Biometric Data Doubles and the Technicisation of Personhood in Ghana

Biometric identification technologies have been heralded by development practitioners, state bureaucrats, the biometric industry, and technology enthusiasts alike as a means to increase accountability and transparency, while reducing discretion in bureaucratic encounters. However, the proliferation of biometric technologies in Ghana since the early 2010s, has increasingly rendered the exchange of credentials for the purpose of establishing unique identities invisible, retreating thus into the background of person-to-person, person-to-business, and state-citizen interactions. Drawing on the case of Ghana, the chapter presents contemporary innovations in identity registration and the ways in which these have altered the production of personhood. Explicit attention will be paid to the processes “making up” personhood in relation to datafied selves and the technologies co-producing them. It will be argued that the immersion of identification technologies into the lifeworld, as a moment of technicisation, is necessarily incomplete. This is because data frictions bring into focus the moment of classification, including the haunting of hegemonic categories. These frictions produce an oscillation between immersion and detachment from the lifeworld, which can provide a potential starting point for the critique of postcolonial data politics in Ghana.