Given Names and Lived Closeness: Kinship Measurement in the South Sudanese Citizenship Office

Abstract

Immediately after the independence of South Sudan in 2011, a nationality law was passed that defined citizenship by membership to clearly defined and bounded ethnic groups. To acquire citizenship, the testimony of a ‘next of kin’, taken to be an ‘older blood relative from the father’s line’, was supposed to verify ethnicity and, thus, belonging to the new nation. Citizenship offices were tasked with checking names and assessing life histories. In so doing, they combined the logic of patrilineal names with estimations of lived closeness, creating a complex system of measuring kinship. Based on colonial legacies and methods acquired during the Sudanese civil war, kinship measurements produced new relations, but also fueled ethnic tensions and cemented social inequalities.

Full text

Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, Volume 65, Issue 4, 70–89
© The Author(s) • doi:10.3167/sa.2021.650404 • ISSN 0155-977X (Print) • ISSN 1558-5727 (Online)
Given names and Lived CLoseness
Kinship Measurement in the South Sudanese
Citizenship Ofce
Ferenc Dávid Markó
Abstract: Immediately after the independence of South Sudan in 2011,
a nationality law was passed that dened citizenship by membership to
clearly dened and bounded ethnic groups. To acquire citizenship, the
testimony of a ‘next of kin’, taken to be an ‘older blood relative from the
father’s line’, was supposed to verify ethnicity and, thus, belonging to
the new nation. Citizenship ofces were tasked with checking names and
assessing life histories. In so doing, they combined the logic of patrilineal
names with estimations of lived closeness, creating a complex system
of measuring kinship. Based on colonial legacies and methods acquired
during the Sudanese civil war, kinship measurements produced new rela-
tions, but also fueled ethnic tensions and cemented social inequalities.
Keywords: bureaucracy, citizenship, documents, ethnic belonging, kin-
ship measurement, South Sudan
Durka was living in a European country when South Sudan declared indepen-
dence in July 2011.1 To her astonishment, she became a stateless person over-
night when Sudan’s embassy refused to renew her passport based on the
argument that she had automatically lost her citizenship after the secession
of South Sudan. Staff at South Sudan’s few embassies in Europe all told her
that they did not yet have the capacity to deal with citizenship applications.
In order to apply for South Sudanese citizenship, Durka had to travel to Juba
using a temporary laissez-passer travel document, even though the last time
she had been to her homeland was when she left for Khartoum at the age of
three. At the citizenship ofce in the capital, her rst attempt to acquire papers
based on her old Sudanese passport failed. The ofcer from the Directorate of
Nationality, Passports and Immigration (DNPI) kindly explained to her that it

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 71
was impossible for anyone to become a citizen without the testimony of a ‘next
of kin’. This witness would prove her kinship—and more broadly her ethnic
afliation—and thus her eligibility for South Sudanese citizenship.
Durka had met her maternal half-brother just after her return and considered
bringing him to the citizenship ofce to verify her ethnic belonging in order to
get a new passport but was surprised to learn that he was not acceptable as
‘next of kin’ because they had different family names. Durka’s mother was from
one of the Equatorian ethnic groups, and her father was a Dinka soldier. They
had never married, and their relationship had been limited to the period when
Durka’s father was stationed near Juba as a member of the Sudan People’s Lib-
eration Army (SPLA) during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). Durka
explained that she had never met her father but that in Khartoum her identity
documents and passports had been issued based on her father’s Dinka name.
When she was barely three years old, her mother had sent her to Khartoum,
where her maternal uncle saw to her education, a journey that had ended in
Europe a few years ago. Her mother had started a new life with a new husband
in Juba. The DNPI ofcer replied that under some circumstances he might
accept a maternal ‘next-of-kin’ witness, but because Durka’s father was Dinka
and “ethnicity is inherited in the father’s line,” he could only consider a Dinka
as a ‘proper’ ‘next of kin’ witness in her case. To prove her belonging to South
Sudan, Durka eventually had to nd her father, who fortunately turned out to
be stationed in Juba. The process was not only a challenging endeavor emo-
tionally—nding a never-seen father, meeting both sides of her family for the
rst time—but also nancially. She estimated that the entire process to acquire
citizenship had taken her almost a month and cost well over 4,000 euros.
I conducted a year of eldwork at the DNPI in 2013. During the rst six
months, I mainly interacted with ofcials, and in the second half of the year,
with applicants seeking citizenship. Given the long tradition of anthropological
literature about kinship in the two Sudans, my initial plan was explicitly not
to look at the topic of kinship but rather at the institutionalization and bureau-
cratization of South Sudanese citizenship. However, I soon discovered that
one was not possible without the other. Durka’s story already demonstrates
how bureaucratic documents used for identication are closely linked with
seemingly ‘traditional’ measurements of kinship. Ofcials established belong-
ing using different kinship measurements to assess closeness (see Thelen and
Lammer, this issue). These included assessing witnesses’ admissibility on the
basis of their legitimated knowledge about different ethnic kinship patterns
(naming systems and patrilineally inherited ethnicity indicating genealogical
closeness) and determining the plausibility of the applicant’s life story through
measurements of lived closeness with the witness.
This article concentrates on the negotiation of such kinship measurements
between bureaucrats and applicants in the citizenship ofce. The ofcials

72 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
measured kinship between applicants and their next of kin in two distinct but
intertwined ways. On the one hand, ofcers compared names to clarify genea-
logical closeness. Such genealogical measuring—based on what could be seen
as conventional anthropological knowledge production—is entangled in the
intricacies of lived realities. On the other hand (mostly involving non-Dinka or
Nuer applicants), the ofcers also measured lived closeness between individu-
als. As I will argue, the entanglement of partly contrasting and partly overlap-
ping measurements opened room for negotiations but also posited a challenge
for prospective citizens. Success or failure in these negotiations could have
severe consequences for individuals and their future prospects.
Below I spell out the concrete methods of kinship measurement and how they
were negotiated between local ofcials and citizenship applicants. To under-
stand their signicance, the privilege of documented citizenship and the ethni-
cized character of national belonging in South Sudan must rst be described.
The Importance of Citizenship and Identity Papers
Being excluded from citizenship in South Sudan is equivalent to being excluded
from upward social mobility: only documented citizens have access to higher
education and the formal job market, or can own a business legally. Moreover,
the state seeks to encourage higher participation by nationals in the humani-
tarian sector—one of the main segments of the South Sudanese economy.
Only documented citizens can occupy positions reserved for South Sudanese
citizens with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or the United Nations.
Thus, the importance of documents is closely tied to class mobility. Uncovering
why people apply for citizenship also explains why they are willing to accept—
or reject—the state’s emphasis on ethnicity and its sometimes painful kinship
measurement practices.
Despite the six-year interim period between the signing of the Comprehen-
sive Peace Agreement (2005) and independence (2011), South Sudan was ill-
prepared to document its citizens and issue identity cards and passports. The
Directorate of Nationality, Passports and Immigration (DNPI) was set up only
two days prior to the declaration of independence. The DNPI is responsible
for registering and documenting the population of the new country. During
the two and a half years between independence and the outbreak of the South
Sudanese Civil War in December 2013, the citizenship ofce issued 250,000
nationality certicates for the approximately eleven million South Sudanese, a
mere 3 percent of the population.2 During the six years of ghting, the number
of documented citizens doubled to half a million, while approximately 400,000
perished in the civil war (Checchi et al. 2018), two million sought refuge across
the borders, and another two million became internally displaced within the

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 73
country. Ten years after independence, the number of people documented by
the state is only slightly higher than the number of people who lost their lives
in the civil war.3
Even though the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other
organizations run programs that help applicants and facilitate claims, access to
documented citizenship overwhelmingly remains a privilege of economically
better-off South Sudanese. Applying for South Sudanese citizenship—mostly
due to the exorbitant costs of the state-of-the art biometrics—cost between 25
and 50 dollars in late 2018 (UNHCR 2017). Due to the collapse of the economy
after the outbreak of the civil war in 2013, low oil prices, hyperination, the
scarcity of hard currency in the market, and the state’s inability to pay salaries
to its employees for years at a time, identity documents remain out of reach for
the overwhelming majority. Being a documented citizen is therefore available
mainly to the urban population working on the peripheries of the informal and
formal economy and to educated people who aspire to work in the humani-
tarian or private sector or for the government. Ethnicity became the basis of
citizenship in the new country, and kinship measurements the key in determi-
nations of ethnic belonging, as the next sections show.
Imagining the Nation through Ethnic Belonging and Kinship
Bitter and tense regional and ethnic dynamics have been part and parcel of
everyday life in South Sudan since colonial times. As a historical development,
these mostly played out along ethnic lines between Equatorian groups from the
southern part of the country and Nilotic pastoralist groups of the north, mostly
Dinka and Nuer.4 Even before the outbreak of the South Sudanese Civil War,
Equatorians frequently complained about perceived Nilotic or Dinka domi-
nance, arguing that the majority of high-level state administrators and political
leaders were from the two main ethnic groups of the SPLA. On the other hand,
unemployed Dinka and Nuer similarly often complained about the dominance
of Equatorians in NGO and UN jobs. These exaggerated sentiments were clearly
observable in the citizenship ofce, where Equatorian applicants frequently
charged that they received unfair treatment from the ‘Dinka ofce’. The DNPI
staff, like nearly all South Sudanese state ofces, can be separated into two
distinct clusters (Markó 2016). One is led by overwhelmingly Dinka and Nuer
members of what Pinaud (2014) calls ‘the military aristocracy’ of South Sudan.
This military cluster makes decisions about establishing national belonging
through kinship measurement. The second cluster, staffed with young and
professional ofcials from varied ethnic and social backgrounds, produces
internationally accepted travel documents based on biometric technology and
training supplied by a German identication management company.5

74 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
Even people from a mixed ethnic background, like Durka, were forced to
belong to a single ethnic group and gain citizenship through paternal ethnic-
ity. Her interactions with the ofce hark back to an existing complex history
of understanding descent as the basis of belonging. If the usage of the British
legal category ‘next of kin’ hints at a colonial past, the emphasis on specic
‘xed’ kinship categories indicates seemingly strict ethnic boundaries, as in
early anthropological accounts. However, the post-independence emphasis
on ethnicity, imagined as a rigid and assigned-at-birth label, was not simply a
direct consequence of indirect colonial rule (Mamdani 1996), but the result of
the militarization of ethnicities during the decades of subsequent civil wars.
Certainly, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) classical study of the Nuer looms
large in the understanding of kinship as agnatic descent, even though it has
been academically deconstructed and reconstructed several times over (Evens
1984; Gough 1971; Hol 1979a, 1979b; Karp et al. 1983; Kuper 1982; McKinnon
2000; Rosaldo 1986). While in his later writings Evans-Pritchard (1951: 156)
recognized that the lived closeness of kinship was not prescribed by patrilin-
eality, his earlier model traveled in time and space, inuencing not only other
social science models and military strategies (Zitelmann 2018), but also the
overall thinking about the region and within the region.
Scholars have additionally pointed to the ossifying effect that enduring war-
fare has had on the understanding of ethnicity. Sharon Hutchinson (1996) has
demonstrated how a more essentializing notion of ethnic belonging emerged
over extended periods during the two Sudanese civil wars since the mid-
twentieth century and replaced a more uid understanding of kinship. Mili-
tary commanders in the Second Sudanese Civil War applied the belief that
kinship was established through descent and that it was sufcient evidence
of belonging, as we also see in the kinship measurements described below.
This conviction emerged during the two-decades-long Second Sudanese Civil
War within the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A)
when ethnic politics became particularly prominent, especially after the 1991
Nasir split (Rolandsen and Daly 2016: 120–132). The mostly Dinka and Nuer
military commanders on the two sides of the South-South civil war of the
1990s recruited and armed militias from among their ethnic kin, turning them
against each other. This ‘militarization of Nuer and Dinka ethnic identities’
(Jok and Hutchinson 1999) was based on day-to-day kinship measurement
to determine someone’s belonging. Following the reconciliation of the two
warring Southern factions in 2002 and the subsequent independence of South
Sudan, this ‘military aristocracy’ gained control of all state institutions, includ-
ing the citizenship ofce. When applying the national laws and regulations,
the former commanders, who had become high-ranking ofcials, unsurpris-
ingly used the war-tested techniques of measuring kinship to determine eth-
nicity through the father’s line.

