Genealogies of Knowledge Production: Information, Data, and Algorithmic World-Making

Abstract This essay turns to genealogy as a theoretical framework for situating “data” in postcolonial India. In doing so, it is concerned with mapping the fields of power that produce the genealogies of knowledge within which information, Big Data, and algorithms are generated and embedded. Thus, rather than seek an originary moment or linear history, the article engages the continuities and discontinuities between past and present formations. It first tracks the centrality of information in development projects launched after independence in 1947, then turns to the author's own research and to ethnographies of Aadhaar, the Indian state's Big Data project that entails the production, archiving, and mining of biometric information. Aadhaar's interlinking of databases is deployed toward the creation of taxonomies and the biopolitical management of populations. While is not in itself an “intelligent” platform, Aadhaar's data is available for intensive mining and knowledge production and forms the basis of computational policy formation and decision-making.