ABSTRACT
This contribution refutes the common idea that identification systematically produces civic inclusion. When faced with certain subaltern groups, identification acts as a factor of alienation of the subject, increased precariousness of legal identities, or outright exclusion. Such effects do not result from any clear intention but rather from the various biases concealed in the closed artefacts that make up the identification apparatus. This argument is based on ethnographic observations, the findings of which are illustrated by the case of a woman in North Cameroon whose experience and biography reveals her exposure to various inferiorizing factors. Finally, and more fundamentally, the observation of identification in such contexts suggests that the analysis of the documentary and biometric state must no longer neglect the question of the intelligibility of its apparatus.