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 75
The Bureaucratic Journey to Acquire Citizenship
According to the Nationality Act, there are two ways of acquiring citizenship
by birth. One can be considered a native of South Sudan, rst, if “any parents,
grandparents or great-grandparents of such a person, on the male or female line,
were born in South Sudan,” and, second, if the “person belongs to one of the
indigenous ethnic communities of South Sudan” (South Sudan 2011a: 7). While
the rst route usually applied only to the minority of citizenship applicants
with foreign ancestry (mostly descendants of Greek merchants or northern
Sudanese), the majority of applicants had to use the second route to establish
national belonging. The South Sudan Nationality Regulations supplementing
the Nationality Act require that “the applicant must provide a witness(es) who
is/are believed to be (a male) elder and next of kin” (South Sudan 2011b: 6).
The bureaucratic journey to South Sudanese citizenship for applicants like
Durka took between three weeks and several months (Markó 2016). Preparing
for this journey usually meant “collecting records that seemingly hold out a
promise of legal inclusion” as citizenship applicants “seek to speak back to the
state in its own language” (Abarca and Coutin 2018: 8). By doing so, citizen-
ship applicants also constantly redened and altered the very state they ‘spoke
back to’. Each time applicants successfully argued with ofcials about why their
witnesses should pass the kinship measurement test, they were inuencing and
changing the state’s rules. Applicants were not mere passive subjects of state
rule, but very active agents in shaping how the state ‘saw’ them (Scott 1998).
Despite all the paper documentation, for most applicants this journey started
not at the gates of the citizenship ofce but at a local medical commission. The
majority of the population lacks birth certicates, so they had to acquire an age
assessment certicate. Moreover, to be accepted by the citizenship ofce, the
name on the age assessment certicate had to comply with the Dinka and Nuer
naming conventions indicating patrilineal lineage, which sometimes forced
people—even non-Dinka and Nuer applicants—to acquire a second certicate.
As I observed during eldwork, in an open tent at the center of the courtyard,
‘scribes’ helped those applicants who were illiterate or needed help lling out
forms or making photocopies of papers. These private entrepreneurs also pro-
vided highly sought-after information about kinship measurement techniques,
including searching for possible ‘next of kin’ witnesses or respective proof of
them. ‘Next-of-kin’ witnesses then became ofcial guarantors of the applicant.6
At the next stop on the journey, verication ofcers interviewed applicants and
witnesses, which is the central concern of this article. In these interviews, the
verication ofcers measured kinship not only by assessing the authenticity
of the supplied documentary evidence for genealogical closeness, but also by
judging the credibility of their life stories and lived closeness. Successful appli-
cants moved into a room where they were briey interviewed by a high-ranking

76 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
ofcer from the ‘military aristocracy’. It was only in ambiguous cases that these
ofcers also called in accepted witnesses for further questioning.
As Durka’s case already shows, the journey to citizenship was not always so
smooth. Neither the Nationality Act nor the South Sudan Nationality Regula-
tions came with a list of indigenous ethnic groups living on both sides of the
border. Thus, the police ofcers who conducted the hearing as ‘street-level
bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980) had a great deal of discretion in determining the
terms of ethnic belonging and thus of national inclusion or exclusion. As a
result of nearly half a century of civil wars, during which family relationships
disintegrated (or were never established, as in Durka’s case), many applicants
were unable to secure the ‘next of kin’ witnesses stipulated by the law. This
was particularly the case among youth repatriating from Uganda, Kenya, and
Ethiopia and among foreigners seeking citizenship illegally. Moreover, the law
did not specify who counted as ‘next of kin’, making negotiations on the ques-
tion of kinship measurement between applicants and the citizenship ofce’s
bureaucrats a delicate matter.
Measuring Kinship by Given Name and Lived Closeness
The citizenship ofce measured kinship between applicants and their witnesses
on two different scales. On the one hand, the ofcers tried to determine kinship
as genealogical descent based on the logic of the naming system. On the other
hand, in unclear or dubious cases, the ofcers tried to evaluate the lived close-
ness between the applicant and the next of kin. Both of these measurements
were based on Dinka and Nuer notions of kinship. ‘Next of kin’, as an Anglo-
Saxon legal category, was adopted by South Sudanese lawyers who created the
legislation of the new country. However, according to the Dinka major general
who was the director general of the citizenship ofce, ofcials were not given
any instructions as to how exactly they should evaluate the evidence and who
should be admitted as a ‘next of kin’ witness: “Here in South Sudan, we know
each other … Our task is to determine if the applicant is really from the tribe
he is telling us. For this, we ask the family and the chiefs to testify under oath”
(pers. comm.).
As a former major general of the SPLA and a veteran of the civil war,
the director is an inuential member of the ‘military aristocracy’ of South
Sudan. His approach echoed the experiences of civil war, that is, hasty inter-
views of citizens by uniformed personnel in which the military authority had
an unquestionable right to make decisions. Testimonies of chiefs and family
members would act as evidence, and the lineage determined from the logic of
names would prove the degree of genealogical closeness. The system set up
for the citizenship ofce of the new country thus resembled the structures in

