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ОглавлениеChapter 1
Of Rocks and Rivers—Being Both at Once
We are solid like rocks and viscous like mud. We have offered incense to our deities …
Come, deities, strung in a straight line like the necklaces of the sparrow, of our ancestors … come strung in a straight line … As the deities rose, the rocks dissolved. It was light and the wood dissolved. As it dissolved, everything became fluid…. Let’s create humans, the deities said.
Chanting these lines, the voices of Thangmi shamans rise and fall to the beat of an animal-skin drum. Monotonous yet captivating, every ritual event begins with these recitations about the origins of the world. This is also the soundtrack I always hear in my mind as I write about Thangmi lives. I can almost smell the incense, recalling myself in the midst of one ritual after another, some over a decade ago now. Weddings, funerals, supplications to territorial deities for a good harvest, most taking place late at night, lit first by kerosene lamps and candles and in later years by bare electric bulbs strung along mud walls. Some Thangmi listen attentively, some drink grain beer and joke loudly about the shamans’ performance, others coo children to sleep in corners amid the hubbub. I struggle to stay awake and make sense of what the words, actions, and beliefs behind them might mean.
These chants are part of the Thangmi paloke, a narrative cycle about origins and being in the world. It is a story that Thangmi tell themselves about themselves and their relations to others. It is a story heard from childhood onward that plays a crucial role in shaping Thangmi sensibilities about who they are, as individuals, members of an ethnic community, inhabitants of particular pieces of territory, and mobile citizens of multiple states. Repeated again and again throughout each ritual cycle, the first line sums up an apparent paradox of Thangmi being. As they propitiate their deities, the speakers are at once “solid like rocks and viscous like mud,” both immovable objects and malleable forms. For a group of people who openly acknowledge themselves as peripheral to dominant formulations of national, ethnic, and religious identity, and who practice circular migration between three countries as a primary socioeconomic strategy, this fluid state of being is not only a ritual metaphor but a fact of daily life.
I was listening to academic addresses—eerily evocative of the Thangmi paloke in their cadence—at a conference on “Ethnicity and Federalisation” in Kathmandu, Nepal, in April 2011. Leading scholars, activists, and policy makers had gathered to discuss the role of ethnicity in restructuring the Nepali state. After a ten-year civil conflict between Maoist insurgents and state forces ended in 2006, Nepal began the transformation from a unitary Hindu monarchy to a secular democratic federal republic. The country’s first Constituent Assembly was elected in 2008, and the process of constitution writing began amid great hope for a more equitable future. By the time of the conference in 2011, however, the deadline for a new constitution had been extended several times beyond the initial two years, and agreement on the shape of the new state was still uncertain. Ultimately, the Constituent Assembly would be dissolved in 2012 without promulgating a constitution. The role of ethnicity in determining new provincial boundaries was at the center of contentious debate.
There were no Thangmi, and few members of other marginalized groups like them, in the hotel ballroom filled to capacity with several hundred representatives of Nepal’s political and academic elite. I was invited to present a paper as a “foreign expert” on ethnicity in Nepal but found myself unsure of the implications of my statements in this highly politicized context. Social scientific arguments about the nature of ethnicity were being deployed in novel ways to argue for or against recognizing ethnicity as a valid basis for demarcating Nepal’s newly proposed federal units.
An influential sociologist from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu took the podium. “Ethnic distinctions and boundaries keep shifting and multiplying and coalescing,” he said, “‘before’ and ‘after’ and in-between are akin to waves on the move rather than to fixed rocks” (Mishra 2012:88). He was describing ethnicity in terms similar to those I had heard over and over in the Thangmi chants. But here the relationship between the two possibilities was cast in oppositional terms—either a rock or a wave, a fixed object or a mutable flow—while in the shamans’ formulation these were complementary properties of a holistic state of being reproduced through ritualized action.
This book considers the implications of each of these points of view for contemporary understandings of ethnicity. Is ethnicity a rock or a river? Fixed or fluid? Both at once? To whom? At what particular places and times? How can interpreting the process of ethnicization as a process of ritualization, which brings disparate individuals together around the shared sacred object of identity, offer new explanations for the powerful persistence of ethnic identities despite the increasing realities of mobile, hybrid lives?
I consider these questions through the story of one putatively singular community, the Thangmi, and their life experiences as they move across the Himalayan borders of Nepal, India, and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). But this story raises larger questions about how ethnicity and identity are produced, ritual and politics enacted, cross-border migration lived, and consciousness experienced for many people across the region and the world who have something in common with those who recognize themselves as Thangmi. At the most intimate level, this category of commonality includes those who identify as members of other adivasi janajati (indigenous nationality) groups in Nepal, as Indians of Nepali heritage, and as border people in China.1 At the next level of abstraction, it includes those who define themselves, or are defined by others, as indigenous, tribal, marginal, or “out-of-the-way” (Tsing 1993) anywhere in the world. At the most general level, the category can be expanded to include all those whose lives entail cross-border, transnational, diasporic, or migratory movements and hybrid or synthetic practices. While I tell the Thangmi story for its own sake, this narrative comes to articulate with many others through the telling.
Why Ethnicity?
Mishra (2012) was not the first scholar to use the metaphor of rocks and rivers to describe the nature of cultural processes in the Himalayas. In his ethnography of the Thakali, Fluid Boundaries, William Fisher writes of the Kali Gandaki river running through his informants’ villages in western Nepal in just such a way:
Thakali culture … is like the Kali Gandaki River. It flows in a wide riverbed that allows it to break up into several meandering streams that merge again downstream. These separations and mergings vary unpredictably over time, but the separated channels always rejoin further downstream…. The river changes over time …. But it is nevertheless the same river.
Similarly, any description of Thakali culture is at best a representation of a moment in an ongoing cultural process. The difficulty of locating cultural coherence does not mean that Thakali culture has broken down or that it is in a transitional phase between one coherent structure or another. It merely reflects the process in which Thakali culture has been continually renewed. (2001:19–20)
I read this description early in my fieldwork and pondered it often as I struggled to understand the eddies of Thangmi culture swirling around me. I took my cue from ethnographers like Fisher and Arjun Guneratne (2002), whose work was emerging just as I began my research, to define the initial subject of my study as the process of producing Thangmi identity in its totality in a cross-border context.
Yet I entered the field at a very different historical moment, in both scholarly and political terms, than my immediate predecessors in the lineage of Himalayan anthropology. By the late 1990s, cultural critique was at its pinnacle, and much anthropological writing on the region demonstrated the constructedness of ethnic categories and cultural forms. During the same period, both Nepal and India experienced an explosion of public debate over the nature of social difference. This was due in part to national political developments, including the 1990 return of democracy in Nepal, and the subsequent promulgation of a new constitution that for the first time recognized this extremely diverse country as a “multiethnic” nation, but stopped short of attaching entitlements to specific identities. The year 1990 also saw India’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report, which revised that country’s system of affirmative action—constitutionally mandated since 1950—followed in 1991 by economic liberalization (Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011). The accelerated circulation of global discourses also played a role in fostering debate: multiculturalism, indigeneity, and inclusion, all couched in the broader terms of “rights.” These were often given programmatic teeth by international development actors (Shneiderman 2013a).
Taken together, these developments yielded the somewhat paradoxical intellectual environment of the late 1990s in which I first became acquainted with the Thangmi. On the one hand, the constructed nature of ethnicity and its limitations as an analytical tool were becoming taken for granted in the scholarly world. On the other hand, the ability to make political claims in ethnic terms was viewed as an increasingly valuable skill by people I encountered on the ground. I began to feel that the processual interpretation of culture espoused by Fisher and others was incomplete. It was not wrong, but it could not account entirely for the proliferation of ethnic expressions I observed or for the desire among those with whom I worked to possess what we might call the objects, rather than the processes, of culture. I do not mean objects only in the tangible sense but also in the intangible sense in which such concepts as identity, origins, territory, and indigeneity can be constituted as sacred objects through ritualized action.
