Introduction

Abstract

This book, the product of a series of workshops held under the auspices of the IdentiNet research network, reflects the advent of a new topic— personal identification—as an established research area in social science.¹ A decade after the publication of the pioneering work by Jane Caplan and John Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, the theme of modes of identification, in the past and present, has become clearly established as a subject for scholarly research.² This field of research has exploited a variety of angles from which we can approach the conditions in which identities are manufactured or manipulated. As a consequence, we now have an ever-increasing body of work that allows us to view a new subject, the ‘history of identification’, across time, from the ancient origins of human societies to the most recent developments and mutations of global surveillance.³ In this collection we have brought together work that reflects the latest research in the linked areas of identification and surveillance studies, and which we hope will stimulate further research across disciplines, including law, IT and medicine as well as the more usual angles of history or sociology. Although the studies range widely over both centuries and continents, their common element is that they all illuminate different aspects of that deceptively simple question, ‘Who are you?’, as asked in the original Caplan and Torpey work, which poses a question about identification by another rather than the more common, ‘Who am I?’, in which individuals search for an identity.