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ОглавлениеChapter 2
Framing, Practicing, and Performing Ethnicity
Colorful banners around Gangtok advertised the event: “Tribal Folk Dances of Sikkim, presented in honor of Shri P. R. Kyndiah, Union Minister of Tribal Affairs.” It was November 2005, and each ethnic organization registered in India’s state of Sikkim, as well as in the adjacent Darjeeling district of West Bengal, had been invited to perform a single “folk dance” that best demonstrated their “tribal culture.”
In the rehearsal session before the actual performance, it became clear that the fifty-odd dancers from fourteen ethnic organizations were well aware of the politically charged environment in which they were performing. These groups were seeking recognition from the central Indian government as Scheduled Tribes (STs), and each sought to capture the minister’s eye with a carefully framed performance that demonstrated the “tribal” nature of their identity. The rehearsing groups received stage directions from the director of Sikkim’s Department of Culture, who told them brusquely, “Shake your hips faster and make sure to flutter your eyelashes! Remember, if you look happy, the audience will be happy. And if they are not happy, why should they watch you? You must make them feel comfortable and familiar with your culture.”
The Thangmi performance troupe, sponsored by the Bharatiya Thami Welfare Association (BTWA), was composed of a combination of migrant workers from Nepal who spent several months at a time in India and Thangmi from urban Darjeeling with professional dance experience. Together, they took the director of culture’s suggestions to heart in their lively, upbeat performance of what the emcee introduced as a “Thami wedding dance.” The participation of the dancers from Nepal made the choreographers from India more confident about the efficacy of their performance. The former knew how to perform the slow, repetitive steps that characterize Thangmi cultural practice in village contexts, while the latter knew how to transform these plodding moves into Bollywood-style numbers that carried the weight of “culture” in the generically recognizable South Asian sense. The end result as danced for the minister (Figure 1) bore little resemblance to anything one would see at a Thangmi wedding or other ritual event, but the performance was greeted with resounding applause. Afterward, the minister sent a message to the BTWA expressing his appreciation. The members of the group from India were hopeful that the performance would serve as a catalyst in getting their ST application approved.
Although they participated in the event with apparent enthusiasm, some of the members of the group from Nepal later told me that they felt uncomfortable with the choreographers’ appropriation of elements of ritual practice into another performative context. The dancers from Nepal found the experience unsettling because the audience was not the assembly of deities propitiated through comparable elements of ritual action at home but rather the representatives of a state in which they did not hold full citizenship. This ambiguity could be overcome, since although bureaucratic audiences might require different offerings than divine ones, the overall ritualized form of the event was similar. The larger problem was that the performers from Nepal stood to gain little direct benefit from this transformation of practice into performance since the minister and his colleagues answered to the Indian state alone. Only those Thangmi with fully documented Indian citizenship would be eligible for benefits if the government of India recognized the group as an ST. As will be explored further in Chapter 4, although many Thangmi consider themselves “dual citizens” at the level of belonging and hold some documentary trappings of Indian citizenship, most circular migrants from Nepal cannot prove adequate evidence of the full citizenship required to apply for the special rights offered by an ST or Other Backward Class (OBC) certificate in India.
The Thangmi from Nepal were not outright opposed to the performatization of practice—a process akin to what Richard Handler (2011) has called the “ritualization of ritual,” following Erving Goffman (1971:79). In fact, I had seen several of them applaud heartily at a similarly staged performance of a “wedding dance” at a conference in Kathmandu, hosted by the Nepal Thami Samaj (NTS) earlier in the same year (Figure 2). Rather, they felt that the political results had to be worth the phenomenological and ethical trade-offs that such transformation entailed. In other words, the objectification of culture was acceptable—even desirable—as long as it was done in the service of a specific goal, and as long as the resulting field of performance was recognized as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the field of practice out of which it emerged. Once the dust had settled, the Gangtok experience prompted some of the initially uneasy performers from Nepal to consider how they might also deploy cultural performance to bolster emerging claims to the Nepali state about their rights to special benefits as members of a “highly marginalized” janajati group. Such claims, if recognized, could help create the material conditions necessary to maintain the field of practice itself. These views were forged in the context of ongoing debates within the cross-border Thangmi community about the ownership of cultural knowledge and its power to define ethnic identity. Shifting political paradigms for evaluating and rewarding cultural “authenticity” in India and Nepal compelled Thangmi on both sides of the border to think carefully about the particularities of object and audience that defined practice and performance (two terms I will define shortly), their relative efficacy in each national context, and the need to balance both fields of cultural production in the overall process of reproducing Thangmi ethnicity.
Figure 1. Thangmi wedding dance performed in Gangtok, Sikkim, India, November 2005. Photo by the author.
Figure 2. Thangmi wedding dance performed at the Nepal Thami Samaj Second National Convention, Kathmandu, Nepal, May 2005. Photo by the author.
