Verdery’s focus is anchored in classic – one could say oldfashioned – anthropology, but she

uses it to attempt to understand the present. Anthropology’s close yet shifting relationship to
the study of kinship has existed ever since the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when Morgan
and his interlocutors invented the study of kinship. Morgan saw so-called primitive societies
as based on ‘blood’ and kinship, and our own (‘advanced’) society as based on ‘soil’ and the
state. Later work showed that his neat dichotomy was spurious – that his two types of
societies, one based on kinship and the other on territory, presented a false dichotomy. We
can see this, for example, from two classic ethnographies – Firth’s (1936) study of Tikopia
and Bloch’s (1971, 1982) work on the Merina. In both cases descent merges with locality; in
both cases kinship merges with land, territory. Traditional Tikopians lived on the borders of
their tombs and took their identity from what was essentially a necropolis. In Bloch’s view,
tombs, ancestral land, ancestors, unity and blessings were to the Merina so many aspects of
the same thing: the good. The Tikopians and the Merina experienced their collectivity as a
kinship society. Their tombs secured and represented the tie to the past – or a community
which contained the living and the ancestors. The dead bodies objectified and symbolised a
particular past and oriented the future. The agents’ identities were territorialised. The
Tikopians and the Merina saw themselves as rooted, not only in their dead, but also in a
particular place – the ancestral soil or ‘the homeland’. The grave site sealed rights – claims
on political and economic resources. The control of the ancestors provided leadership and
decision-making among the living descendants with a blessed, sacred authority.

Dead bodies and burial places may be of great significance also today. In the national
order of things, agents formulate and reformulate specific notions of roots (in ancestors and
homelands). On the threshold of the twenty-first century, we should recognise (1) the lasting,
perhaps even expanding, power of the nation form across the globe,6 and (2) that we ought to
understand national ideologies and nations as a sort of (patrilineal) ancestor cult. National
mythologies are replete with kinship metaphors. Many national ideologies represent the
nation as a descent group, a group which commemorates its (usually male) founders and
culturemakers as the origin and ancestors of the community. As authors such as Benedict
Anderson, Carol Delaney, Bruce Kapferer, David Schneider and Brackette Williams have
forcefully brought out, we should seek to understand the nation form as if it formed an
example of kinship and religion (Anderson, 1991/1983; Delaney, 1995; Kapferer, 1988;
Schneider, 1977; Williams, 1995). We should attempt to understand nations as examples of
cosmologies. Bearers of national world-views anchor the collectivity in ancestors. The
graves, and the human remains in them, seal a naturalised and fetishised connection between
the nation’s two ‘natures’, the nation’s place and the nation’s people, the territory and its
population. Modern collective identities are territorialised. The Tikopians and the Merina saw
themselves as anchored in the land of their ancestors. Nationalists understand themselves as
rooted in a particular soil, the national territory; localisations of ancestors’ bodies authorise
such understandings.

Massive transnationalism does not eliminate the need to study how agents construct
histories about roots and how in this way, they shape political practices and processes.
Ethnographies of international labour migrants and of political refugees demonstrate this
(Appadurai, 1996: 158–199; Fuglerud, 1999; Malkki, 1992; Olwig, 1993: 137–208, 1997).
Most researchers today attempt to deconstruct and deterritorialise histories, cultures and
identities (by undermining the belief in their natural link to specific ancestors and
homelands). But this does not prevent millions of people who have left, or been expelled
from their homeland naturalising, essentialising and reterritorialising their histories, cultures
and identities. Notions of kinship and soil are important; they give form to belonging in a
world of flows. Territorialised descent operates as a key idiom of our times.