To pursue Fisher’s metaphor, most of the Thangmi I met were not content just to watch the river flow, as a tourist—or a scholar—might be. Rather, they sought to engage with it as an entity in the phenomenal world: to build a bridge across it, to drink from it, to catch fish in it. In other words, many Thangmi were aware at some level that identity was produced through processual action, but this consciousness of identity-as-process did not preclude their desire for identity-as-object. The capacity to engage in ritualized action that produced ‘Thangminess’ as a recognizable object was the key to community membership. That such ritualized action could take multiple forms, from deity propitiations to political conferences, was understood as a key feature of the synthetic, collectively produced nature of Thangmi identity itself.
The persistence of this fundamental human desire to objectify one’s identity in terms recognizable to others is, I argue, why ethnicity still matters, as an analytical construct, a political resource, and an affective anchor for identity. This is the case despite a general agreement by the late 1990s within anthropology and perhaps across much of the social sciences that ethnicity, and even the concept of “the group,” was dead. In a 1996 survey of the topic, Marcus Banks concluded that “while ethnicity has an ever more insubstantial place within the narrow world of academia, … it appears to be increasingly important in the wider world” (1996:183). “Unfortunately,” he continued, “it is too late to kill it off or pronounce ethnicity dead; the discourse on ethnicity has escaped from the academy and into the field” (189). In this formulation, ethnicity exists first as an analytical rubric and only subsequently as a subjective experience.
To ground this discussion in the South Asian contexts in which my ethnography unfolds, consider this 1997 comment from David Gellner: “There is a bitter irony in the fact … that just when a scholarly and anthropological consensus is emerging that a Hindu-tribe dichotomy was hopelessly flawed as a tool for understanding Nepalese society, Nepalese intellectuals should begin to take it up with a vengeance” (22). More than fifteen years later, at the time of writing in 2014, Nepal is engaged in a historically unprecedented process of “post-conflict” federal restructuring, stalled due to the political impasse over the demand for ethnically delineated states that would take what Gellner calls the “Hindu-tribe dichotomy” for granted. Across the border in Nepali-speaking areas of India, the call for a separate state of Gorkhaland for Indian citizens of Nepali heritage (often called Gorkhas) was newly revived in 2008. An earlier agitation ended in 1989 with the creation of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC). Debate over Darjeeling’s future remains a key political issue for the Indian state of West Bengal.
Portraying such large-scale political transformations as the ironic result of the “escape” of a scholarly paradigm for ethnicity into “the field” would be analytically insufficient. Rather, we must evaluate what ethnicity signifies for those who claim it. We must investigate anew how such forms of consciousness are produced by all kinds of individuals—not only by self-proclaimed ethnic activists—who see themselves as members of a collectivity and seek recognition as such from others. Acknowledging that ethnicity is inevitably constructed is not the end of the story but rather the beginning of understanding the ongoing life of such constructions. “Tracing the contours of this new life” (Banks 1996:189) of ethnicity is important not because scholars necessarily believe it to be the most accurate way of understanding “the group,” “belonging,” or “difference” but because many contemporary ethnic subjects and the recognizing agents with which they must engage—both state and nonstate—do.
Scholarship indicates an emerging realization that ethnicity’s case is not yet closed. Whether by highlighting the cross-border nature of ethnogenesis (Scott 2009) or the power of global market forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), contemporary explorations of ethnicity broaden analyses beyond the frame of the nation-state, while recognizing the power of national borders and state-specific regimes of recognition in shaping ethnic configurations. In this vein, which productively tempers 1990s arguments about the ascendance of transnational, deterritorialized identities, this book argues that nation-states remain a key frame in relation to which ethnicity is produced, even and perhaps especially in contexts of high cross-border mobility. Furthermore, I argue that ethnicity is a result not only of the prerogatives of state control or market forces but also of a ritual process through which identity is produced as a sacred object that binds diverse people together. Such sacred objects serve as shared referents, enabling heterogeneous individuals—often dispersed across multiple nation-states, with multiple class, gender, age and educational experiences—to contribute in diverse ways to collective projects of ethnicity in action.
This argument returns to traditional anthropological formulations by building upon Edmund Leach’s supposition that “the maintenance and insistence upon cultural difference can itself become a ritual action expressive of social relations” (1964:17). Leach’s insight reveals ethnicity as not only a political project but also an affective domain in which the cultural difference constitutive of social relations is expressed to both selves and others through ritual action. In this spirit, I refocus attention on the objectification of identity as a fundamental human process that persists through ritualized action regardless of the contingencies of state formation or economic paradigm. I hope readers will find here an ethnographic explanation of how ethnicity may be both a rock and a river at once, solid yet also viscous like the muddy flow of a swollen monsoon watershed that carries boulders through Himalayan valleys.
This argument shifts attention away from the representational construction of ethnicity through discourse to foreground instead the expressive production of ethnicity in action (Bentley 1987) and its ongoing pragmatic effects, and affect, for those who enact it. The Comaroffs suggest that in academic studies of ethnicity, the overwhelming “stress on the politics of ethnicity above all else has a number of critical costs: it depends on an underspecified, almost metaphorical conception of the political, the primary referent of which is the pursuit of interest; it reduces cultural identity to a utility function, the measure of which is power, again underspecified; and it confuses the deployment of ethnicity as a tactical claim to entitlement and as a means of mobilization for instrumental ends, with the substantive content of ethnic consciousness” (2009:44). Indeed, much of the last great spell of anthropological work on ethnicity, particularly in South Asia, focused on “ethnonationalist conflict” (Tambiah 1996) and “ethnic violence” (Appadurai 1998). Although these works built valuably upon Frederik Barth’s (1969) formative insights to explain why, in certain cases, ethnic boundaries become aggravated sites of contestation, they shifted focus away from the group-specific, culturally contextual, substantive content of ethnic consciousness that lies between and animates such boundaries. Moreover, while many scholars have effectively explored how state paradigms for recognition in South Asia shape ethnic consciousness writ large, much literature presumes that the contents of all such consciousnesses are interchangeable.2 I contend instead that although the mechanisms of and criteria for state recognition with which all groups must engage may be the same, the substantive content of ethnic consciousness develops in large part through the process of mobilizing specific cultural and ethnographic content, the nature of which varies widely between groups. If we wish to understand the dialectic between ethnic consciousness and legal paradigms for recognition, we must attend to the ethnographic specifics of individual contemporary groups, both within and beyond the political frame.
The Comaroffs are hardly the first scholars to suggest that the political life of ethnicity is not its only one (Leach 1964; Williams 1989; Jenkins 2002). But the Comaroffs newly situate ethnicity under the sign of the market, understood in neoliberal terms. They call upon scholars to investigate the dialectic between “the incorporation of identity and the commodification of culture” (2009:89) as a means of moving beyond the analysis of ethnicity as a purely political construct, and to “fashion a critical scholarship to deal with its ambiguous promises, its material and moral vision for times to come, the deep affective attachments it engenders” (149).
So how do we do that? The fact that academic interests in the “political” aspects of ethnicity often occlude attention to its embodied, affective aspects is a methodological problem as much as a theoretical one. It is relatively straightforward to examine the discursive production of ethnicity through the analysis of texts and media, but understanding “the substantive content of ethnic consciousness” is more complicated. This book takes up the challenge through in-depth ethnography that emphasizes ritualized action, a concept that I take to encompass both “practice” and “performance.” These terms are defined and their analytical value explored in Chapter 2.