This chapter argues that Thangmi individuals from diverse backgrounds in both Nepal and India possess a high level of self-consciousness regarding the multiple fields of ritualized action in which they engage. They intentionally choose to deploy different types of action within different social “frames” (Goffman 1974; Handler 2011) to achieve a range of results from diverse recognizing agents: state, divine, and otherwise. This self-consciousness emerges in part through the experience of moving regularly between multiple nation-states through circular migration. Familiarity with more than one national frame within which ethnicity is conceptualized and recognized enables Thangmi, as both individuals and members of a collective, to see the framing machinery through which ethnicity is produced and reproduced in each context. They may therefore take self-conscious, agentive roles in employing appropriate framing devices for their own purposes. These may range from assuaging territorial deities through private household propitiations to assuaging skeptical state representatives through public cultural performances, but ultimately all of the ritualized action so framed has a shared sacred referent: Thangmi identity itself.
This argument takes us beyond portrayals of ethnicity as either an evasive response to state control (Scott 2009) or a creation of market forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) to reveal it instead as a ritual process. I show how the objectification of identity cannot always be reduced to a process of “ethno-commodification” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) but rather must be seen as a fundamental human process that persists through ritual action regardless of the contingencies of state formation or economic paradigm. Ultimately, ethnicity is a complex collective production, which coheres around the sacred object of identity. This serves as a shared referent that enables heterogeneous individuals—bound together by little more than name across nation-state, class, age, gender, and other boundaries—to contribute in diverse ways to collective projects of ethnicity-in-action. The affective reality of the identity that results from this synthesis draws its power from the very diversity of its component parts.
Defining Practice and Performance
My definitions of “practice” and “performance” diverge from other received definitions. The two are qualitatively distinct, but inextricably linked and mutually influential fields of “ritualized activity,” which I follow Catherine Bell in defining as “a particular cultural strategy of differentiation linked to particular social effects and rooted in a distinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment it structures” (1992:8). I acknowledge at the outset that most practice has a performative aspect (Austin 1975; Bauman 1975; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Butler 1997a), and almost all performance can be seen as a form of “practice” in Bourdieu’s sense (1977, 1990). Nonetheless, making a distinction between practice and performance is helpful at the analytical level as we attempt to understand the dynamics of consciousness and objectification inherent in the process of producing ethnicity. At the level of action, there is no question that the edges of these categories blur into one another. However, these distinctions are described as ontologically real by Thangmi themselves, which suggests that they are worth paying attention to.
“Practice” refers to embodied, ritualized actions carried out by Thangmi individuals within a group-internal epistemological framework that mediates between the human and divine world: to stop malevolent deities from plaguing one’s mind, for instance, or to guide a loved one’s soul to the realm of the ancestors. Practices are addressed to the synthetic pantheon of animistic, Hindu and Buddhist deities that inhabit the Thangmi divine world, and take place within the clearly delimited private domains of the household, or communal but exclusively Thangmi, spaces. Practices then are the actions encapsulated in what Goffman calls social “primary frameworks” (1974).
“Performances,” in the contrast I draw here, are framed “keyings,” or “transformations,” in Goffman’s terms (1974), of the practices found within primary frameworks. Performances are ritualized actions carried out within a broader discursive context created by political, economic, or other kinds of external agendas. They are mounted for express consumption by non-Thangmi audiences, which may comprise representatives of the Nepali or Indian states—as at the Gangtok performance with which this chapter began—or members of other ethnic communities, NGO representatives, anthropologists, and various others. Performances take place in the open, in public domains, with the express purpose of demonstrating to both selves and various others what practices are like.
Participation in both of these forms of ritualized action contributes to contemporary experiences of what culture, identity, and ethnicity are from the perspectives of the actors who engage in them. Neither practice nor performance can stand in for the whole of culture or as the sole signifier of cultural authenticity. Instead, practice and performance, as I define them here, are both essential aspects of contemporary cultural production and as such are mutually constitutive. Neither can be substituted or subsumed by the other. Both are necessary for groups and individuals to maintain the pragmatic and emotional well-being that derives from a sense of belonging to a shared identity that is recognized by others within the political context of individual nation-states, as well as within transnational environments shaped by cross-border movements and international discourses of indigeneity and heritage.
Arjun Guneratne’s work with the Tharu of Nepal’s Tarai provides an ethnographic touchstone for discussing the dynamics of identity and consciousness in Nepal. Guneratne distinguishes between two “levels of group identity”:
The first is implicit or unselfconscious, associated with the traditional, local, endogamous group…. In Bourdieu’s terms, it exists as doxa or the unreflected upon and “naturalized” process of social reproduction of the community (Bourdieu 1977)…. The “natural” character of social facts, hitherto accepted as part of the given order, become subject to critique when an objective crisis brings some aspect of doxa—identity—into question. This is a necessary precondition for the emergence of the second level of identity I wish to distinguish.
This second or more encompassing level of identity is a self-conscious … and politically oriented identity that draws together various local communities and groups and endows them with an imagined coherence (cf. Anderson 1991). It is imagined in the sense that the structural linkages … that help to shape the first level of group identity defined above do not exist at this level. (1998:753)
These two levels of identity are in many ways coterminous with the social fields produced by practice and performance as I define them. I extend Guneratne’s insights further by suggesting that the two fields of identity coexist and mutually constitute each other. In other words, the shift from one level of identity to another is not a quintessentially modern transformation that moves in only one direction, from a state of “identity as doxa” to a state of “identity as political imagination,” with the latter eventually eclipsing the former. Instead, both forms of identity can exist simultaneously and influence each other in a multidirectional feedback loop. This potentiality comes into focus when we turn our analytical gaze to the actions of practice and performance rather than keeping it trained on the more static notion of identity itself. Practice and performance are mutually dependent aspects of the overall processes of cultural production and social reproduction, a relationship augmented but not initiated by the politics of recognition within modern nation-states. Take away practice and there is no cultural content for performance to objectify. Take away performance and there is no means for groups to demonstrate in a public forum their existential presence.
