ABSTRACT
Bill Maurer’s study examines how lineality and descent are constructed in law and political discourse in the contemporary British Virgin Islands. His discussion centers on current debates about citizenship and competing views about how citizenship ought to be legitimated. Maurer shows that even discourses that critique orthodox views are often based in naturalizing presumptions. For example, Virgin Islanders who protest narrow definitions of citizenship based on the citizenship status of fathers still conceive of birthplace as the basis of their alternative notion of national belonging. The compelling political problem he addresses—who does and does not “belong” to a nation and how such “belonging” is established—echoes as a contemporary problem of global political economy far beyond the boundaries of his study.
