ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I present the ways women politicians understand and politicise two primordial elements that constitute their ethnie identities, blood, and roots. For women politicians, these elements are more than just an identifier who belongs or does not belong to the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991, p. 49). Blood and roots add to the uniqueness, history, and destiny of the ethnie. They can serve as a measurement of suffering and struggle, the sacrifice made for the ethnie. In some of the stories of women politicians I reveal that blood and roots have an ability to transfer collective memories, ethnie symbols, myths, and rituals from old to the young generations, as a tie that connects past to the present. I conclude that, in their work, women politicians often exploited primordial elements of the nation, such as blood and roots, in order to contribute to the “core doctrine of nationalism” (Smith, 1991, p. 74). Women politicised ethnic primacy and the ethnic core of their nations and they anchored them to their political claims for self-rootedness and uprooting the “other”.