By recognizing diverse forms of action as constitutive of ethnicity—from private household practices to public political performances—I consider an equally broad range of actors as legitimate cultural producers. In so doing, I move beyond the idea that activists who objectify cultural forms to achieve specific political goals are somehow outside the realm of “authentic” cultural production or must be viewed in conceptual opposition to “the rural poor” (Shah 2010:31). Rather, I consider Thangmi activists within an overarching framework that also includes shamans, elders, housewives, youth group members, schoolchildren, and multiple others as differently agentive but mutually influential producers of the shared social field of ethnicity in action. By the same token, I do not take at face value activist assertions as authentic statements of ethnic consciousness but rather calibrate these with competing claims from other, equally Thangmi, actors.
This dynamic view of ethnicity as a collective production to which multiple, diverse actors contribute shifts the focus away from the concern with authenticity that has preoccupied much earlier work on ethnicity, identity, and indigeneity. Debates centered on the discursive formation of “indigeneity” in particular challenge conventional stereotypes to reveal the diversity of indigenous experiences, not all of which entail social and economic marginality in the same measures (de la Cadena and Starn 2007; Cattelino 2008). Yet as explained in Chapter 6, indigeneity itself is a contested term within the Thangmi community, as well as within the broader public spheres of both Nepal and India. It is therefore only one component of my discussion rather than the primary analytical rubric. Considering the relationship between ethnicity and indigeneity allows us to explore the multiple scales on which contemporary subaltern identities are articulated (Li 2000).
The People Without an Ethnography
When I returned to Kathmandu after my first visits to Thangmi villages in central-eastern Nepal in 1998, I scoured bookstores and libraries for information about the group but could find nothing. It is puzzling that this relatively sizable group failed entirely to make it onto the ethnographic map of Nepal, where several numerically smaller communities have been popular ethnographic subjects, and barely onto that of India, where colonial administrators carefully enumerated and categorized the communities they encountered. This absence, noticeable in both scholarly and political contexts, provided the impetus for my research with the Thangmi.
“Thami ke ho?” or “What is Thami?” is a common Nepali language refrain that Thangmi everywhere hear throughout their lives. Nirmala, a young woman from the village of Dumkot in Dolakha, explained how this made her feel: “Everyone in the bazaar asks, ‘Thami ke ho?’ I want to tell them ‘Yo Thangmi ho,’ or—‘This is Thangmi’ [pointing to herself]. But that is not enough; we need to know our history and culture so we can explain. Some of the books published in Darjeeling which I have read, like this one, are very helpful in that way.” Nirmala held up a copy of the 2003 publication Niko Bachinte (Our Morning, in Thangmi). Superimposed over a photo of a Thangmi shaman in Sindhupalchok (that I had shot early in my research), the text on the back cover of the publication began with the question “Thami ke ho?”
What was often encountered as a flippant query from curious outsiders had become a burning rhetorical question that the community posed to themselves. Unpacked somewhat, it actually means, “How do you fit into familiar systems of classification?” or “Where is your place in the social order?” The Thangmi ethnonym’s lack of clear signification derives in part from a history of misrecognition, which many Thangmi exacerbated by intentionally misrepresenting themselves as members of other better-known groups.3 In social interactions, Thangmi often find that they are mistaken for Kami, a dalit (previously “untouchable”) blacksmith caste, or Dhami, a socially marginalized group of folk healers, owing to the similar sounds of their names. They are just as frequently misrecognized as members of neighboring ethnic groups, primarily Tamang, Rai, or Limbu, by the general public, scholars, and members of those groups who seek to claim the Thangmi population as part of their own for political purposes.
In both countries, “Thami” is the group’s official moniker, appearing on citizenship cards in Nepal or ration cards in India as a surname. Members of the group usually prefer their own ethnonym, “Thangmi.” But neither name conveys enough information for outsiders to easily categorize those who bear it, since most People simply do not know what “Thami,” and even less “Thangmi,” indexes in terms of ethnicity, religion, or region. Despite their different citizenships and life experiences in Nepal and India, members of the current generation of the Thangmi community are drawn together by their desire for “existential recognition” (Graham 2005) of a distinctive presence in practice, which might help fill the discursive absence surrounding their name.
Although the Thangmi recognize themselves as a distinct group, they are not named in Nepal’s 1854 Muluki Ain, the legal code that provided the historical basis for political recognition in Nepal (Höfer [1979] 2004).4 Later scholarly and bureaucratic ethnographies in both Nepal and India compounded the problem. For example, the 1993 update of the Anthropological Survey of India, which has existed since the colonial era (Cohn 1987), states, “There is no idea about the origin of the Thami community or the term ‘Thami.’ Their history is indeed obscure…. The Thamis do not have any exclusive ritual worth mentioning” (Subba 1993:184–85).
Indeed, beyond Mark Turin’s description of the Thangmi language (2012), which shows that this under-documented Tibeto-Burman tongue is related to both Kiranti (Rai and Limbu) and Newar languages,5 there is no previous authoritative scholarship in English on the Thangmi. The small body of existing material is largely inaccessible. This includes the field notes of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf archived at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (this founding father of Himalayan anthropology passed through Thangmi villages several times but never made an in-depth study), American anthropologist Creighton Peet’s unpublished 1978 dissertation,6 and the notes of French linguist Genevieve Stein (who worked in the village of Alampu in the 1970s but never published her findings). Other locally published materials are now out of print (Sapkota 2045 VS; Toba 1990).7 Newspaper articles in the Nepali media are another source of information, but with some notable exceptions (Lall 1966), these are generally based on secondary sources of questionable veracity and tend to represent the Thangmi in a folkloristic idiom, casting them as a quaint, backward group notable for their cultural oddities, such as their supposed belief that they are yeti-ko santan, or “the descendants of yeti” (Manandhar 2001).8
In several compendia, the Thangmi are classified as a subgroup of other better-known groups, such as Tamang (Bista 1967:48; Gaborieau 1978:107; Majupuria and Majupuria 1978:60, 1980:57), Kiranti (Lévi, as cited in Riccardi 1975:23), or Parbatiya Hindu (Vansittart 1918:70).9 A 1994 ethnographic survey by Rajesh Gautam and Ashoke Thapa-Magar exemplifies the derogatory language often used to describe the group: “not clean in their habits” (1994:314), “when a Thami is seen it is clear that these people have recently renounced their uncivilized ways” (1994:323). Debates about the meaning of the ethnonym “Thangmi”—which most likely derives either from the Tibetan mtha’ mi (people of the border) or thang mi (people of the steppe)—are literally relegated to the footnotes of Himalayan anthropology.10 A 1928 recruitment manual for the Gurkha regiments of the British Army recognizes the Thangmi as a distinct group but powerfully sums up their marginal position within national and transnational hierarchies of recognition: “Coarse in appearance, and the inferior of the other races in social and religious matters, they do not merit further description” (Northey and Morris 1928:260).
The point on which most scholars agree, and the one they often refer to in explaining why they did not conduct further research with the Thangmi, is that they are an extremely poor group with little distinctive material culture: no unique artistic or architectural traditions, no colorful crafts or costumes, nothing visible beyond the lowest common denominator features of rural Himalayan life. To an outside eye, there is indeed little to distinguish a Thangmi individual or village from the next person or place.
However, this apparent absence of distinctive ethnic markers from an outsider’s perspective is belied by a rich cultural presence enacted through practice within the community itself. Thangmi cultural content is largely contained in the intangible, internally coherent aspects of ritualized action rather than in any tangible, externally recognizable visual form. When I asked what made Thangmi themselves, the answers nearly always pointed to ritualized action, broadly defined. Indeed, as I looked around me, I saw octogenarian shamans propitiating territorial deities, young ethnic activists mounting political performances, and householders offhandedly saluting the deities under whose auspices they went about their daily business. Only through understanding such forms of action could I understand how Thangminess itself was produced.
