository. This essay is an ethnographic consideration of the processes by which Aadhaar enrollees become data, focusing on the sociopolitical valence of biometric data. It argues that the datafication of the body via Aadhaar occasions re‐examinations of – and contestations over – the idea of the individual in postcolonial India, a country often deemed sociocentric in popular and scholarly discourse alike. Further, it suggests that biometric socialization facilitates belonging in a ‘Digital India’, often rendered as a data cosmopolis in emergent technocratic imaginations.

中文翻译：

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成为数据：生物识别ID和“数字印度”中的个人

Aadhaar（字面意义上的“基金会”）是全世界目睹的最大的国家生物识别技术。一个Aadhaar是链接到其持有人的虹膜扫描，指纹，面部照片和人口统计信息在一个集中的数据库中的12位数字的身份证号码。在不到十年的时间里，印度迅速将其数十亿人口的90％纳入了中央身份数据存储库。本文是对Aadhaar入学者成为数据的过程的人种学考量，重点是生物统计数据的社会政治价值。它认为通过Aadhaar进行的身体数据化在后殖民时期的印度，人们经常对个人的观念进行重新审视和争论；在印度，这个国家在大众和学术话语中都被视为以社会为中心。此外，它表明生物识别社会化促进了“数字印度”的归属，而“数字印度”通常在新兴的技术官僚主义的想象中被呈现为数据大都市。