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Article ID: CBB050711679

Making Reliable Persons: Managing Descent and Genealogical Computation in Pakistan (2021)

Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume: 63
Issue: 4
Pages: 948-978
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/making-reliable-persons-managing-descent-and-genealogical-computation-in-pakistan/9988A7769E61A3D1BC754EE5C7B5FD49

DOI: 10.1017/S001041752100030X

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Science and government National security Postcolonialism Colonialism Genealogy Identification cards Biometry 21st century Pakistan

In 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.

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