Why Rituals of Ethnicity? Recognition, Complicity, and the Ethnographic Contract
Although desire for political recognition from the state is a relatively new phenomenon for many Thangmi, recognition from other sources, particularly the divine world, has long been a key force in constituting Thangmi social relations. As Man Bahadur, a middle-aged Thangmi man from Dolakha, put it, “If we Thangmi forgot to worship our deities, they would not recognize us. If the deities do not recognize us, how can others recognize our ethnicity?” This compels us to reconsider recognition as a deep-seated subjective desire (Taylor 1992) that drives much of human communicative interaction (Keane 1997). While often fostered through political means, recognition should not be reductively understood only as a regime of control produced by specific sociopolitical formations (Povinelli 2002). Rather, understanding the mechanisms of recognition and the content of the consciousnesses they produce requires an exploration of the full range of “recognizing agents” with which subjects engage. For Thangmi, these have over time included the divine world, the Nepali and Indian states, social scientists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), members of other communities, and crucially, other members of the Thangmi community itself, separated by citizenship, distance, class, and other vectors of difference.
Anthropologists themselves may become recognizing agents “complicit” (Marcus 1999) in catalyzing community efforts to achieve recognition from other sources. Ethnography that works to transform the “terms of recognition” can become part of the toolkit groups use to craft their future (Appadurai 2004). This book therefore uses the conceit of ethnography as an organizing principle, with chapters loosely structured around classical anthropological subjects: ritual, myth, economy, political organization, territory, descent and the life cycle, and the dynamics of power and agency. Organizing the book in this way provokes a reconsideration of the relationship between anthropological form and content by demonstrating that reflexive, multisited research with transnational communities need not preclude in-depth description of fundamental aspects of social life, presented in a manner that is meaningful to both scholars and communities themselves. That the rubric “Thangmi” describes a diversity of experiences not easily reconciled within a singular frame is a fundamental premise of this book; yet using the monographic form of ethnography allows me to create the coherent social scientific profile that disparate members of the Thangmi community commonly desire.
The lack of accessible, accurate scholarly material about the Thangmi is not simply an academic concern. It has concrete consequences within the crucible of janajati and tribal politics in Nepal and India, as Thangmi attempts to control the terms of their own recognition vis-à-vis the multiple states in which they live have shifted over time from a strategy of state evasion, or “dissimilation” (Geoffrey Benjamin as cited in Scott 2009:173–74), to one of direct, intentional engagement.
Historically, land and labor exploitation under the Rana and Shah regimes compelled Thangmi in Nepal to remain under the radar of state recognition whenever possible.11 Fear of the state, which primarily manifested in its tax-collecting form, encouraged the insular maintenance of cultural practices. Thangmi intentionally avoided public forms of cultural objectification that might attract curious outsiders. Many Thangmi elders told me that they actually counted themselves lucky to have been left out of the 1854 Muluki Ain legal code. This lacuna encouraged Thangmi to misrepresent themselves as members of better-known ethnic groups in encounters with authority.
But in 2002, the Nepal Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) Act first created the legal category of adivasi janajati in Nepal, listing fifty-six groups. In 2004, the nongovernmental Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN) introduced a new five-tiered classification system to further categorize these groups as “endangered,” “highly marginalized,” “marginalized,” “disadvantaged,” and “advantaged” (Gellner 2007; Hangen 2007; Middleton and Shneiderman 2008; Onta 2006b; Shneiderman 2013a). The government of Nepal ratified International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, becoming only the second Asian country to do so. Under these changing circumstances, a recognizable identity encoded in an ethnographic tome began to seem newly important to groups concerned with securing recognition in a state that might be restructured along ethnic lines. What use is remaining intentionally beyond the range of state recognition when the state begins offering options for self-governance, if autonomy” can only be provided to those groups who are already officially recognized at the point of devolution?
In India, by contrast, there has long been a dialectic between indigenous self-representation and state-sponsored ethnography (Cohn 1987; Dirks 2001). The Indian Constitution of 1950 provides for the “upliftment” of marginalized groups through official recognition (known as “scheduling”) and quotas (Galanter 1984; Jenkins 2003). In the early 1990s, in the wake of the Mandal Commission report, which revamped India’s affirmative action system, Thangmi in India demanded Other Backward Class (OBC) status, which they received in 1995. Since then, they have campaigned for—but not yet received—Scheduled Tribe (ST) status, which is perceived to offer greater political, educational, and economic benefits. These descendants of Thangmi migrants, who left Nepal as long as 150 years ago, for the most part no longer speak the Thangmi language and grew up in environments where Thangmi ritual practitioners were often not available. In the process of applying for ST status, however, many Thangmi in India have become interested in rediscovering Thangmi “culture.” Chapter 5 examines these processes in depth.
Nowhere does the Indian constitution specifically define the criteria for ST recognition. In 1965, the Lokur Committee established these semiofficial guidelines, which remain in place today: “indication of primitive traits; distinctive culture; geographical isolation; shyness of contact with the community at large; and backwardness” (Galanter 1984:152). The first two criteria are almost universally interpreted by aspirant groups to mean that ethnographic materials must be submitted as part of their application.
Much of the onus for presenting ethnographic data lies with the aspirant communities themselves. The potential for social science research to contribute to such campaigns for recognition, as well as to become complicit in them, has been discussed at length elsewhere in the world, particularly in Latin America and Australia. In these regions, scholars have contributed ethnographic knowledge to indigenous land-rights claims, cultural performances, and various other mediations between the communities with whom they work and broader publics. The results of such engagement are always complex and rarely morally clear-cut. The moral contract for research” (Warren and Jackson 2002:4) is always fraught, as information about and access to community-specific knowledge, actions, and discourse are exchanged for social scientific recognition. Often the ethnographic contract remains unspoken—and certainly unsigned. Yet it evokes expectations and aspirations on all sides from the moment that a scholar first engages with people from whom she wishes to collect “data.” In exchange for our data, I believe that scholars conducting ethnographic work have an ethical responsibility to, at the very least, investigate potential avenues for contributing to the agendas of those with whom we work. For me, this belief has led to carefully chosen strategies for raising Thangmi public profiles through the production of social scientific knowledge about them.
Charles Hale (2006) describes how this kind of engagement with subaltern communities, which he calls “activist research,” may conflict with the prerogatives of cultural critique (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Activist research, although always politically compromised, has the potential to create uniquely generative theoretical spaces that move beyond institutional academic commitments. Hale suggests that although cultural critique positions itself as the only approach that can adequately represent subaltern voices in a nonessentialized, politically correct manner, problems arise when subaltern communities themselves choose to use theoretically unfashionable categories: “As long as the heavy weapons of deconstruction are aimed at the powerful, the proposal remains on high ground. But what about the other ‘sites’ of a multisited ethnography? How do we responsibly address situations in which the relatively powerless are using these same vexed categories to advance their struggles?” (2006:102). This is precisely the situation I encountered. While my initial scholarly impulse was to demonstrate the processual constructedness of Thangmi ethnic identity, I ultimately could not ignore the intensity with which Thangmi from diverse backgrounds—including activists, ritual practitioners, and common people who bumped up against the problem of misrecognition in their daily lives—asked me to provide an essentializing ethnographic portrait of “the Thangmi” as a unified, unique, and historically unchanging group.
