Making Reliable Persons: Managing Descent and Genealogical Computation in Pakistan

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.