Vital Omissions

An estimated 1 in 5 children under the age of 5 worldwide have not been registered at birth, and roughly 1 billion people do not possess any proof of identity. In a world in which fewer and fewer spaces remain untouched by the modern state, human life without official recognition is an increasingly perilous kind of existence. Why, then, when states today have unprecedented capacities to identify, count, and surveil their populations, do so many people continue to fall through the administrative cracks? Vital Omissions offers a new thesis for unraveling the paradox of the civil registration gap. Set in Malaysia, Amanda Cheong offers rich narratives of the lives of marginalized families who have gone unaccounted for at the most basic level: the recording of their vital events. Her analysis throws into relief the inherent contradiction in the theoretically inclusionary project of civil registration, and the fundamentally exclusionary project of citizenship. She finds that who gets counted, and how, are inherently political choices rather than technical imperatives, and that these choices can be made in ways that omit unwanted populations from the nation by depriving them of the documentary means to prove their legal personhood.