Why shouldn’t they want this when, for instance, an early application to the government of India for ST status was met with rejection and the directive to “submit total ethnographic material of your caste to the ministry”?12 It may be the case within academic anthropology that “the production of portraits of other cultures, no matter how well drawn, is in a sense no longer a major option” (Ortner 1999:9). Yet it is precisely this ethnographic portrait, presented in an authoritative academic voice, that many Thangmi desire, as an instrument of both psychological and political recognition. With no holistic portrait produced in the bygone days of anthropology when such work was not yet politically incorrect, why should Thangmi forgo this aspiration when their counterparts in other better-documented communities proudly brandish their ethnographies as important heritage objects?
It would be a sad irony if postcolonial anthropological reflexivity worked to reinforce earlier disciplinary biases—and their entanglements with local relations of power—by rejecting calls from historically understudied people to produce knowledge about them. As one young Thangmi activist writes, “We have a request for all scientists and scholars: please do research about the Thami, please write about us, and we will stand ready to help you” (Tahal Thami, in Samudaya ([2056] 2061 VS:vi). Rather than disengaging from such projects because they make us feel uneasy as scholars, we might consider how uneasy it feels to be a people without an ethnography in many contemporary political environments. The fact that ethnography itself is complicit in shaping people’s political futures is a part of anthropology’s disciplinary legacy that remains to be adequately acknowledged and transformed through collaboration with contemporary communities who are themselves engaged in the ethnographic project.
For many Thangmi, engagement in ethnographic research itself—whether as a researcher, an informant, or both—has become an important mode of ethnic expression. I write candidly about my own role in these processes as an ethnographer and acknowledge that this work is relevant not only to an academic audience but to Thangmi and the various audiences they engage.
Rituals of Ethnicity emerged as the title of choice from my discussions with Thangmi interlocutors about these issues of presence and absence, object and action, complicity and collaboration. It became clear early on that the title of this book must be recognizable in some form to Thangmi themselves (even in English), and foreground the Thangmi-specific ethnography at its core, despite what I hope is the broader applicability of the anthropological arguments contained herein. I asked many Thangmi with whom I worked what I should call the book that would emerge from my long-term engagement with their community. Most of the answers were variations of “Thangmi jati-ko sanskar ra sanskriti,” “hamro jati-ko sanskar,” or in its most concise form, “jatiya sanskar,” all in Nepali. Literally meaning “rituals and culture of the Thangmi ethnicity,” “rituals of our ethnicity,” or “ethnic rituals,” respectively,13 these phrases indicated to the people who proffered them that the book so named would be a useful compendium of ethnographic information about what constituted them as a community: the ritual practices in which they engaged. Rituals of Ethnicity preserves this meaning, while also enabling an anthropological double entendre: it refers to both the specific rituals of the Thangmi community and the general social processes through which both ritual and ethnicity, as well as consciousness itself, are produced.
Cross-Border Mobility and the Feedback Loop
Colonial documents show that people calling themselves Thangmi have been moving across what are now the borders of Nepal and India since at least the mid-nineteenth century.14 Several pilgrimage accounts authored by traveling Tibetan lamas also suggest that a group called mtha’ mi, or “people of the border” in Tibetan, lived in the borderlands between what is now China’s TAR and Nepal as early as the seventeenth century (Ehrhard 1997). Chapter 4 provides the historical context of these movements, while Chapter 6 argues that the very idea of mobility is a central feature of Thangmi ethnic identity. Yet these patterns of mobility were not at all obvious to me when I began my residence in the Thangmi heartland of rural central-eastern Nepal. Only after several months did I begin to realize that the Thangmi were anything but sedentary inhabitants of bounded villages.
My outlook was conditioned by the trajectory of Himalayan anthropology, defined by a paradigmatic series of ethnographic monographs focused on discrete communities—largely in the highlands—whose members were imagined as residents of bounded localities within a single nation-state. These monographs included works on Gurung (Macfarlane 1976; Pignède [1966] 1993), Limbu (Caplan [1970] 2000; Sagant 1996), Magar (Hitchcock 1966), Newar (Gellner 1992; Levy 1990), Sherpa (Adams 1996; J. Fisher 1990; Fürer-Haimendorf 1964; Ortner 1978, 1989), Tamang (Holmberg 1989; March 2002), Thakali (W. Fisher 2001; Vinding 1998), Tharu (Guneratne 2002; Krauskopff 1989), Yolmo (Desjarlais 2003), and various Rai groups (Gaenzsle 2000, 2002; Hardman 2000; McDougal 1979). Some of these ethnographies hint at the importance of mobility and experiences in India or historical Tibet in constituting ethnic subjectivities, but such stories were ethnographically under-unexplored.
As I conducted more interviews with Thangmi in Nepal, I was surprised by how often conversation turned to experiences of India and the TAR or to family members who were currently there. Many People spoke powerfully of how time spent in these other places had shaped their worldviews. I eventually realized that I would need to travel to India and the TAR to understand what being Thangmi meant.
The ethnographic realities that I encountered in these places demanded a middle path between two popular social scientific approaches to ethnicity. The first suggests that ethnicity is an exclusive product of modern nation-states, emerging only within clearly demarcated national boundaries (Verdery 1994; Williams 1989). The second emphasizes the narrative of deterritorialization (Appadurai 1990; Basch, Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Inda and Rosaldo 2002), suggesting that locality and national borders are no longer the primary factors in shaping ethnic identity. In the Thangmi case, neither of these interpretations applies. Rather, ethnicity is at once shaped by country-specific discourse and policy, yet is also dependent on a dialogue between members of a community across state borders.
Economic remittances earned largely in the Middle East and Malaysia are increasingly recognized as crucial in sustaining Nepal’s contemporary economy, just as transnational mobility is increasingly recognized as crucial to anthropological accounts of rural modernity (Chu 2010). This book adds to such conversations by showing that cross-border labor migration to adjacent countries has been a long-standing component of Himalayan livelihood strategies rather than a new experience emerging from modern processes of economic globalization. I argue that the relative impact of “social remittances” (Levitt 2001) and the “spaces of cultural assertion” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003) opened through migration—the changes in worldview and values that return migrants bring home—have been as, or more, important in the long run than cash earned in India or Tibetan parts of China.
I locate experiences in India and China as central to ethnicity formation in Nepal and, conversely, experiences in Nepal as relevant to related processes in Himalayan areas of India and China. I term this the “cross-border feedback loop”: the process of communication and exchange through which ideologies of ethnicity originating in discrete nation-states become embedded in the discursive and practical aspects of cultural production elsewhere. This creates a cyclical process of consciousness formation that on the one hand emerges within each national context but, on the other, transcends national boundaries to create a synthesis independent of any single nation-state. The agents of the feedback loop are Thangmi themselves, as they move back and forth and engage with others across the collectivity.
Being “In” Place: The Himalayas, South Asia, and Area Studies
My focus on the cross-border feedback loop within the Thangmi community shapes a larger conversation across academic area studies. Rather than a project of comparison, which analyzes tit-for-tat the differences in ethnicity formation as experienced in three discrete nation-states, mine is an ethnography of connection (Tsing 2005), which explores the links between those experiences, and the scholarly and political discourses surrounding them, in multiple national and regional frames.
In many academic contexts, South Asian studies in practice refers to the study of India. Nepal and other smaller South Asian states are relegated to the periphery of major debates, or perhaps scholars of the peripheries intentionally keep to themselves. Much of this positioning has to do with the historical effects of what Mary Des Chene (2007) calls Nepal’s “condition of non-postcoloniality.” Ironically, while the fact that the country was never fully colonized is one of the central tenets of Nepali nationalism, it also accounts for the country’s near absence from the English-language historiographic record15 and Nepal’s subsequent marginalization within South Asian studies.