Ethnicity as Synthetic Action
Let us pause to reflect again on one of the central questions of this book: why does ethnicity still matter, and how can a focus on its ritualized nature add value to what sometimes appears to be a fully saturated sphere of scholarly discourse? The answer to this question requires a brief foray into an anthropological notion of “practice” broader than my own, as described above: that which came to the fore in the 1980s and early 1990s in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work in outlining a “theory of practice” (1977, 1990). Appropriating Bourdieu’s well-known concept of habitus as a “system of durable, transposable dispositions” (Bourdieu 1977:72), G. Carter Bentley argued for a “practice theory of ethnicity” through which we might understand ethnicity as a “multi-dimensional habitus [in which] it is possible for an individual to possess several different situationally relevant but nonetheless emotionally authentic identities and to symbolize all of them in terms of shared descent” (1987:35). For Bentley, “the theory of practice provides an efficient means of explaining the conjunct of affect and instrumentality in the phenomenon of ethnicity” (28), but following Bourdieu, Bentley suggests that the dispositions of habitus are “not normally open to conscious apprehension” (27).
The promise of such action-oriented approaches to understanding ethnicity—summarized succinctly by Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary Crain’s call for anthropologists to “consider identity less as being, and more in terms of doing” (1998:15)—has been to some extent compromised by the Marxist-inflected legacy of Bourdieu’s emphasis on the unconscious nature of practice. This influence is also evident in work that treats ethnicity as a “fetish,” which conceals the true conditions of its production (van Beek 2000; Willford 2006). As ethnicity began to decline as a fashionable topic of anthropological inquiry by the late 1990s, work like Bentley’s, which sought to understand how ethnic subjectivity itself was produced in action, was eclipsed by work that foregrounded the discursive construction of ideas about ethnicity (Anderson 1991).
James Scott takes a different position toward the intentionality of ethnic actors in his framing of the problem of “ethno-genesis” in Southeast Asia, while at the same time returning to the insights of earlier scholars who sought to understand ethnicity-in-action long before the turn toward practice theory, notably Edmund Leach. Scott casts ethnic communities—particularly those he defines as “highland peoples”—as key players in shaping the states on whose margins they live. Scott focuses on a metalevel historical discussion of these dynamics, offering only brief but enticing insights into how ethnic consciousness is actually produced on the ground. “A person’s ethnic identity … would be the repertoire of possible performances and the contexts in which they are exhibited,” he writes, but “there is, of course, no reason at all to suppose one part of the repertoire is more authentic or ‘real’ than any other” (2009:254–55). This assertion hearkens back to Bentley’s (1987) description of a multidimensional habitus in which multiple authentic identities may coexist, while also according ethnic action a degree of consciousness that Bentley and others working within the confines of formal practice theory cannot. I seek to carry forward the promise of both these approaches by marrying an analysis of ethnicity-in-action with a focus on intentionality.
Enacting simultaneous, multiple subjective states that are all affectively real requires a substantial degree of self-consciousness and self-objectification on the part of actors who practice and perform ethnic identities. For many Thangmi, this consciousness emerges in the subjective space created by the repeated process of shifting frames between multiple nation-states as circular migrants. For Thangmi settled in one location or another, contact with Thangmi circular migrants and their worldviews can effect different but comparably intimate shifts in frame. The self-consciousness engendered through these regular reframings is evident in the manner in which individuals recognize the gap between practice and performance, and work to synthesize these fields of action into an identity that is both productive, in the affective sense of belonging, and constructive, in the political sense of rights (cf. Ortner 1996). An action-based approach to ethnicity enables us to see how a wide range of different intentions and motivations held by many individuals belonging to a putatively singular ethnic group can in fact work in concert to produce a multidimensional ethnic habitus, of which the recognition of intragroup difference is itself a key feature.
Framing Cross-Border Subjectivities
It is easy to reify the unit of the nation-state itself, as well as “other kinds of groups that spring up in the wake of or in resistance to the nation-state,” as primordial “individuals-writ-large … imagined to ‘possess’ cultural properties that define their personalities and legitimate their right to exist” (Handler 2011). Anthropologists have widely recognized the modern nation-state as the primary structure shaping processes of ethnicization. But does this assessment match with the subjective perceptions of those who experience ethnicization? Nation-states may certainly be viewed as “individuals-writ-large” by people who live firmly within the borders of one state or another and whose subjectivity is defined by such a nationalist ethos in a singular manner. However, the views of “border peoples,” whose subjectivities have long been defined by interactions with multiple states may be markedly different.1 In the Thangmi context, the long history of cross-border circular migration and the concomitant in-depth experience of multiple frameworks for defining national and ethnic identities lead to a different view. Nation-states are seen as flexible identity-framing devices, in relation to which individuals and collectivities produce meaningful cultural content in each context, rather than absolute identity-determining structures, which in themselves dictate that content.
This argument leads to an inversion of nationalist perspectives in which “the group is imagined as an individual” with a homogeneous identity (Handler 2011). Instead, in the cross-border Thangmi context, collective identity cannot exist without the manifold contributions of heterogeneous individuals, each of whom possesses complementary elements of the overall repertoire of ritualized action required to establish the existential presence of the group within multiple state frames. From the perspectives of those who belong to it, the group is not imagined as a coherent “individual” but is readily acknowledged as the product of disparate life experiences embodied by multiple individuals in as many locations. As Surbir, a long-term Darjeeling resident originally from Nepal put it, “We Thangmi are like the beads of a broken necklace that have been scattered all over the place. And now it’s time to find them and put them back together again.” Surbir’s statement shows that this sense of fragmentation is not necessarily the desired state of affairs, and many Thangmi activist agendas focus on synthesizing disparate Thangmi practices into a coherent whole. The Nepal Thami Samaj (NTS) Second National Convention Report, for instance, echoes Surbir’s metaphor with the assertion that the convention’s main objective was “to integrate the Thamis living in various places, … to make [our] demands and fundamental identity widespread, and to string together all the Thamis” (NTS 2005:4). Yet it is the self-consciousness of this process of mixture, the ongoing synthesis of disparate experiences, beliefs, and ideologies, all held together under the name “Thangmi,” as well as “Thami,” which defines collective identity at the most fundamental level.
Mahendra, a Thangmi artist well-known in Darjeeling, explained his views on the collective production of Thangminess with an analogy: “I am an artist; so many people who meet me who have never met a Thangmi before think that all Thangmi are artists. Actually, they should think instead, ‘If a Thangmi can be an artist, then there must also be Thangmi writers, cooks, football players, dancers, and everything else.’ Each Thangmi should be Thangmi in his own way.” Viewing ethnicity as a collective project, to which individuals may make varying contributions in a laterally differentiated manner rather than as a vertically homogenous “individual” that requires group members to articulate belonging in more or less similar ways, diminishes the need to wrestle divergent experiences into neat arguments about group solidarity or singular authenticity. The quality of “we-feeling,” which, for instance, the Nepal Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) Act (NFDIN 2003:7) lists as one of the defining criteria for membership as an Indigenous People’s Organization (IPO), may actually be produced through the interactions and communication among members of individual groups, across boundaries of class, gender, and state.
Nonetheless, what happens inside each state at the policy level matters. Conceptualizing ethnicity as a collective process enacted across multiple state borders demands a nuanced analysis of the effects and localized meanings of global discourses like indigeneity (Tsing 2009) and heritage. For instance, the government of India rejects the English “indigenous” as an operative term in its minority legislation. Somewhat ironically, the Indian state prefers to maintain the colonial “tribal” and has to date refused to ratify international instruments like the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In addition, India scrutinizes international organizations working within its borders, with the Indian state itself providing the majority of economic and cultural support to marginalized groups through affirmative action measures. By contrast, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Nepal was one of the first Asian countries to ratify this Convention and integrate the term “indigenous” into its official language. The Nepali state allows a range of international organizations to provide targeted development aid to marginalized groups. These national differences in accepting and implementing the prerogatives of global discourse as propagated by international actors have substantial effects on the ways in which groups like the Thangmi envision their own ethnic identity within each state. This argument will be developed further in Chapter 6.
In short, academic attention to processes of globalization has often overplayed the extent to which Western-influenced ideologies—global discourses—dominate local discourse and practice, leading to analytical models that deemphasize the ongoing power of individual nation-states to imbue identity production with locally specific meanings. We are told that nations become deterritorialized through constant border-crossing movements, including labor migration, conflict-induced displacement, and cosmopolitan jet-setting, with the result that transnational frameworks eventually supersede national ones in shaping identities (Appadurai 1990; Basch, Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Inda and Rosaldo 2002). Contrary to such assumptions, the Thangmi case shows how transnational life experiences in fact bring into sharp focus the specific properties of individual national frameworks rather than erasing them.
I argue that nation-states remain crucial framing devices in the production of ethnicity but that these framing machineries are now rarely experienced in isolation. They are therefore not taken for granted. Instead, nation-states are experienced as multiple but simultaneously existing frames, which become visible in the process of switching between them. Each frame demands and facilitates different forms of ritualized action, manifested in different contexts to produce recognizable identities. In this formulation, nation-states continue to exercise sovereignty in very real ways. But such state tactics can never become entirely hegemonic in a mobile world where cross-border experiences are increasingly common. Anyone who regularly crosses borders knows that sovereignties do not exist in isolation. Instead, the role of nation-states as framing devices becomes evident at the same time that their previously presumed absolute power becomes relative. Nonetheless, the ability to control such frameworks in order to produce the desired effects within them is a complicated craft, requiring great care and ritualized attention to the nuances of practice and performance to achieve success.
Recognizing the Sacred: On Consciousness and Objectification
The distinction between practice and performance may appear to be academic, but it also has an indigenous ontological reality. Members of the Thangmi community in both Nepal and India differentiate between the aims and efficacy of a practice carried out within Thangmi company for a divine audience and a performance carried out in a public environment for broader political purposes. To distinguish between the two types of action, Thangmi use the Nepali terms sakali and nakali, which translate as “real, true, original” (Turner [1931] 1997:578) and “copy, imitation” (333) to describe practices and performances respectively.2 Thangmi individuals talk about how one must get carefully dressed and made up—nakal parnu parchha (N)—in order to mount successful performances, while practices require no such costuming.
While viewing video I shot of Thangmi cultural performances in Darjeeling, several audience members at a program in Kathmandu organized by the NTS shouted out comments like, Oh, how nicely they have dressed up [literally “imitated”]! They look really great!” After the video viewing, one elderly man commented to me, “That nakali dance works well to show our Thangmi ethnic culture (jatiya sanskriti [N]), but it’s a bit different from the sakali.” In this statement, nakali is not necessarily a negative quality but rather a positive and efficacious quality, which in its very contrast to the sakali enables an alternative set of objectives to be realized. Through their demonstrative capacity to “show” and make visible “Thangmi culture” to audiences beyond group members and their deities, nakali performances do something that sakali practices cannot; yet the nakali cannot exist without constantly referring to and objectifying the sakali.
The difference between sakali and nakali glosses the distinction between practice and performance well. It was these concepts proffered by Thangmi interlocutors that compelled me to appreciate the different techniques of objectification each form of ritualized action entails. At some level, every expressive action, every ritual, is fundamentally an act of objectification: the process of making deeply held worldviews visible in social space. In the Durkheimian sense, rituals are “the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of … sacred objects” ([1912] 1995:56). As a set of rules enacted in the public sphere, rituals are inherently objectified forms of social action that articulate human relationships with the sacred.
My argument therefore is not that practice—the sakali—is somehow unobjectified, raw, or pure doxa lost in the process of objectification that creating the nakali entails. Rather, I suggest that the techniques and intentions of objectification operative in the sakali field of practice are different from those operative in the nakali field of performance. To put it in Goffman’s terms (1974), primary social frameworks are still frameworks. Nakali performance objectifies in a new and differently efficacious manner the already objectified sakali field of practice. Thangmi gurus who go into trance to conduct private ritual practices in homes objectify the set of rules that governs their relationship with territorial deities. In the same manner, Thangmi youth who perform a staged rendition of such shamanic practice to a pop music soundtrack reobjectify the gurus’ practice in order to themselves objectify the rules that govern their relationship with the Indian state.
In other words, each field of action entails intentionally different strategies of ritualization, implemented with the help of different framing devices (of which the nation-state is one), in order to make claims upon different community-external entities that will yield different results. Yet one field of action does not supersede the other. Rather, sakali practice and nakali performance both continue to exist simultaneously and mutually influence each other. Individual Thangmi may employ one, the other, or both in making their own contributions to the collective production of ethnicity.
The constant that links these disparate forms of action together is the enduring presence of the “sacred object” of ritual attention that requires certain rules of conduct to be set out in ritualized form. Handler (2011) follows Durkheim closely by suggesting that the sacred object of heritage performances may be the “social self.” I take this notion a step further by proposing that in the Thangmi case, the sacred object is identity itself. Ethnicity then is one set of the “rules of conduct” that govern behavior in the presence of this sacred object. These rules are expressed in a synthetic set of ritualized actions produced by disparate members of the collectivity, which taken together objectify the inalienable but intangible sacred originary in a manner simultaneously recognizable to insiders and outsiders.
Creating Sacred Objects
“The sacred,” writes Maurice Godelier, “is a certain kind of relationship with the origin” (1999:169). People’s relations with each other across a collectivity—as enacted in moments of practice and performance—objectify as sacred human connections with their origins, along with their concomitant position in social, political, and cosmic orders. This combination of introverted knowledge of one’s origins and extroverted relationships with states, markets, and other temporal regimes of recognition is ethnicity itself. It is produced through a range of diverse but simultaneously existing fields of action maintained by the disparate individuals who compose the collectivity.
In Godelier’s terms, sacred objects are those that cannot be exchanged (as gifts or commodities) or alienated, and that give people an identity and root this identity in the Beginning” (1999:120–21). For the Baruya about whom he writes, sacred objects are in fact tangible objects as such. These objects act as an inalienable extension of the human body in their ability to simultaneously contain and represent identity.
For Thangmi, however, such tangible sacred objects have historically been almost nonexistent. There is no easily discernible Thangmi material culture—no icons, art, architecture, texts, or costumes—that might be objectified as sacred. In the absence of tangible signifying items, identity must serve as its own sacred object. Identity itself must be objectified and presented to the representatives of the divine or the state since there is little else in the material world that can stand in for it.
This absence of material culture contributes substantially to the problems of recognition that Thangmi face at the political level in Nepal and India. Moreover, for generations, Thangmi intentionally retreated from the gaze of the state rather than engaging with it, and the Thangmi ethnonym remains largely empty of significance to anyone but Thangmi themselves. Accordingly, to an outside eye, there is little to distinguish a Thangmi individual or village from the next person or place.
There is, in fact, an enormous amount of Thangmi cultural content, but it is all contained in the intangible aspects of practice: origin myths; propitiation chants to pacify territorial deities; the place names along the route that the Thangmi ancestors followed to Nepal and India; the memorial process of reconstructing the body of the deceased out of everyday foodstuff; the way in which offerings to the ancestors are made of chicken blood, alcohol, and dried trumpet flowers.