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 77
place during the civil war, when high-ranking, mostly Dinka and Nuer military
ofcers ran the civilian administration.7
Measuring the Similarity of Names as Genealogical Closeness
The introduction and standardization of surnames has been frequently used
by states to make society legible for diverse governance matters (Scott 1998).
As has already become evident from Durka’s story recounted at the outset, the
citizenship ofce tried to attain this legibility through the standardization of
what seems to have become shared local knowledge of Dinka and Nuer kinship
through daily interaction. In these negotiations, the staff actively produced the
naming system of the new state but also established a selection mechanism
for ‘close enough’ relatives of the applicant—a method that, in their view, best
ensured compliance with the law.8
In applying this system, male and female ofcers followed the rules of
what they saw as patrilineal descent based on the naming systems used by
the two dominant groups of the ‘military aristocracy’. According to these nam-
ing systems, a newborn’s given name would generally be followed by that of
the father (or, in exceptional cases, the guardian) and the grandfather (or the
father of the guardian) spanning several generations.9 “We follow the logic of
names,” one low-ranking DNPI ofcer told me, citing the genealogical clarity
of the names used by Dinka and Nuer in determining possible kin relationships
when, for example, looking for eligible future spouses (pers. comm.).
The requirement that the witness be ‘next of kin’ demanded from both
ofcers and applicants an effort to “master the bastard algebra of kinship”
(Malinowski 1930: 19). Bronisław Malinowski used this phrase to refer to “the
pseudo-mathematical treatment of the too-learned anthropologist” (ibid.: 20)
who tried to “reduce to formulae, symbols, [and] equations” the complexities
of kinship (ibid.: 19). Since naming systems and understandings of kinship
vary widely among the other ethnic groups of South Sudan, determining kin-
ship measurement through the logic of names created legal and practical ambi-
guity and opened up a space for debate between applicants and ofcers. The
opacity of the process also fueled and reinforced sentiments of ill treatment
and domination by certain ethnic groups over the general population. Count-
less times, I heard complaints about ‘Dinka domination’ after an applicant was
unable to convince a military ofcer about his or her next of kin during the
kinship measurement procedure.
The supposed clarity of the naming system was based on the assump-
tion that wives do not take their husband’s name. The senior ofcers at the
DNPI envisioned this system as the backbone of the new registry, with the
stipulation that the ofcial name must always consist of four names—three
generations—with the last name being the ‘family name’. ‘Family name’ was a

78 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
requirement of the German identication machinery, where the computerized
system was organized according to the Western notion of separable family and
given names. The imagined stable ‘family name’ was translated into a shift-
ing category in the South Sudanese citizenship ofce, which recorded it as the
fourth name (great-grandfather) of the applicant. Therefore, even if a father
and a son applied for citizenship documents together, they received different
‘family names’.
The paternal lineage alone would show the generational degree because
the names of the Dinka and Nuer maternal or afnal relatives contain only the
paternal ancestors of the ego. In the following paragraphs, I seek to shed light
on the logic of Dinka and Nuer names and thus on the state-recognized, ofcial
South Sudanese naming systems used in the citizenship ofce. Based on this
logic, the degree of similarity of names was understood as an indicator of genea-
logical closeness and could be used for measuring kinship.10 Demonstrating this
through a concrete example, let us assume that a Dinka man called Jok Deng
Adout Kiir was applying for citizenship and had brought another Dinka man
called Achuil Luol Adout Kiir as a next of kin. As table 1 illustrates, the third and
fourth names—those of the grandfather and great-grandfather—are the same.
This would allow the ofcial to assume that they were relatives and measure
their genealogical closeness to be that of paternal cousins. The disputes about
names between the ofcers and the non-Dinka or Nuer applicants were particu-
larly long and sometimes very heated. The DNPI’s logic, which at rst seemed
like a strictly patriarchal system that allowed only older paternal relatives to act
as witnesses, turned out to be more complex when it came to the strategies of
individual applicants and ofcials. Both sides in these debates displayed and/or
appropriated knowledge in kinship categories and ethnic belonging.
Deviations from the Patrilineal Naming System
Several factors complicated the seemingly straightforward kinship measure-
ment on the basis of patrilineal names. Some had to do with actual naming
practices that do not comply with the model, and some with lived kinship.
Both required efforts to align the similarity of names with the genealogical and
TabLe 1: Dinka applicant, a hypothetical ‘ideal’ case
Applicant Jok Deng Adout Kiir
(name) (father) (grandfather) (great-grandfather)
Witness Achuil Luol Adout Kiir
(cousin) (name) (father) (grandfather) (great-grandfather)