I contend here that processes of state and ethnicity formation in Nepal cannot be adequately understood in isolation. Rather, they must be situated within more expansive transregional conversations that both acknowledge the reality of cross-border mobility on the ground and make use of conceptual categories from South Asian studies to develop comprehensive analytical frames. At the same time, work on Nepal has great potential to deepen the empirical basis and theoretical purchase of analyses emerging from India. Nepal offers an alternative, non-postcolonial South Asian vantage point, at once shaped by similar long-term cultural trajectories as its southern neighbor yet possessing a very different modern political history. The story of Thangmi ethnicity formation engages in South Asian conversations on ethnicity, caste, class, and the politics of marginality, not as an anomalous case from Nepal conceptualized as somewhere “other” but rather by probing how such discourses extend beyond the political borders of India to influence dynamics of subject formation in South Asia writ large.
Beyond South Asia, both political and cultural Tibet (Goldstein 1998:4) have been important points of reference for Thangmi over time. As described in Chapter 4, the border between Nepal and the TAR is only a few miles away from several of the largest Thangmi villages. Many members of the community regularly travel across it, making use of the “border citizen” card issued jointly by the Nepali and Chinese governments that allows them to engage in cross-border travel without a passport or visa (Shneiderman 2013b). In such contexts, contemporary Thangmi generally refer to the political entity north of them as “China,” although older individuals at times still use “Tibet.” When describing the geopolitical entity, I refer to the territory directly north of Nepal as “China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region,” or “TAR.” I use “Tibetan” to describe broader cultural, religious, or linguistic concepts that relate to the Tibetan cultural world but are not necessarily limited to the boundaries of political Tibet. Chapter 3 explains how the complexes of Tibetan language and Buddhist religion perceived to originate across the border to the north figure prominently in Thangmi ideologies of synthesis, providing an important counterpoint to the Nepali and Hindi languages, as well as Hindu religion, emanating from the south.
My initial intentions to conduct research in an equally balanced manner between Thangmi communities in Nepal, India, and the TAR never came to fruition. I could not secure research permission for more than one month in the TAR. The people represented in this book are, therefore, primarily those whom I describe as “Thangmi in Nepal” and “Thangmi in India” (although “Thangmi in China” make brief appearances, especially in Chapter 4).
Brian Axel pinpoints the potential problem with such terminology in his ethnography of the Sikh diaspora: “One would be hard put to say that, preferring the local to the global, there are no diasporas, rather Chinese in New York or, for example, Sikhs in London” (2001:1). He opts instead for the doubled “Sikh diaspora as a diaspora” (8) to reiterate that it is the diaspora itself that is his object of study, not “exemplary” members of it in any particular location (1). Chapter 6 explains why the Thangmi case complicates such definitions of diaspora. My point here is that focusing on a diaspora, or any other type of multisited community, as the object of one’s study does not obviate the need to evaluate carefully how various members of it orient themselves within specific nation-state frameworks at specific historical junctures.
For me, the word “in” locates a set of actions within the ideological framework of a nation, not a body within a bounded physical territory. When I write “Thangmi in Nepal,” I mean “Thangmi acting in relation to the nation-state of Nepal as a primary frame, although they may have spent time in India, or at other times have acted in relation to the nation-state of India as a primary frame, and/or may be aware of the relationship between the two frames in shaping their actions, even if they have not actually visited the other country.” “Thangmi in India” means the converse. By “Thangmi in Nepal” or “Thangmi in India,” I do not intend to imply “Thangmi who have never left Nepal” or “Thangmi who have a certain essential quality because they were born in, or live in, India.” Sometimes, I use “Thangmi from Nepal” when referring to “Thangmi acting in relation to the nationstate of Nepal as a primary frame, but who are physically present in India at the point of action,” and “Thangmi from India” when I mean the opposite.
Why do I not simply use the more obvious “Nepalese Thangmi” or “Nepali Thangmi,” and “Indian Thangmi”? As described in the Preface to this book, for political and legal reasons that must be taken seriously, each of these terms is rejected by some subset of those ostensibly described by it.
Historical, Political, and Personal Contexts
The Thangmi story unfolds against the backdrop of large-scale political transformations, revealing the far-reaching impacts, as well as the limits, of the discourses and practices of democracy and communism in Nepal, India, and the TAR. The ethnographic present of this book spans a decade, from 1998 to 2008, with the broader time frame primarily that of remembered history. I made special efforts to work with older people who could recount details from personal experience dating back to the early 1940s in some cases. This locates the beginning of my narrative at the very end of colonialism in India, the final phase of Rana rule in Nepal, and the years immediately preceding the assertion of Chinese control in Tibet. Supplementing ethnography with documentary evidence occasionally allows me to project further back into the past, locating the roots of political transformations that occurred during the period of my research in ongoing processes of state formation and ethnic classification that began much earlier.
In the wake of Indian independence in 1947, followed by the Constituent Assembly of 1948–1950, democracy became an important vector shaping political subjectivity across South Asia. In a novel application of a core concept of liberal democracy, the Indian constitution enshrined a commitment to the “upliftment” of marginalized communities. However, the implementation of such ideals in administrative practice remains a contentious issue, underlying debates over affirmative action, usually called “reservations” in India, which in turn point to larger questions about the nature of political subject formation.
The year 1951 saw the beginnings of Nepal’s first experiment with multiparty democracy, as activists from Nepal used their exile base in India to overthrow the Rana oligarchy in collaboration with King Tribhuvan. This first phase of democracy came to an end in 1959, when King Mahendra acceded to the throne, banning political parties and establishing the so-called panchayat partyless democracy. The 1962 constitution legally defined Nepal as a unitary nation with only one culture and one language. Much later, in 1990, the country returned to multiparty democracy, after what is commonly referred to as the first jana andolan (N: People’s Movement). Only after the 1990 constitution officially recognized Nepal as a multicultural, multilingual state (although still a Hindu one) could ethnicity and other forms of cultural difference be discussed publicly without fear of persecution.
Communism was a simultaneously important ideological and political force in both Nepal and India. It constituted a site of cross-border linkage between the two countries, as well as with China. In South Asia, communism and democracy are not always radically opposed ideologies nor sequential forms of governance, as in much of what is now referred to as the “postsocialist” world. Rather, democracy and communism are parallel, mutually influential political trajectories that intertwine in often unexpected ways over time to shape localized forms of political consciousness.
Founded in the 1920s, the Communist Party of India (CPI) played a crucial role in early nationalist politics. In the 1960s, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), split from the larger party, rising to prominence in the state of West Bengal, where Darjeeling is situated. By the late 1980s, when the Gorkhaland agitation for a separate Nepali-speaking state in Darjeeling began, reopening calls for autonomy that date to the turn of the twentieth century, the CPI(M) had been in power at the state level for over a decade. The CPI(M) reign continued until 2011. Many analyses of the first Gorkhaland movement suggest that it was in fact a proxy for anti-communist mobilization in a context where it was extremely difficult to challenge the status quo (Subba 1992), highlighting the complex relationships between ethnic and class-based mobilization in this part of the world.
Also in West Bengal, communist party hardliners known as the Naxalites led a peasant insurgency in the late 1960s. Their base in the town of Naxalbari was along one of the primary vehicular routes I traveled between Nepal and Darjeeling during my fieldwork. The legacy of the Naxalbari revolt deeply influenced Thangmi who traveled regularly through the Naxalite heartland as circular migrants, just as it did the trajectories of the contemporary Maoist parties in both India and Nepal today. The former maintains a strong presence in central Indian states like Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, provoking violent responses from Indian state forces, while the latter won the 2008 elections in Nepal and led two of the country’s subsequent governments.
The Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) was founded in Calcutta in 1949. After many splits and mergers, the CPN yielded both the contemporary Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M)—popularly known as the Maoists—and the centrist Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML). These entities constitute two of what are commonly referred to as the three major political parties in Nepal at the time of writing. The third is the center-right Nepali Congress (NC), Nepal’s oldest party. Established in the late 1940s in northern India, with close ties to the Indian National Congress party, the NC led Nepal’s earliest democracy movements. All of these parties were forced underground during the panchayat era.