It is telling that the only notable exceptions to the generally true statement that the Thangmi have no unique material culture are the ritual implements of take (T: drum) and thurmi (T: wooden dagger). However, these are both pan-Himalayan shamanic implements also used by other groups across the region and as such have little sacred power as identity-signifying objects per se. They only become sacred when used in the specific context of Thangmi ritual language invoked by Thangmi gurus to marshal the power of Thangmi territorial deities (Figure 3). But as soon as such rituals are over, the take and thurmi become generic objects, not particularly Thangmi nor particularly sacred. In order to work, take and thurmi must be used by a guru who received these ritual implements from his own father or shamanic teacher. This suggests that in the appropriate context, such objects may also work as signifiers of shared descent—but not in an abstractable manner beyond the guru’s lineage itself. This is why the BTWA’s use of a thurmi image for its logo (Figure 4), along with the more complex diagram of one submitted as part of its ST application, are viewed as nakali uses of the object by gurus who use such items in ritual practice. Recall, however, that nakali is not necessarily a negative attribute. Rather, it implies the reobjectification of the sakali in a new context for a different purpose. As the late Latte Apa, Darjeeling’s senior Thangmi guru put it, “I always think it’s strange when I see the thurmi on the BTWA certificates. It is not a ‘real’ thurmi. But then I think, the government doesn’t know us yet, but we must make them know us. If they see the thurmi, they will know, ‘That is Thangmi.’”
Such statements show how the sacred object of Thangmi identity remains constant, although it may be objectified in a diverse range of sakali and nakali forms. The nakali use of the thurmi as a logo for the Thangmi ethnic organization did not compromise its continued sakali use by Latte Apa in ritual practice; he acknowledged the value of the former yet continued with the latter. The audiences who reaffirm the sacrality of the thurmi in each context may be different, but each plays a comparable and equally necessary role. Latte Apa was both a practitioner and a performer without a sense of internal contradiction; the sacred object toward which his various forms of ritualized activity were oriented did not change, and both practice and performance reaffirmed the primacy of that sacred object. His practices ensured that deities came to know the Thangmi and validated their special relationship with territorial deities, whereas his performances ensured that state officials and other outsiders came to know the Thangmi as a community worthy of recognition. The mechanisms of recognition in each domain are different, but both realms of ritualized action regulate key arenas of the social world in which the sacred object of Thangmi identity is reproduced.
Figure 3. Guru Maila displays his thurmi as he prepares to propitiate Bhume, in Suspa-Kshamawati, Dolakha, Nepal, April 2008. Photo by the author.
Figure 4. BTWA member Shova shows the association’s thurmi logo, as displayed on the banner affixed to the back wall of the BTWA Darjeeling office, November 2004. Photo by the author.
Recognition and Self-Consciousness
A concern with “recognition” runs throughout Godelier’s discussion of the sacred. He asks, “To what extent do humans not recognize themselves in their replicas?” (1999:178), and soon answers, “To be sure he can see himself in these sacred objects because he knows the code, but he cannot recognize himself in them, cannot recognize himself as their author and maker, in short as their origin” (1999:178–79; italics in original). Although Godelier accords his subjects the power to “see” themselves, he stops short of granting them the ability to “recognize” themselves, therefore suggesting that ritual behavior cannot be fully self-conscious. Handler similarly hedges his bets, suggesting first that actors have a certain level of self-consciousness: “Audiences, too, will have differing kinds of awareness of the frame and the contents of heritage rituals. And of course, both actors and audiences will be more or less aware of each others’ interpretations of such issues” (2011:52). Soon after, however, Handler returns to a more traditional Durkheimian position by suggesting that “modern social groups worship at the altar of their own identity, but they do not consciously realize that the idea of identity itself, like the idea of god, is a social production” (53).
Such arguments allude to larger anthropological debates over authenticity and the role of objectification in constituting the modern “culture concept.” Crediting Bernard Cohn (1987), Handler defines “cultural objectification” as a quintessentially modern process that is “the imaginative embodiment of human realities in terms of a theoretical discourse based on the concept of culture” (1984:56). Along with this argument comes the assumption that engaging in the process of objectification somehow removes one from the realm of pure, un-selfconscious, and, by implication, nonmodern culture. Recall also Guneratne’s (1998) separation of Tharu identity into two distinct domains—that of un-selfconscious doxa versus that of self-conscious political posturing—a formulation that draws upon Bourdieu’s dichotomous separation of the fields of “practice” and “theory” and their respective identification with worlds of the “native” and the “analyst” (1990).
These arguments entail two paradoxes regarding the self-consciousness (or lack thereof) of cultural actors. The first paradox: on the one hand, those who do not engage in objectification—“natives” in whose world “rites take place because … they cannot afford the luxury of logical speculation” as Bourdieu puts it (1990:96), or nonmodern actors in Handler’s terms—are portrayed as unable to see the frames within which their social world is produced, instead taking “identity” and “culture” for granted as sacred realities without recognizing themselves as the authors of these phenomenon. On the other hand, those who do engage in objectification—analysts and modern cultural actors—may be able to see the frames within which social reality and identity are produced, yet they still perceive the resulting cultural objects as real and sacred, without self-consciously recognizing the role of their own actions in reifying the frames within which such objects are created.
