Area of inquiry (group 2): belonging practice questions.

Barth's 1969 collection included cases in which individuals crossed an ethnic boundary, among them Pathan households in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands received over time into Baluch groups and coming to count as Baluch, while the distinction between the two categories held. Barth used such cases to argue that

• an ethnic boundary can persist even while the personnel on either side of it change
• ethnic categories dissolve wherever contact between neighbouring groups becomes routine
• membership of an ethnic group is settled by descent and cannot be altered in a lifetime
• the two groups must in fact have shared a single culture before the movement began

Answer: an ethnic boundary can persist even while the personnel on either side of it change

Boundaries are maintained by ascription and by the rules for crossing, so people can move across one without the categories on either side losing their force. The flow of personnel is evidence for the boundary, not against it.

Malkki argued, in work published from her Tanzanian fieldwork of the mid-1980s, that refugees are treated as an anomaly calling for explanation while people living in the state of their birth are not. She traced this to what she called 'the national order of things', by which she meant

• the body of international law under which states process claims for asylum
• the sequence of camps and transit centres through which the displaced pass
• the assumption that a people belongs by nature to a territory of its own
• the ranking of states according to the number of refugees each receives

Answer: the assumption that a people belongs by nature to a territory of its own

The refugee looks anomalous only against a taken-for-granted map on which each people has its own soil, so the anomaly is produced by the classification rather than by the person. Read as a description of asylum procedure, the term loses its critical point.

Carsten described how people on the Malaysian island of Langkawi in the 1980s said that eating rice cooked at the same hearth over a long period made those who shared it kin, so that fostered children and long-staying visitors came to count as relatives. Her material is most often used to argue that

• relatedness can be made through shared substance and daily practice, not only by birth
• the households she studied had given up kinship terms in favour of an economic idiom
• kinship on Langkawi was reckoned by descent from a common ancestor and by nothing else
• the comparative study of kinship should be abandoned, since the term has no stable referent

Answer: relatedness can be made through shared substance and daily practice, not only by birth

Carsten proposed 'relatedness' so that ethnography could record what people themselves treat as making kin, instead of testing local practice against a definition built on biological reproduction. She does not claim that descent is irrelevant there, only that it is not the sole source.

Among the Nuer of the southern Sudan, as recorded in the 1930s, a quarrel between two neighbouring lineages was fought out between those two alone; when a group from a distant part of the country pressed a claim, the same two lineages stood together against it. Anthropologists call this pattern

• an age-set organisation, in which cohorts initiated together act as a unit
• a segmentary system, in which who counts as 'us' shifts with the opponent
• a centralised chieftaincy, in which disputes are referred upward for settlement
• a caste order, in which rank fixes which groups may combine with which others

Answer: a segmentary system, in which who counts as 'us' shifts with the opponent

Belonging in this model is relative rather than absolute: the same lineage is an opponent at one level and an ally at the next, which is how order held without any central office. Reading the case as centralised authority reverses Evans-Pritchard's argument.

Ong studied Hong Kong business families in the 1990s who held residence rights in more than one country, placed children in schools abroad and timed moves around passports, taxation and political risk. Her term 'flexible citizenship' names

• a legal status introduced by several states to allow investors to hold more than one nationality
• the practice of treating rights of residence and nationality as resources to be accumulated and deployed
• the loss of any sense of belonging among people who move frequently between countries for work
• an argument that national borders had ceased by the 1990s to have any bearing on how wealthy families organise their affairs

Answer: the practice of treating rights of residence and nationality as resources to be accumulated and deployed

The families in question were not detached from belonging; they were managing several belongings at once, and doing so with resources most migrants do not have. The case is useful precisely because it sits beside the undocumented worker: mobility means something quite different at the two ends of the scale.

Povinelli examined native title claims in Australia, in which Aboriginal claimants are required to demonstrate a continuous traditional attachment to the land in terms a court will accept. Her analysis of this requirement is that

• recognition is offered on condition that claimants present themselves in a form the state has specified in advance
• the requirement is a neutral evidential test that bears equally on all parties appearing before the court
• claimants who fail to meet it have shown that the attachment they assert was never in fact maintained
• the courts have no interest in the question of attachment and decide such claims on other grounds entirely, leaving the question of attachment to the parties themselves

Answer: recognition is offered on condition that claimants present themselves in a form the state has specified in advance

The demand is impossible in a specific way: the same history of removal and prohibition that grounds the claim is what interrupted the continuity the court requires. Recognition therefore rewards those who can perform a particular version of tradition, which is why Povinelli calls it cunning rather than simply unjust.