AO: Identifying a growing global isolation of South African historical writing due to what he sees as a view that South African history is completely distinct and unique, Breckenridge argues that the peculiarity of the South African history is derived from its connections with the wider imperial world, and that those linkages provide the basis for very interesting and productive comparisons.
AO: He avoids the two major debates that have framed the problem space - the politics of Afrikaner Nationalism and Marxist studies of the ideological and institutional effects of mining-driven capitalism - instead focusing on “local effects of globally staged debates in the science and technology of biometrics in accounting for the Apartheid state, and its immediate aftermath” (ix).
AO: Breckenrige looks at notions of the “state” (philosophical, anthropological, STS) and of “biometrics” in order to argue for a new disctinctive kind of state (biometric state) that rquires new ways of thinking about bureocratic power.
AO: cites Foucault’s state power
AO: Notes that there is rich body of work looking at how experts fashioned new forms and structures of power as they sought new kinds of knowledge on the African continent (and that the studies show the severe geographical and financial limits of the colonial state’s power.) (5)
AO: instead of widely used general explanations of state-building as a product of governmentality and rationalisation offered by Foucault and Weber, Breckenridge points to the history of progressivism, and to its distinctively unconstrained role in the making of the South African state after 1900 as an explanation for why South African biometric government is so centralized (26).
