Launch of Registration and Recognition, Columbia University, New York

You are invited to attend a launch and discussion of Registration and Recontition: Documenting the Person in World History, edited by Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter and published by the British Academy and Oxford University Press.

Simon Szreter, Fred Cooper, Adam McKeown and Keith Breckenridge will discuss the book.

Time:  5:15 to 6:45, October 29, 2012

Place:  Room 411, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, History Department, Fayerweather Building, Columbia University

Directions:  Access is from Amsterdam Ave, at the back of Columbia's St Paul's Chapel, the Fayerweather is the building immediately on the right. Room 411 is on the 4th Floor.  Here is a map of the courtyard.

The M11 bus bus stop is right outside on Amsterdam Ave; And Line 1 subway station at Broadway and 116th Street is on the other (west) side of the main Columbia courtyard.

About the book:  This book is a comparative investigation of different regional histories of registration - a feature of societies common across Asia, Europe and the Americas, but poorly understood in contemporary social science. Registration has typically been viewed as coercive, and as a product of the rise of the modern European state. This volume shows that the registration of individuals has taken remarkably similar, and interestingly comparable, forms in very different societies across the world. The volume also suggests that registration has many hitherto neglected benefits for individuals, and that modern states have frequently sought to curtail, or avoid responsibility for, it. The book shows that the close study of practices of registration provides a tool - like class, gender or state - that supports analytical comparisons across time and region, raising a common, limited set of comparative questions that highlight the differences between the forms of state power and the responsibilities and entitlements of individuals and families.

Table of Contents: 

C.A. Bayly: Foreword

1: Simon Szreter and Keith Breckenridge: Registration and Recognition: The Infrastructure of Personhood in World History

Part 1 Registration, States and Legal Personhood
2: Richard von Glahn: Household Registration, Property Rights, and Social Obligations in Imperial China: Principles and Practices
3: Simon Szreter: Registration of identities in early modern English parishes and amongst the English overseas
4: Andreas Fahrmeir: Too Much Information? Too Little Coordination? (Civil) Registration in Nineteenth-Century Germany
5: Osamu Saito and Masahiro Sato: Japan's civil registration systems before and after the Meiji Restoration
6: Paul-André Rosental: Civil Status and Identification in 19th Century France: A matter of state control?

Part 2 Registration as Negotiated Recognition
7: Rebecca Flemming: Identity Registration in the Classical Mediterranean World
8: Tamar Herzog: Naming, Identifying and Authorizing Movement in early modern Spain and Spanish America
9: H.D. van Leeuwen: Establishing and Registering Identity in the Dutch Republic - Henk Looijesteijn and Marco
10: Andrew MacDonald: The Identity Thieves of the Indian Ocean: Forgery, Fraud and the Origins of South African Immigration Control, 1890s-1920s
11: Shane Doyle: . Parish Baptism Registers, Vital Registration and Fixing Identities in Uganda
 

Part 3 Empires and registration
12: Ravindran Gopinath: . Identity Registration in India during and after the Raj
13: Stanley L. Engerman: Monitoring the Abolition of the International Slave Trade: Slave Registration in the British Caribbean
14: Khaled Fahmy: Birth of the 'secular' individual: medical and legal methods of identification in 19th-century Egypt
15: Keith Breckenridge: No will to know: the rise and fall of African civil registration in 20th century South Africa
16: Frederick Cooper: Voting, Welfare and Registration: The Strange Fate of the Etat-Civil in French Africa, 1945-1960
 

Part 4 Registration, Recognition and Human Rights
17: Anne-Emanuelle Birn: Uruguay's child rights approach to health: What role for civil registration?
18: Dominique Marshall: Birth Registration and the Promotion of Children's Rights in the Interwar Years. The Save the Children International Union's Conference on the African Child, and Herbert Hoover's American Child Health Association
19: Francie Lund: Children, citizenship and child support: the Child Support Grant in post-apartheid South Africa
20: James Ferguson: What Comes after the Social? Historicizing the Future of Social Assistance and Identity Registration in Africa