Thoughts on Kinship at the Citizenship Office in South Sudan
Thoughts on Kinship at the Citizenship Office in South Sudan
Author(s): Ferenc Dávid MarkóSubject(s): Anthropology, Public Administration, Public Law, Sociology of Politics
Published by: Akadémiai Kiadó
Keywords: Anthropology of the state; Kinship; South Sudan; East Africa; Civil war; State; Bureaucracy;
Summary/Abstract: Building of a yearlong anthropological fieldwork inside the South Sudanese citizenship office, the paper elaborates the topic of the negotiated statehood through an analysis of the flexibility of kinship. As almost nobody in South Sudan posses genuine birth certificates, the new country struggles to verify the citizenship-applicants, and recognise the fraudulent applications. South Sudan introduced an ethnicity and kinship-based system. Each and every applicant has to arrive with a ‘next of kin’, an elder, blood-relative, to verify her life-story. These debates between verification officers and applicants open up a new space for kinship studies. The paper concludes, that nevertheless the continued flexibility of the meaning of kinship these situations cannot be understood without the normative basis of kinship.
Journal: Acta Ethnographica Hungarica
- Issue Year: 61/2016
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 213-226
- Page Count: 14
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF