Review: Karen Fog Olwig et. al., ‘The Biometric Border World’
Review of Karen Fog Olwig, Kristina Grünenberg, Perle Møhl and Anja Simonsen’s The Biometric Border World: Technologies, Bodies and Identity on the Move (Routledge, 2019), 235 pages.
Abstract
The Biometric Border World: Technologies, Bodies and Identity on the Move is a rich scholarship that turns our attention to the roles of technologies in the border world. How does biometricization of border produce subjectivity? How is technologization of movement implicated in ethics of relationality in the border world? If border is bothering that manifests in disparate contexts, what are the variables that continue to shape the productions of biometric technologies? In all, Karen Fog Olwig, Kristina Grünenberg, Perle Møhl and Anja Simonsen forge a new framework termed ‘assemblage’ that shapes our experiences of mobility and border world today. Specifically, the study refutes the oversimplification of biometric technology (26). Instead, it argues that the adoption of biometric technologies has been accompanied by the development of an elaborate, omnipresent and obscure border world outside the national order of things that operates in unpredictable ways (2).
Reviewed by Olajide Salawu
Karen Fog Olwig, Kristina Grünenberg, Perle Møhl and Anja Simonsen’s seminal book is subsumed under four parts with an introduction and a conclusion. Each of the contributors devotes their attention to different discursive sites such as the lab, the physical border, en route and the family where noses, fingerprints, eyes and bones become signs and biomarkers. Each part contains a prologue that introduces the contributor’s argument, followed by two chapters of analysis and an epilogue. As a whole, the study takes an ethnographic approach tied to the prominence that the anthropological field gained in the 1990s, especially in the field of border studies. This emphasis is linked to human stories and movements after the devolution of the Berlin Wall and the evolution of borderless Europe. In essence, the study shows how this borderlessness generates further anxieties between Southern and Northern Europe and even fortifications of other thresholds into Europe such as Ceuta and Gibraltar. The second base where the study finds its root is in technological studies. Disaggregatingly, the study undertakes a robust assessment of the gap in studies finding echoes, consonance and dissonance that shape various arguments that the writers advance. For example, the study finds a parallel with Ruben Andersson’s (2016) study where he reads border as a kind of ecology: an intricately linked system of multiple actors. This notion helps them to theorize their framework of assemblage.
The lab is the first site Kristina Grünenberg takes us to. In the segment, she discusses the biometricists as cartographers participating in mapping the human body. Her enrolment as an anthropologist at a technical university’s lab, which she tagged ID-Lab provides us incisive range into the biometric border world. This site is symbolic, and sometimes is the underworld of technologies where secret decisions are made and classified information is shared based on trust. Specifically, the first chapter of this part contends that lab researchers are body cartographers working on the body as a landscape to produce signs of identity that can be used in the biometric border world. The second chapter focuses on post-lab activities, idea-sourcing, funding applications, conferences, workshops and secret panels. These post-lab activities balkanize into four pathways, namely internal fractioning, consensus on standardization of a new technology, controversies of biometric use between the camps of technophilia and technophobia, and lastly protection of new knowledge in biometric technology development. The pathways, Grünenberg avers, even if they lead the way out of the lab, they still lead the way back to it. The part in all highlights the challenges encountered by researchers in biometric studies, such as accuracy in recognizing twins with identical features, malfunctioning of the machines in the encounter with ‘the wild’ – which implies any imaginary scenario in which biometric technology can be put to use. In conclusion, our understanding of assemblage in this part is expanded in a context where we see the lab researchers, funders, NGOs, policymakers, police as a bricolage of the biometric border world.
The study turns to the physical border next. Yet, in this part, border becomes a fluid category slipping between the human agent, biometric machine and other hard barriers. The site of observation for Perle Møhl here is Copenhagen Airport, Gibraltar and Ceuta. Møhl’s investigation demonstrates how different technologies at each site of these physical borders shape the experience of biometric technologies. The first chapter revolves around technologies of recognition. Møhl familiarizes us with the technological activities of border-making such as ABC System at the Copenhagen Airport and surveillance camera in Ceuta. Throughout the chapter, Møhl argues that seeing is not a simple innate activity. It therefore requires enskillment and deskillment of the senses for the border personnel as the machine is not totally reliant (94). Møhl notes how the biometric technology sometimes overrides the human agent during the decision making in the border world. In essence, Møhl is asking us to see the domineering role of technology in border-making wherein the decision of mobility is entirely left to it. The second chapter shifts our attention to other biometric technologies that are more associated with sound and movement. Møhl asserts that at sites such as Gibraltar and Ceuta, presences constitute a threat. The fences are then fitted with sensors that obtain the illegal haptic signals, thereby directing the technological officers to where the trespass is taking place. Like others, Møhl rejects the overreliance on the machine. For example, she underscores that when an eGate is faulty in the ABC system as a result of its hypersensitivity, it spreads to others. In sum, we are invited to see how the biometric border world is a conflation of different players: from the monitors at the border, the developers of the technologies who have access to the delocalized data, the biometric machines to the irregular migrants who develop their own technologies to subvert the digital system.
