After the U.S. invasion in 2001, access to land, particularly state-owned as well as agricultural and pasture-land, became potent political currency in Afghanistan. Land grabbing and distributing land to political networks transformed into a veritable source of income and way to establish political loyalties. Nomadic communities were not immune to the consequences. Indeed, in many ways, they were more affected than others by the differential allocation of power and authority that played a central role in their attempts to access and wield this resource. Nomadic identities were reconstituted in a politicized garb after the establishment of the internationally-backed Afghan government and the influx of international NGOs that administered the development and reconstruction sector. In the interface with what Fassin has called the “humanitarian government” (Fassin 2007), organizations and policy makers showed a strong interest in ameliorating the livelihoods of pastoralists and enshrining their rights in both the constitution and national laws. The outcome was the emergence of so-called “Kuchi” rights, a quasi-legal neologism referring to pastoral nomads and their descendants, that offered rights and political opportunities. However, other nomadic communities were excluded from this category. One of these—peripatetic communities—emerged as the new urban poor and part of the internally displaced population (IDPs) in need of attention from the international aid sector. This paper offers a new perspective on these constructed legal and social categories of recognition through the lens of the nomadic dead, and the people who care for them. Access to land—or lack thereof—is intimately tied to access to burial grounds and thus subject to sociopolitical pressures. This paper investigates how nomadic populations deal with legal categorizations that are paralleled by social stigma which impact care for the dead and burial. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Afghanistan’s urban centers of Kabul, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif since 2013, it explores how the unequal status of pastoral (legally recognized) and peripatetic (unrecognized) nomads, intersected with social stereotypes to render one group integrated and protected and the other stateless. This status in life crossed the threshold into death, leaving families of the unrecognized facing conflicts and problems associated with burial decisions. Taking an approach that focuses on community negotiation, the paper considers how the different statuses of these otherwise structurally similar communities was navigated in the interaction between nomadic community and burial gatekeepers.