The second paradox: any sign of consciousness in the manipulation of cultural forms is portrayed negatively as a fall from nonobjectified, genuine grace. Such “calculating, interested, manipulated belief” comprises acts of “bad faith” in Godelier’s words (1999:178). At the same time, consciousness on the part of those who attempt to identify instances of such manipulation is seen as evidence of good social science at work.
There are two problems with such arguments. First, they assume that there is a moment of rupture, an “epistemological break” (Bentley 1987:44, citing Foucault 1977) heralding “epochal difference,”3 when social groups—conceived of as coherent, homogeneous individuals—make the transition, never to return, from nonobjectified to objectified cultural action, from identity as doxa to identity as politics, from practice (in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, not mine) to theory, from ethnic community to “ethno-commodity” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Consider Guneratne’s description of the Tharu community’s transformation: “While the cultural practices of their elders become in one sense marginal to their everyday concerns, in another sense they undergo a reification and reappear as an essential aspect of their modern identity. It is no longer culture as doxa in Bourdieu’s sense but culture as performance, a tale that Tharus tell themselves about themselves” (1998:760). Second, regardless of how and when that moment of rupture occurs, individuals are not portrayed as gaining genuine self-consciousness through the transition. Rather, they are portrayed as moving from a state in which they lack self-consciousness entirely to a state in which total belief in their analytical capacities—belief in the power of objectification inherent in the modern culture concept—obscures their real inabilities to comprehend their contributions to the production of sacred objects like identity.
It is time to reconsider these assumptions. First, I question the dividing lines between the types of actors discussed above (modern/nonmodern; native/analyst) since all engage in processes of objectification. Second, I suggest that all such actors (rather than none of them) may act with a substantial level of self-consciousness. Finally, I argue that there is no singular moment of rupture when groups shift from one form of objectification to another. I propose instead that multiple forms of objectifying action, each with different intended audiences and effects, are employed simultaneously in the production of sets of social rules like ethnicity. By refocusing on the entire range of things that individuals belonging to a collectivity—defined by name and the associated implication of shared descent—actually do to objectify various parts of their social world, we can see that culture as doxa, or practice, does not necessarily give rise, in a unidirectional, evolutionary manner, to culture as performance. Instead, people across the collectivity engage in multiple fields of ritualized action that coexist and inform each other.
This argument revisits some of the territory covered by debates over change and continuity, tradition and modernity, that dominate much anthropological work on questions of cultural objectification and authenticity (Briggs 1996; Handler 1986; Jackson and Ramírez 2009; Linnekin 1991). Rather than focusing on cultural objects themselves, foregrounding the diverse forms of sacralizing action people use to produce their cultural world and the constantly shifting interplay between such forms—which are not inherently attached to specific chronological conjunctures—helps move beyond limiting dichotomies. Furthermore, acknowledging that there is a range of simultaneously available objectifying actions that people may employ to express their relationship with the sacred object of identity allows us to see there is a modicum of choice—and therefore self-consciousness—in the decisions that people make about which forms of action to employ in which circumstances, and thus come to recognize themselves as creators of their own social world.
I am not suggesting, as Scott (2009) seems to, that people make fully rational, strategic choices about how they represent their identity for purely expedient political and economic reasons. Rather, actors are conscious of and make choices between various forms of action that articulate different aspects of their relationship with the sacred to different but equally important audiences. Each form of action occasions recognition from a public larger than the individual or the ethnic collectivity itself, whether that be the divine world or the state, and that experience of recognition leads to a powerfully affective affirmation of the social self. For some, this strong experience of validation might come from material evidence that the divine exists and has a special relationship with believers: natural wonders, deities speaking in tongues through possessed shamans, or other “miracles.” For others, affirmation might come from evidence that the government notices and has a special relationship with their own community: constitutional provisions for special treatment, political and educational quotas, or other such policies. The desire to gain either one or both of these forms of “existential recognition” (Graham 2005) cannot exist without a minimum sense of self-recognition as a legitimate subject for recognition from others. That basic level of self-consciousness—and the ensuing confidence that external recognition will at some point be forthcoming—is the necessary impetus for individuals to undertake the often expensive, as well as mentally and physically arduous, ritual tasks of propitiating deities (multiday Thangmi rituals often require participants to go without sleep for close to a week) or submitting government applications (a process requiring repeat visits to government offices over several years at great personal expense). The objectifying actions necessary to secure each form of recognition and its evidence are different, but the affective results are comparable. For many, a complete sense of recognition may come from a combination of both.
On the Politics of Heritage and Cross-Border Frames
Building upon the notion that in the performance of heritage, “people become living signs of themselves” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:18), the Comaroffs suggest that the commodification of ethnicity “demands that the alienation of heritage ride a delicate balance between exoticism and banalization—an equation that often requires ‘natives’ to perform themselves in such a way as to make their indigeneity legible to the consumer of otherness” (2009:142). Is this what the Thangmi dancers with whom this chapter began were doing? If so, who exactly is the consumer of otherness? Most Thangmi rarely come in contact with tourists or other foreigners—the class of people, for lack of a better term, who often provoke the processes of ethnocommodification that the Comaroffs describe. The areas of Thangmi residence in Nepal’s hills were never on a tourist trekking route, and the Maoist-state conflict from 1996 to 2006 made it nearly impossible to consider development along those lines. Darjeeling does see a reasonable amount of tourists, but throughout the course of my research, I never documented any engagement with them on the part of the Thangmi community.