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 79
lived closeness it was supposed to measure (see also McKinnon, this issue).
Well aware of both kinds of complexities, state bureaucrats and citizenship
applicants engaged in numerous practices of adapting to or manipulating the
measurements, thereby producing ever more complex mixtures.
The rst level of complexity arose from the additional baptismal names
given to the child. For instance, Dinka or Nuer often take on a baptismal
name—usually, but not always, placed after the rst given name, so that in our
hypothetical case our witness would be called Achak *John* Luol Adout. In
certain cases, the father’s or grandfather’s baptismal name falls off the genea-
logical name passed on to and recited by their children. The daughter of Achak
*John* Luol Adout, for example, might be called Rakelleh Achak Luol Adout,
with the baptismal name of *John* falling out. However, as there has been no
codied and strictly followed application of this rule, there was a great deal of
compromise between bureaucrats and applicants when they decided about the
nal name of the applicant that would be printed on the ID card and recorded
in the state registry. I saw numerous occasions when the high-ranking military
ofcer conducting the ofcial investigation and kinship measurement changed
the name of an applicant on the form. In certain cases, either at this stage or
later during the entering of biometric data into the database by low-ranking
ofcers, the applicants successfully ‘appealed’ the name change and convinced
the ofcers to revert to the name that they had rst applied with. In most cases,
however, applicants accepted the change of their ofcial name.
Cases of children born out of wedlock further complicate the situation. In
many cases, Dinka or Nuer men cannot pay the bride price because they lack
a herd of cattle. As a result, their children become associated with the patri-
lineal line of the maternal uncles and are named accordingly (Pendle 2018;
Sommers and Schwartz 2011). As in the case of Durka, who grew up with her
maternal uncle for different reasons, individuals may also feel closer to their
maternal relatives even while ofcially associated with (and named after) their
paternal relatives.
During eldwork, I encountered different strategies used to apply for citi-
zenship at the DNPI in cases where measurements of kinship based on the
similarity of names or on lived closeness did not match. Some, like Durka,
sought out their genetic father to ask him or one of his relatives to testify for
them. In these cases, they had used their maternal names previously; now
their ofcial names would be those of their fathers or, as the case may be, of
their grandfathers and sometimes great-grandfathers, replacing former names
derived from their maternal uncles and their patrilineal ancestors.
Others claimed that their maternal uncle was their father and then brought
any of the relatives they grew up with to the ofce to testify. For example, the
child of their uncle, a matrilineal cousin, would testify at the ofce to being a
patrilineal sibling. Recycling the names used in the previous example, let us

80 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
suppose that a Dinka called Jok Deng Adout Kiir, who was born out of wedlock
and raised by his maternal uncle, applied for citizenship. If he followed the
paternal line, he would have to get a new name; however, in order to be able to
use the maternal line, he would have to indicate another person as father, thus
making the witness’s degree of kinship measurable (see tables 2 and 3). In both
cases, the applicant’s choice of kinship afliation was the result of lived close-
ness, which included geographical closeness (e.g., which branch of relatives
was easier to contact in Juba), and emotional closeness or personal proximity
(e.g., which branch was more convenient to ask for favors). Also, the emphasis
that the applicant placed on ‘real’ descent and the ofcial name that would then
appear on the identity card played a role. In cases where individuals refused
to change their descent, and thereby their name, the decision about national
belonging was made in the negotiations of measurements with the ofcers.
TabLe 2: Dinka applicant raised by maternal uncle who secures a patrilineal
kin witness
Applicant Jok Deng Adout Kiir
(name) (maternal (uncle’s father) (uncle’s
uncle, guardian) grandfather)
Applicant’s Jok Achuil Luol Wek
official name (name) (father) (grandfather) (great-grandfather)
Witness Kuol Achuil Luol Wek
(paternal sibling) (name) (father) (grandfather) (great-grandfather)
TabLe 3: Dinka applicant raised by maternal uncle who secures a matrilineal
kin witness
Applicant Jok Deng Adout Kiir
(name) (maternal (uncle’s father) (uncle’s
uncle, guardian) grandfather)
Applicant’s Jok Deng Adout Kiir
official name (name) (maternal (uncle’s father) (uncle’s
uncle, guardian) grandfather)
Witness Kuol Deng Adout Kiir
(‘real’ cousin/ (name) (father) (grandfather) (great-grandfather)
maternal sibling)

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 81
However, this was not a one-way street: bureaucrats also learned every day,
and this shaped their future decisions. I witnessed daily how high-ranking, off-
duty military ofcers sat in the small, shady courtyard behind the verication
ofce, drinking tea and discussing difcult cases. They argued with each other
when they thought that one of them had made a wrong decision. In certain
tricky cases, I saw ofcers postpone their decision and tell the applicant to
“come back tomorrow.” They would then seek out their colleagues to inquire
if they had previously encountered something similar. In cases when a dis-
pute between an applicant and an ofcer became contentious, the highest-
ranking commanding ofcer frequently took over the dispute and restarted the
entire investigation.
From time to time, bureaucrats made exceptions. Instead of seeking degrees
of distance in lineage, they were occasionally more interested in trustwor-
thiness and assessed the closeness between the applicant and the witness,
irrespective of the genealogical relations. In his nal book on the Nuer, Evans-
Pritchard (1951: 156) wrote about the deviation of patrilineal, segmentary
rigidity in everyday life among the Nuer: “The sentiment of mar, of commu-
nion with his kin, gives a Nuer the comfort of security … irrespective of their
precise category of relationship.” The similar notion is known as ruääi or kaar
among the Dinka. The DNPI ofcers in certain cases would measure the level
of mar/ruääi—lived closeness—during the citizenship interviews.
For example, in one citizenship interview, a Dinka ofcer did not accept a
next-of-kin witness—a maternal cousin—of an Equatorian Kakwa applicant,
arguing that the law required a paternal, older relative. The two sides got into
a heated discussion about who qualied as a relative. Insisting on measuring
genealogical closeness through the similarity of names, the ofcer argued that
he could only accept a witness who shared at least one of the four names with
the applicant, in line with the Dinka and Nuer naming system described above.
By the end of the discussion, the applicant managed to convince the ofcer
that although the Kakwa are also a patrilineal ethnic group, maternal uncles—
and, accordingly, their children—are emotionally closer and more important
than the father, and that due to the logic of the Kakwa naming system kinship
would not be clear even in the case of paternal relatives. After some hesitation,
the Dinka ofcer accepted the applicant’s arguments and agreed to question
the witness. While the Dinka ofcer rst insisted on the logic of names, the
Kakwa applicant questioned the adequacy of such measurements for deter-
mining his ethnic belonging, arguing that the Dinka and Nuer measurement
of kinship failed at attesting Kakwa kinship due to different naming practices,
and that Kakwa kinship should be measured on the basis of closeness in fam-
ily life rather than shared names. The questioning thus changed to a different
and improvised kinship measurement that tested lived closeness. The ofcer
rst asked the applicant a series of trivial questions about the place where the

82 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
applicant claimed to come from: What is the name of the river nearby? What
is the name of the paramount chief of the county? He then cross-examined the
witness alone, asking the same questions to determine if the two were really
from the same place.
However, ofcers at the citizenship ofce did not always accept such argu-
ments about ethnic difference as being legitimate reasons to deviate from
the logic of names for kinship measurement. Another citizenship applicant
provides an example. He worked for a non-governmental nancial institution,
but was also the leader of the semi-ofcial umbrella organization of the Acholi
community in South Sudan. His birth certicate was issued at a hospital in
Khartoum, and he used this to apply for citizenship, bringing along a paternal
cousin as ‘next of kin’ witness. The ofcial politely told him that the birth cer-
ticate was not acceptable because his name did not match the ofcial naming
system. First, it only consisted of three names; second, it did not include the
names of his paternal ancestors. The applicant argued in vain that while the
Acholi are a patrilineal ethnic group, in their naming system it was outright
unacceptable for people to be named after their own father. Finally, he had no
option but to request the Age Assessment Form from the medical commission
under a new name that complied with the state’s accepted naming system. He
was perplexed and annoyed by the fact that his passport would be under a dif-
ferent name, and that each time he used it, he would have to explain why. For
him, this was proof of ‘Dinka dominance’ over something as fundamental and
sacred as a person’s name.
However, discrepancies between kinship as similarity in names and lived
closeness also affected ofcials themselves. Several high-ranking ofcers tried to
nd jobs for their relatives at the citizenship ofce. One older Dinka colonel—
who perhaps checked and enforced most strictly that witnesses be paternal
relatives—secured a guard position for a young protégé. He had told me that
the boy was a ‘next of kin’ to him. In later conversations it turned out that the
young man was the grandson of his maternal aunt, a degree of kinship that the
Dinka language has no word for (Deng 1972). The ofcer still felt close to him,
considering him and his aunt, who entrusted him with care obligations, to be
part of his ruääi. Applicants and ofcers together engaged in exible kinship
measurements that combined the standards of patrilineal naming systems with
assessments of lived closeness. Their disagreements occasionally strengthened
ethnic divides and stereotypes. The next section shows how these negotiations
resulted in new types of kinship relations.
The Productivity of Measuring Kinship
In certain cases, citizenship applicants produced evidence of kinship to suc-
cessfully apply for identity documents. These attempts were based on careful

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 83
observation of the ofce routines and demonstrated a fair understanding of
different types of kinship measurements. Two of my interlocutors came from
Southern Kordofan, Sudan. They had ed the Sudanese Civil War for Khar-
toum and then Juba, South Sudan, looking for work and a better life. They
met in Juba for the rst time and moved to a shared house. Both of them
had UNHCR-issued identity papers for refugees; however, they could not get
permanent jobs, as these jobs are usually reserved for South Sudanese nation-
als. They applied for citizenship together, even though they knew that they
were legally not eligible. According to the law, they were not South Suda-
nese because—despite the Christian population of South Kordofan having
supported the SPLA for decades—the area remained in Sudan upon South
Sudan’s secession. In order to become eligible, they had to create measurable
kinship for each other. Although they came from different ethnic groups, they
testied for each other as ‘next of kin’, and created new biographies for them-
selves, for which they obtained evidence.
First of all, they selected an appropriate South Sudanese ethnic group—it
had to be a group with a small population whose language was not spoken
at the citizenship ofce, lest they be caught—and created new names and
life stories for themselves, and then testied as each other’s brothers. The
new names followed the state-desired logic of names described above: their
imagined fathers’ names became second names, grandfathers’ names third,
and so on. In order to get prepared, they visited the ofce several times,
months before actually applying, and also consulted xers about the pro-
cess. The requirement of ‘next of kin’ witnesses and the bureaucrats’ kinship
measurement methods thus spurred great interest among citizenship appli-
cants to acquire knowledge about the different kinship categories used during
measurement in order to have a successful application.11 After successfully
applying for South Sudanese citizenship, the two men from South Kordofan
have been renting a house together in a new district in Juba, where they told
everyone that they are brothers. In this case, the kinship measurements not
only led to national belonging but also helped to forge a lasting relationship
acknowledged locally as kinship.
This productivity of measuring is also evident in the following case. One of
my Equatorian Kuku interviewees traveled to Juba to acquire citizenship docu-
ments from a Ugandan refugee camp. Once in Juba, and having learned about
the requirements of the procedure, he had to look for a distant paternal relative
because his entire family lived in Uganda. This cousin, whom he would not have
contacted and met otherwise, traveled to Juba from a nearby village to help him,
and in the three weeks they spent together, they became such good friends that
my interviewee decided to move to his cousin’s village instead of returning to
Uganda. Measurements of kinship as similarities in names produced the very
closeness of kinship that the similar names were supposed to indicate.