In the late 1970s to early 1980s, there was a brief moment of greater liberalism around a constitutional referendum called by King Birendra. During that period, activists from the CPN-UML traveled to the Thangmi regions of central-eastern Nepal to establish local bases (Shneiderman 2010). Their efforts were brutally quashed in a 1984 police massacre in the Thangmi village of Piskar, which, as detailed in Chapter 5 and elsewhere (Shneiderman 2009), remains a crucial moment in the formation of both ethnic and class consciousness for many Thangmi. This local event was part of the larger trend of state repression across the country through the 1980s, which eventually led to the democratic revolution of the early 1990s (Hachhethu 2002).
By the time I first traveled to Nepal in 1994, the country had the world’s only democratically elected communist government under a Hindu constitutional monarchy. This period was short-lived, as the communist government lasted for only nine months before a vote of no confidence led to one of the countless political reshufflings throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The complexity of the country’s political landscape baffled me, and my initial research focus was on questions of ethnic and religious identity, not political mobilization. As I began working on what I imagined to be “basic ethnographic research” with the Thangmi while on a Fulbright fellowship in 1999, the linkages between these superficially separate domains became increasingly apparent.
I was not the only outsider visiting Thangmi villages at that time. Maoist activists had launched the People’s War in western Nepal in 1996 and by the late 1990s were scoping out prospective base areas in the east. My encounters with them in Dolakha and Sindhupalchok significantly shaped my research. Documenting the early phases of Maoist mobilization in the region became an important project, leading to several publications in which I and my coauthors described the experience of insurgency at the village level, as well as its implications for us as scholars (Pettigrew and Shneiderman 2004; Pettigrew, Shneiderman, and Harper 2004; Shneiderman and Turin 2004; Shneiderman 2009, 2010). Yet I remained committed to the question of Thangmi ethnicity and its absence from the ethnographic record that had drawn me to these villages in the first place. This book therefore does not substantively describe Nepal’s Maoist movement, its ideology, or its operations. Yet the Thangmi story presented here tells us much about the context in which that movement emerged and the larger set of ongoing political transformations of which the Maoist insurgency was just one part.
By the time I returned to South Asia in 2004 for doctoral research, civil conflict was at its height. King Gyanendra Shah imposed authoritarian rule through a royal coup in 2005. The combination of Maoist armed insurgency and popular protest led to the second jana andolan (People’s Movement) in 2006. Later that year, the king was stripped of his powers (although the dynasty was only formally deposed in 2008), and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement officially ended the conflict. The interim constitution of 2007 declared Nepal a secular federal democratic republic, building upon long-standing Maoist demands for both a Constituent Assembly and federal restructuring along ethnic lines. I watched members of the Thangmi community vote in the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections, which yielded a victory if not an outright majority for the Maoists, among whom was the first ever elected Thangmi parliamentarian.
In late 2007, just as Nepal was gearing up for Constituent Assembly elections, a renewed movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland was launched in Darjeeling. This time under the leadership of the Gorkhaland Janamukti Morcha (GJM) rather than the Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF), which had led the agitation in the late 1980s, activists demanded a separate state within the Indian federation, free from Calcutta’s control. Encouraged by the creation of new states like Jharkhand and Uttarakhand in the early 2000s, the agitators claimed that the DGHC established as part of the resolution to the 1980s movement did not have the teeth to deliver genuine autonomy as promised. The year 2011 saw a sea change in West Bengal’s political landscape, as the communist government finally fell to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress after thirty-three years of rule. Soon after election results were in, the GJM engaged in extended tripartite negotiations with the center and the new state government, which led to the formation of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration. At the time of writing, the territorial and political limits of this body remain unclear.
Over time, Thangmi have participated in all of the parties and movements described here. As detailed in Chapter 5, the formation of ethnic consciousness has been critically linked with that of class consciousness, but often in unexpected ways that challenge received ideas about the relationships between these two forms of mobilization. Just as communism and democracy have been intertwined on the macro level of national politics in South Asia, ideas about class and ethnicity have been deeply interconnected at the micro level of Thangmi experience. Neither paradigm for understanding social difference and inequality exists in isolation (Lawoti 2003; Tamang 2006), nor is there a teleology in which one leads inevitably to the other. Rather than engaging in over-deterministic arguments about whether class or ethnic mobilization is more effective in challenging ingrained inequalities like those from which Thangmi have unquestionably suffered, here I demonstrate how each of these paradigms has differently deployed “the currency of culture” (Cattelino 2008) for political purposes, in the process contributing to the affective production of identity.
Understanding Thangmi ethnicity formation over the longue durée yields important insights into how ethnic claims—whether in the context of demands for identity-based federalism in restructuring Nepal or campaigns for tribal recognition and the state of Gorkhaland in India—come to be lived, embodied, and felt deeply by the people who make them. This window into ethnicity-in-the making for one small group at a particular geographical, historical, and political conjuncture tells us much about how and why the substantive content of ethnic consciousness is produced in general, and suggests that states and policy makers would do well to consider the affective dimensions of this process that make it such a compelling force for mobilization.
A Total Social Fact
My first serious Thangmi interlocutor in Nepal was Rana Bahadur, whose life story is presented in Chapter 3. This senior guru was a vast repository of cultural, historical, and ritual knowledge, but he was at first reluctant to speak with me. Bir Bahadur, who worked with me as a research assistant, told me that Rana Bahadur did not want to talk at all unless I was willing to record the entirety of his ritual knowledge. Rana Bahadur had apparently found his interactions with previous researchers unsatisfying: foreign as well as Thangmi and non-Thangmi from India and Nepal had wanted quick summaries of “Thangmi culture,” but did not want to spend the time observing or listening to the dense complex of ritualized action and recitations that comprised it.
Rana Bahadur explained that the problem with writing was that it allowed the writer to pick and choose what to represent, whereas his oral tradition required the full recitation of the entire ritual “line” from an embodied place of knowledge that made it impossible to extract any piece from the whole. (He and other gurus regularly used the English term “line” to denote the fixed trajectory of each invocation.) Therefore, if I was to write or otherwise record (since audio and video technologies were, from his perspective, just embellished forms of writing) anything at all, I had to be prepared to record everything he knew.
I told Rana Bahadur that I was ready to listen to as much as he wished to tell me. After several afternoons following the old guru’s schedule and recording whatever he said, I seemed to pass Rana Bahadur’s test. He announced that he was ready to “open” his knowledge to me, and every ensuing recording session began with a chanted invocation in the same idiom used to propitiate deities: “[So and so—names and nationalities of previous researchers] came but did not want to listen to all of my knowledge, so I bit my tongue…. Then they went back to their own countries, and this American woman came. She wanted to listen to everything, and so I have opened my knowledge to her. I have sent as much as I know in her writing … and now the funerary rites can be done for this dead man.” I first thought that these lines were simply part of Rana Bahadur’s standard invocation. Upon analyzing them closely with Bir Bahadur, I was embarrassed to discover that I had been written into the ritual recitation itself.
Initially I removed this part of the recitation from all of my transcriptions, bracketing out Rana Bahadur’s repeated references to me as an anomaly that I did not really know how to handle. If I had become part of the chant, was what I was recording the “genuine” Thangmi culture that I sought, or was it already transformed by my very presence? I was similarly disturbed when Darjeeling’s senior guru Latte Apa—whose life story is also presented in Chapter 3—began a funerary ritual with the statement, “Because she’s here [pointing to me], this time I’ll definitely do it by the real, old rules!”
