The prehistory of modern passport and identification technologies:
the documents, seals, and stamps, that could document and transform
their owner's identity. Who are you? And how can you prove it? How
were individuals described and identified in the centuries before
photography and fingerprinting, in a world without centralized
administrations, where names and addresses were constantly
changing? In Who are You?, Valentin Groebner traces the early
modern European history of identification practices and identity
papers. The documents, seals, stamps, and signatures were-and
are-powerful tools that created the double of a person in writ and
bore the indelible signs of bureaucratic authenticity. Ultimately,
as Groebner lucidly explains, they revealed as much about their
makers' illusory fantasies as they did about their bearers' actual
identity. The bureaucratic desire to register and control the
population created, from the sixteenth century onward, an intricate
administrative system for tracking individual identities. Most
important, the proof of one's identity was intimately linked and
determined by the identification papers the authorities demanded
and endlessly supplied. Ironically, these papers and practices gave
birth to two uncanny doppelgangers of administrative identity
procedures: the spy who craftily forged official documents and
passports, and the impostor who dissimulated and mimed any
individual he so desired. Through careful research and powerful
narrative, Groebner recounts the complicated and bizarre stories of
the many ways in which identities were stolen, created, and
doubled. Groebner argues that identity papers cannot be interpreted
literally as pure and simple documents. They are themselves pieces
of history, histories of individuals and individuality, papers that
both document and transform their owner's identity-whether carried
by Renaissance vagrants and gypsies or the illegal immigrants of
today who remain "sans papier," without papers.
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