84 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
Measuring patrilineal descent and lived closeness to make decisions about
national belonging may thus be experienced as coercive, yet it may also allow
actors to create new kinship relations that can prove surprisingly stable, as in
the example of the two young men living together as brothers. Likewise, Durka,
who returned from her European home and had to search for her never-before-
seen father to testify for her, developed a very good relationship with him
afterward. Toward the end of her visit, Durka decided to move out of her hotel
room to spend a few days with her father’s family. This exibility that actual
lived closeness offers has constantly inuenced people’s view of kinship based
in normative assumptions about mutual obligations. Of course, these norma-
tive foundations are not closed sets expressed through formulas; oftentimes,
even two Dinka ofcials may disagree about a disputed issue. And these expe-
rienced, exible kinship relations—such as the ofcial naming system thus set
up—are themselves continually affecting the normative foundations treated as
reference points.
Conclusion
The nationality laws of 2011 dene South Sudan as a hodgepodge of well-
dened and bounded ethnic groups (Markó 2015). The emphasis on ethnicity
as the building block in dening the new nation and thus the cornerstone of
the application process might have been understood as an innocent and logical
choice by the new state. However, with the well-documented militarization of
ethnicities in South Sudan (Jok and Hutchinson 1999) and the ethnic nature
of the civil war that broke out in 2013 (Craze 2019; Craze et al. 2016; Pinaud
2014), the primacy of bureaucratic ethnicity uncovers deeper levels of con-
nections between the violent state and ethnic politics. Leaders of the formerly
militarized ethnicities grabbed power in 2005 and created ethnicized bureau-
cracies from the beginning of the new state. What started as a political struggle
for power within the highest echelons of the governing party quickly developed
into a brutal civil war with ethnic killings, massacres, and the absolutization
of ethnic identities.
While the civil war was obviously not the direct consequence of the kinship
measurements within the citizenship ofce, the new country’s emphasis on
ethnicity as the basis of nationhood predicted the future cracking lines. Despite
numerous examples of vertical solidarity across ethnic lines—for example,
several Nuer ofcers of the DNPI who were escorted to the safety of the peace-
keepers’ base during the rst nights of the civil war by Dinka colleagues who
risked their own lives, and the two Nubians who ‘invented’ their brotherhood
and have lived as brothers ever since—once that state collapsed it disintegrated
along the lines it was supposed to follow as the foundations of the new nation.

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 85
Some frustrated citizenship applicants felt oppressed by kinship measure-
ments based on the logic of the ofcial naming system, which reinforced their
preconceptions about ‘Dinka domination’. Some of my highly educated friends
in Juba, returning from long exiles just after the declaration of independence,
were quite annoyed that the citizenship application form starts with a ques-
tion about ‘tribe’. One, a writer by profession, put South Sudanese instead of
giving her tribe. Unable to get her documents, she had to change the form, ll-
ing it out according to the ethnic logic of the ofce and conrming belonging
through a ‘next of kin’ witness. Even though she comes from a powerful and
‘immaculately’ Dinka family, has a high socio-economic status, and denitely
can ‘speak to power’, she was unable to negotiate her ‘extreme’ position and
had to conform to the rules and accept the ethnic emphasis, and with it the
kinship measurements. Her story shows the limits of civic action in a society
where militarized ethnicity was translated into ethnicized bureaucracy even
before the outbreak of the civil war in South Sudan.
Immediately following the declaration of independence, South Sudan was in
dire need of procedures that could establish citizenship and on that basis issue
identity documents. Driven by good intentions, the leaders of the citizenship
ofce turned to the methods used during the Second Sudanese Civil War and
created legislation with an emphasis on ethnicity. This article has highlighted
that a single approach toward kinship measurement through the attestation
of names proved insufcient in practice to determine ethnicity, and verica-
tion ofcers thus applied different types of measures. Combining the logic of
names with lived closeness of kinship opened the possibility for applicants to
become active participants. During this process, both the applicants and the
ofcers constantly redened ofcial state practices by applying exible kinship
measurements. While sometimes this exibility can produce new relations and
belonging, the apparatus created to measure kinship can also increase political
tensions, strengthen ethnic stereotypes, and cement inequalities in access to
state resources.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Tatjana Thelen and Christof Lammer for their constructive
criticism and editorial assistance. Deng Dekuek helped with Dinka naming
rules. The anonymous reviewers provided valuable feedback. Andreas Danger,
Mihály Sárkány, Gábor Vargyas, and Bea Vidacs helped me formulate the ideas
into a coherent argument.

86 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
Ferenc Dávid Markó is a Researcher at Small Arms Survey/The Graduate Insti-
tute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and a Lecturer in the
Department of Cultural Anthropology, Eötvös Loránd Science University, Buda-
pest. His research focuses on the bureaucratization of South Sudan and on the
dynamics of recurring political violence. Research for this article was funded
by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Among his publications are “Negotiations
and Morality: The Ethnicization of Citizenship in Post-secession South Sudan”
(Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2015) and “‘We Are Not a Failed State, We
Make the Best Passports’: South Sudan and Biometric Modernity” (African
Studies Review, 2016). E-mail: ferenc.marko@smallarmssurvey.org
Notes
1. All names have been changed to ensure anonymity.
2. Throughout the article, the Second Sudanese Civil War refers to the Southern
rebellion against the Sudanese state between 1983 and 2005, while the South
Sudanese Civil War refers to the war that broke out in December 2013 in Juba
and reached a ceasere and peace agreement in September 2018.
3. Meanwhile, the size of the biometrics database tied to aid distribution by the
World Food Programme and the International Organization for Migration grew
to four million entries, basically documenting one-third of the most vulnerable
part of the South Sudanese population (private sources).
4. The detailed history of the colonial policies of uneven development between
regions of South Sudan is discussed by Douglas Johnson (2003). For the legacy
of kokora, the decentralization policy of the short period of peace that started
in the 1970s (1972–1983), see Willems and Deng (2015).
5. For a more detailed history, see Markó (2016), and for an analysis of various
social classes among the ofcers in the citizenship ofce, see Markó (2022).
6. See Markó (2016) for a more comprehensive description of this process.
7. For the wider context of this system, see Branch and Mampilly (2005) and
Rolandsen (2005).
8. In this way, they acted in a similar way to the insurance adjusters described
by Irene Moretti (this issue), who also use a combination of measurements for
assessing closeness that they try to adapt to the complexities of everyday life.
9. For a detailed description of the Dinka naming system, see Deng 1972: 38–40.
10. See also Thelen and Lammer (this issue) on the various indicators of kinship,
such as closeness and similarity.
11. Similarly, Caren Freeman (2011) shows how the Korean government encouraged
Chinese Koreans to ‘discover’ kinship relations on the peninsula and produce
new kinship.

