Abstract
AbstractIn 2016, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), which produces Pakistan’s biometric-based national identity card, publicly announced that it would be “re-verifying” identity cards for a national security drive. NADRA relies on the documentation of descent-based relations, including genealogical charts (shajarah-yi-nasab), for its verification procedures. In so doing, NADRA asks the difficult question of who belongs where and who is a citizen, based on who they used to be. This article historically traces the movement of genealogies between the realm of the familial and the bureaucratic. I examine how the colonial state deployed genealogical expertise and how this formation folds into the postcolonial present in ways that shape capacities for genealogy-based claims to identity. It demonstrates how what I term “genealogical computation” extends beyond the domain of governance into articulations of identity that seek to establish status, reliability, and trustworthiness. I argue that “reliable persons” are produced in contemporary Pakistan through an encounter between the genealogical computations of citizens and the expectations of an ethno-securitized state. This encounter is borne out of a rehearsed relation where one’s genealogy, which has held a particular meaning in relation to one kind of security state (the colonial), is now asked to take on another.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Sociology and Political Science,History
Cited by
5 articles.
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