Penultimately Anja Simonsen builds her scholarship on the ethical front. Simonsen invites us to see biometricization as a form of caring and uncaring. Simonsen’s site of engagement is the ‘overburdened locality’ of Italy where her encounters with the Somalian refugees are biometrically documented. Biometric technology is implicated in racial politics; however, Simonsen is interested more in care as it comes in form of assemblage offered in supranational, humanitarian, transnational, interpersonal contexts to the fleeting refugees who perceive it with conflicting attitudes. For example, supranational care whereby a refugee's fingerprint is fetched into a central database of the EURODAC system is seen as a symbol of immobility by the refugees who do not want to stay behind in Italy after their arrival. On the other hand, international organizations such as the United Nations see this as a form of care that helps them categorize and provide for the refugees' needs. Chapter Six takes on the notions of out-formation and in-formation to read the lapses that refugees exploit to navigate biometric technologies' strictures. The part largely suggests that the deployment of biometric technologies has created palpable conditions which nudge the refuge bodies in perpetual flight. Although Simonsen worked with a number of the migrants for her fieldwork, the final remark on Ali that he ‘vanished’ (148) just like others leaves some room for ethics of relationality in research work. Did Simonsen engage with Ali and others just to an extent of their availability for research work? Or, has Ali entered the realm of Neglected Things (Bellacasa 2017)?
The last part of the study turns to the family as a site through which we can access biometric technologies. Working with Somalian families and refugees in Denmark, Karen Fog Olwig demonstrates how the biometric technology of DNA translates border experiences for both Danish nationals and refugees. Olwig’s analysis shows how ‘digital images of genes, bones and teeth have become key elements in a complex series of decisions determining individuals’ relations of kinship, and thus, their right to be reunited with family members who are residents of Denmark (165). This biometric technology just like the preceding part invades personal space/border that does not only unveil a present history, but reveals the past of the refugees and their genealogy in determining the condition of kinship and family. Olwig highlights the affinal network that defines Somalian familial latitude as different from Danish culture. These cultural incongruities become some of the indices that foreclose the refugees' chances of entering the social border of Denmark and political and economic borders. The last chapter of the part problematizes how different human and non-human (machine) apparatuses determine the rights to family reunification. This DNA biometric technology decentralizes decision making in constructing a refugee's subjectivity as fit and suitable to be accepted into Danish society. In a sense, the part uncovers how DNA biometric technologies complicate the socio-cultural politics of the border world.
In the end, Karen Fog Olwig, Kristina Grünenberg, Perle Møhl and Anja Simonsen repudiate the notion of technological sublimity that seems to evoke new digitally founded faith in the machine. Rather, they restate the entanglement of the human actors in the processes of the biometric border world. More than that, they want us to pay attention closely to the indispensability of the human agency in this globally technologized mobility. Hence, the study is a compelling contribution not only because Europe remains central to the exodus of irregular migrants from the Global South or the Middle East, but also because the deployment of biometric technology is salient to the decision making in the processes of movements across the world today. Nevertheless, their study leaves some germane questions unanswered. For instance, the study pays little attention to biometric technologies’ implications on cosmetic and other slippery identitarian terrain such as plastic surgery, gender and sexualities. How does biometric technology function in other aesthetics practices such as make up? In general, their iterations seem to affirm that European resistance to irregular migrants is because of illegality of their residential status while overlooking the hurdles of mobility the regular migrants face in their vagrancies towards Europe. Among other grammatical infelicities is the transcription of exchanges between the privacy expert, a German consumer, and a biometric expert (64). When Kristina reports on the conference of biometric stakeholders in her enunciation of the second pathway, one is perturbed to ask whether Morocco is not an African country. Furthermore, her anonymization of another African country limits the chance of understanding her engagement in the section. Convincingly, the study presents a strong case for techno-human solutions in the border world and speculates further on new confrontations of biometric technology: a new path which future research could take.
References
Karen Fog Olwig, Kristina Grünenberg, Perle Møhl and Anja Simonsen (2019). The Biometric Border World: Technologies, Bodies and Identity on the Move. London: Routledge.
Bellacasa, Maria Puig De La (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than the Human World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Further Reading
Mellor, Philip A and Chris Shilling (2014). Sociology of the Sacred: Religion, Embodiment and Social Change. London: Sage Publications.
Thrift, Nigel (2021). Killer Cities. London: Sage Publications.
Venn, Couze (2018). After Capital. London: Sage Publications.
Olajide Salawu is a PhD student at the Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His research interests include mobility, urbanity, rurality, folk music, digital comedy, new media forms, African cyber literary experience, medical humanities and film studies. His works have appeared in Third Text, Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, Journal of Pan African Studies and so on.