Eventually I came to see that from Rana Bahadur’s perspective, I was a useful recognizing agent. I appeared at the end of his life, reassuring him that the knowledge he had gained through years of ritual practice remained relevant in an era when much around him was changing. Even after I thought I had recorded everything he had to tell me in 1999–2000, he contacted me several times in the remaining years before he died in 2003, telling me to come to Dolakha urgently so he could tell me one more thing before he died (an eventuality for which he was carefully preparing). For Rana Bahadur, my recognition of him as a holder of culturally valuable knowledge became a personal obsession, which seemed to have little to do with a desire for political recognition. My recognition of his special relationship with the Thangmi deities who had been the primary recognizing agents throughout his life seemed to augment the feeling of self-worth that he gained from that divine relationship. Rana Bahadur never asked me to publish what I had recorded with him, or to submit it to the Nepali or Indian state (as others later would); he accepted my terms of recognition and in exchange simply asked me to write down what he knew in its entirety—to document his knowledge as a totality.
Despite the superficial differences in their approach to Thangmi culture, it was also in this holistic sense that the Thangmi ethnic activists whom I later came to know wanted me to contribute information to their efforts to portray Thangmi culture as an embodied social fact. As the late Gopal Singh, then vice president of the Bharatiya Thami Welfare Association (BTWA), phrased this sentiment, “Language is our breath, culture is the whole body,” Yet Thangmi identity, he continued, as embodied in “our pure language and pure culture,” has “not been fully brought to light.” In order to achieve these goals, Gopal Singh admonished “all the Thami-loving brothers and sisters to remain honest and loyal to this ethnicity and to collect and publish proven facts relating to the Thami” (Niko 2003:7). This echoes a similar emphasis on “scientific fact” in Thangmi publications from Nepal, where “truth” about the group and its history is depicted as the hard-won fruit of “research” on a positivist “reality.” One such essay suggests that such myths are to be discounted as “unscientific” since they are only “stories collected from the elders” rather than the results of “comprehensive research” (Samudaya [2056] 2061 VS:17).
If elders were not a legitimate source of authority on the culture and history of a community, what did this mean for my “research”? In “reality,” there was no alternative, more legitimate source of evidence for the claims that Thangmi activists in both Nepal and India wanted me to help them make. My sources—like Rana Bahadur—were the very “elders” whose knowledge was dismissed as “stories” rather than evidence. But I felt compelled to honor my ethnographic contract with such elders by representing the stories they told me in their totality, even when such stories did not yield the “research results” that my simultaneously binding ethnographic contract with activist informants stipulated.
As I waded deeper into the ethical complexities of such multisited complicity (Marcus 1999) during my first in-depth fieldwork in India in 2004, I lost sleep trying to figure out how my “research” fit into the picture. What did the Thangmi activists whom I was coming to know actually want from me? On the one hand, they were skeptical of what the empirical evidence that I had collected told them about themselves. On the other hand, they repeatedly thanked me for sharing my research openly with them, telling me on numerous occasions, “You are our god,” or “You are our Sunari Ama,” the mythical ancestress of all Thangmi. Such statements made me feel not only uncomfortable, just as Rana Bahadur’s incorporation of me into his ritual chant had, but antithetical to the activists’ erstwhile requests for me to conduct “scientific” research aimed at demonstrating a “pure” culture. At first I consigned such statements to the same conceptual category of inexplicable fieldwork ephemera in which I had mentally placed Rana Bahadur’s invocation of my presence. But as I heard them over and over again, back in Nepal as well as in India, these ascriptions of divine power continued to bother me, and I came back to them later as I strove to understand the relationship between research, ritual, and politics in effecting recognition.
Perhaps the critique of “research” based on the “stories of elders” was not actually a critique of those elders or their stories themselves, but rather of the interpretive frameworks of researchers who, based on short-term encounters, had taken such “stories” at face value. These researchers had concluded that the Thangmi culture, if it could even be called that, was derivative and degenerate. By sticking with the ethnographic project past the point at which others had decided that the Thangmi were not worthy of future attention” (Northey and Morris 1928), I had demonstrated my commitment to Thangmi agendas, competing and contradictory though they might be. By appearing in the public domain alongside members of the Thangmi community repeatedly over a decade with the trappings of social scientific authority—notebook, video camera, university affiliation, research funding—I was demonstrating to outside others that the Thangmi must have some kind of culture worth recognizing.
It was in this sense that I became a recognizing agent—a catalyst who augmented Thangmi individuals’ sense of self-worth and the community’s visibility—and that the divine metaphor became comprehensible, if still disconcerting. For the Thangmi activists with whom I worked, “research” was in part a symbolic process that was not only about its empirical content but also about its form as a mode of ritual action carried out in the public domain, the efficacious performance of which could yield pragmatic results from the recognizing agents of the state (and/or the organizations that stood in for it, such as NGOs, particularly in Nepal). In this formulation, I was not so much like a deity as a ritual specialist, capable of mediating between the human and divine, the citizen and his or her state(s).
At first I tried to deny such powers—“I am just a student,” “No, I don’t have any powerful friends,” “No, I am not with any ‘project’; I am just a researcher”—but over time I realized this was disingenuous. The reality was that unlike most Thangmi, I could and did command attention when I walked into governmental or organizational offices (or wrote a letter to the editor, made a phone call, or engaged in cocktail conversation) to make a point about pressing issues, be it a badly managed road project, an idea for economic development, or a hurtful misrepresentation of the Thangmi community. It was not just my Thangmi interlocutors who believed that my work could have concrete effects; other ethnic activists, politicians, and bureaucrats lauded me for conducting “research” about a “marginalized group” that no one else could be bothered to do, so that the Thangmi might have a chance at future “advancement.”
In the larger scheme of things, it did not matter if my written research presented precisely the empirical conclusions the activists desired. They were more interested in my research as a form of efficacious action and in my role as an outside figure of academic authority—a recognizing agent—whose very attention to the social fact of “Thangmi culture” legitimized the results of their own research, which in the end were the ones they sought to promote to the state, not mine.
In short, I and social science as a whole were useful mediators between divine and political forms of recognition. Thangmi activists did not want to divest themselves entirely from their relationship with the territorial deities who had historically provided a strong sense of recognition; rather they wanted to reinterpret these relationships within the increasingly attractive terms of recognition offered by the states in which they lived. I could help in this process by presenting “data” about Thangmi history and culture as a total social fact that evidenced their “unique” identity.
By telling me repeatedly that I was like a god, Thangmi with whom I worked ensured that I would feel obligated to act as such: if they acted in a ritually correct manner, by providing me access to the information I requested, then, like a deity who responds to rituals conducted according to the appropriate protocols, or like an ethnographer under the binding terms of an ethnographic contract, I was expected to deliver the goods. In a reversal of Bronislaw Malinowski’s classic argument for the value of fieldwork—which he claimed was important because only in that context does “the anthropologist have the myth-maker at his elbow” ([1948] 1974:100)—in this case, the “myth-makers” had the anthropologist at their elbow, ready to parlay the partial truths they wanted to tell about themselves into a totality worthy of broader recognition. In this sense, ethnography may be a complicit form of identity-producing action that cannot be fully disentangled from the projects of recognition that it seeks to describe.
Acknowledging the place of ethnography (and ethnographers) in the interplay between contemporary forms of recognition—political, divine, scholarly, and beyond—can enable this complicity to become a productive tool in transforming the terms of recognition themselves. To members of a historically misrecognized group like the Thangmi, that is part of what research is for. For social scientists, as Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn argue in their discussion of contemporary indigeneity, “a role for careful, engaged scholarship can be to contribute to understanding and activism that recognizes the paradoxes, limits and possibilities” (2007:22) of indigenous projects of recognition. This vision may be extended to ethnic projects, broadly conceived, and such intentions guide my writing here.