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 87
References
Abarca, Gray Albert, and Susan Bibler Coutin. 2018. “Sovereign Intimacies: The
Lives of Documents within US State-Noncitizen Relationships.” American Eth-
nologist 45 (1): 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12595.
Branch, Adam, and Zachariah Cherian Mampilly. 2005. “Winning the War, but
Losing the Peace? The Dilemma of SPLM/A Civil Administration and the
Tasks Ahead.” Journal of Modern African Studies 43 (1): 1–20. https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0022278X04000588.
Checchi, Francesco, Adrienne Testa, Abdihamid Warsame, Le Quach, and Rachel
Burns. 2018. Estimates of Crisis-Attributable Mortality in South Sudan, Decem-
ber 2013–April 2018: A Statistical Analysis. London: London School of Hygiene
& Tropical Medicine. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/les/resources/
LSHTM_mortality_South_Sudan_report.pdf.
Craze, Joshua. 2019. Displaced and Immiserated: The Shilluk of Upper Nile in
South Sudan’s Civil War, 2014–19. Geneva: Small Arms Survey.
Craze, Joshua, and Jérôme Tubiana, with Claudio Gramizzi. 2016. A State of Dis-
unity: Conflict Dynamics in Unity State, South Sudan, 2013–15. Geneva: Small
Arms Survey.
Deng, Francis Mading. 1972. The Dinka of the Sudan. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood
and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1951. Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Evens, T. M. S. 1984. “Nuer Hierarchy.” In Différences, valeurs, hiérarchie [Differ-
ences, values, hierarchy], ed. Jean-Claude Galey, 319–334. Paris: ditions de
l’cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales.
Freeman, Caren. 2011. Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration
between China and South Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gough, Kathleen. 1971. “Nuer Kinship: A Re-Examination.” In The Translation of
Culture: Essays to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ed. T. O. Beidelman, 79–122. London:
Tavistock.
Hol, Ladislav. 1979a. “Nuer Politics.” In Hol 1979c, 23–48.
Hol, Ladislav. 1979b. “The Segmentary Lineage Structure and Its Existential
Status.” In Hol 1979c, 1–22.
Hol, Ladislav, ed. 1979c. Segmentary Lineage Systems Reconsidered. Belfast:
Department of Social Anthropology, The Queen’s University.
Hutchinson, Sharon E. 1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the
State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnson, Douglas H. 2003. The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars. Oxford: James
Currey.
Jok, Jok Madut, and Sharon Elaine Hutchinson. 1999. “Sudan’s Prolonged Second
Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities.” African
Studies Review 42 (2): 125–145. https://doi.org/10.2307/525368.

88 | Ferenc Dávid Markó
Karp, Ivan, Kent Maynard, John W. Burton, Peter Harries-Jones, et al. 1983.
“Reading the Nuer [and Comments and Reply].” Current Anthropology 24 (4):
481–503. https://doi.org/10.1086/203035.
Kuper, Adam. 1982. “Lineage Theory: A Critical Retrospect.” Annual Review of
Anthropology 11: 71–95. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.11.100182.000443.
Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in
Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Malinowski, Bronisław. 1930. “Kinship.” Man 30: 19–29.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the
Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Markó, Ferenc Dávid. 2015. “Negotiations and Morality: The Ethnicization of Citi-
zenship in Post-secession South Sudan.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 9 (4):
669–684. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2015.1105441.
Markó, Ferenc Dávid. 2016. “‘We Are Not a Failed State, We Make the Best Pass-
ports’: South Sudan and Biometric Modernity.” African Studies Review 59 (2):
113–132. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2016.39.
Markó, Ferenc Dávid. 2022. “ID Cards and Social Class: The Intensication of the
Bifurcated State in South Sudan.” In Everyday State and Democracy in Africa:
Ethnographic Encounters, ed. Wale Adebanwi. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Forthcoming.
McKinnon, Susan. 2000. “Domestic Exceptions: Evans-Pritchard and the Creation
of Nuer Patrilineality and Equality.” Cultural Anthropology 15 (1): 35–83.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/656640.
Pendle, Naomi R. 2018. “‘The Dead Are Just to Drink From’: Recycling Ideas
of Revenge among the Western Dinka, South Sudan.” Africa 88 (1): 99–121.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972017000584.
Pinaud, Clemence. 2014. “South Sudan: Civil War, Predation and the Making
of a Military Aristocracy.” African Affairs 113 (451): 192–211. https://doi.
org/10.1093/afraf/adu019.
Rolandsen, Øystein H. 2005. Guerilla Government: Political Changes in the South-
ern Sudan during the 1990s. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.
Rolandsen, Øystein H., and M. W. Daly. 2016. A History of South Sudan: From
Slavery to Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosaldo, Renato. 1986. “From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquis-
itor.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clif-
ford and George E. Marcus, 77–97. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the
Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sommers, Marc, and Stephanie Schwartz. 2011. Dowry and Division: Youth and
State Building in South Sudan. Washington, DC: United States Institute of
Peace. https://www.usip.org/sites/default/les/resources/SR_295.pdf.
South Sudan. 2011a. The Nationality Act, 2011. https://www.refworld.org/
docid/4e94318f2.html.
South Sudan. 2011b. Nationality Regulations, 2011. https://www.refworld.org/
pdd/4ffab4582.pdf.

Given Names and Lived Closeness | 89
UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees). 2017. A Study of Statelessness
in South Sudan. Juba: UNHCR. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/
download/63857.
Willems, Rens, and David Deng. 2015. “The Legacy of ‘Kokora’ in South Sudan.”
Brieng paper. Utrecht: PAX for Peace.
Zitelmann, Thomas. 2018. “Kinship Weaponized: Representations of Kinship and
Binary Othering in U.S. Military Anthropology.” In Reconnecting State and Kin-
ship, ed. Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber, 61–86. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.