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.