The “consumer of otherness” here is instead the state and, especially in Nepal, its associates in international development. But such performances for state consumption are not divorced from practices that are carried out for divine consumption, and understanding both as forms of ritualized action that objectify ethnic consciousness simultaneously to both ethnic selves and others is key. This is not an either/or proposition: at the same time that ethnic actors perform themselves for consumption by temporal or divine others, they also engage in practices that represent themselves to themselves in order to reproduce the content of ethnic consciousness. Scott is quite right that no single part of a repertoire is more “real” than others.
Echoing Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Godelier asserts that through ritual activity, People generate duplicate selves … which, once they have split off, stand before them as persons who are at once familiar and alien. In reality these are not duplicates which stand before them as aliens; these are the people themselves who, by splitting, have become in part strangers to themselves, subjected, alienated to these other beings who are nonetheless part of themselves” (1999:169–70). Beyond simply serving as a means of crass cultural commodification, performances allow people to objectify their own self-consciousness in a manner that has deep affective results. Through such self-replicating, signifying action, they generate a reflective awareness of these processes of subjectification and alienation in a manner that allows “duplicate selves” to stand without contradiction. In the end, the sacred self is inalienable. The experience of becoming “a living sign” in the process of performance or watching other members of one’s community become one—as many Thangmi are now doing—generates a consciousness of the different objectifying tools of practice and performance, and their different but equally important efficacies. In a diverse cross-border community, such consciousness emerges in part from intimate knowledge of the differences in paradigms for cultural objectification in each country and the ability to see such national ethos as frames within which one’s own action unfolds.
During a ritual to protect a Darjeeling household from bad luck, Rana Bahadur (no relation to the senior guru Rana Bahadur), a young Thangmi from Nepal who had long lived in India, described this effect: The politics here are distinct; the politics there are also distinct. In each place, culture must be deployed in different ways.” He was a respected shaman’s assistant who often played an important role during ritual practices, as well as a cultural performer who wrote and sang many of the lyrics on the popular cassette of Thangmi language songs recorded by the BTWA. Rana Bahadur was one of many Thangmi whose experiences of both India and Nepal as national frames effected a conscious recognition of the differences in technique, efficacy, and audience that defined practice and performance. Another was Sheela, the general secretary of the Sikkim branch of the BTWA, a well-educated woman in her late thirties. She explained the motivation behind the performatization of Thangmi practice I had witnessed in Gangtok: “Thami rituals and traditions are so slow and repetitive. That works back in the pahar (N: “the hills,” meaning rural Nepal), but here we need something different when we show our culture to others so that the government will notice us.” Within this diversity of experience, curiosity about the embodied effects of each form of ritualized action is constant, along with a sense that the relationship between these forms of action enables the ethnic collectivity to synthesize a coherent presence across borders and disparate life experiences.
In one direction, that curiosity manifests in the desire of seasoned Thangmi cultural practitioners from Nepal to watch and, in some cases, participate in stage-managed cultural performances like the one in Sikkim with which this chapter began. In the other direction, many Thangmi in India talk about opportunities to observe cultural practices, such as death or wedding rituals, with the same reverence with which they might discuss an audience with Sai Baba or the Dalai Lama. The increasing exposure of practitioners to performance and performers to practice—through cheaper and easier cross-border travel and the trend of home-grown VCD production—has generated a debate within the community as a whole about what constitutes Thangmi culture and what elements of it should be “standardized” for future reproduction.
The fact that this debate is actively taking place within the community itself, which includes many members for whom practice itself remains alive and a key component of identity, sets this case apart somewhat from other discussions of the production of heritage in the global economy. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines heritage as “the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct,” and as “a mode of production that has recourse to the past,” to “produce the local for export” (1995:369). In the Thangmi case, practice remains very much alive, but it has increasingly come into relationship with performance. The two coexist. Rather than fetishizing dead practices, emergent desires to demonstrate heritage through performance for political purposes within India has in fact encouraged the continuation of practice in Nepal and even the rerooting of it in India, where it had previously disappeared. For most Thangmi, heritage has not become entirely detached from living practice itself, commodified by outside forces and reconstituted for the exclusive purpose of consumption by others. I suspect that this is not so unusual and may be the case elsewhere but that the analytical obsession with dichotomizing authentic and inauthentic, practice and theory, has obscured such dynamics. Instead, although oriented toward external audiences, performance is produced by Thangmi, for Thangmi purposes, in constant conversation with practice itself.
Objectification and commodification are not always synonymous. The process of self-objectification is one inherent in the human condition, fundamentally expressed through ritual, not one that emerges exclusively in response to state policies or market forces. While processes of ethnocommodification may be common in the (post)(neo)liberal era,4 they are not the only form of ethnic objectification, nor are their resultant objects the only evidence by which the content of ethnic consciousness should be understood. Due to the specific properties of ritualized activity, in which “the celebrant has agent’s awareness of his or her action … but this is also preceded and accompanied by a conception of the action as a thing, encountered and perceived from outside” (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994:5), ethnic consciousness produced through ritual action may be “a thing” without being explicitly commodified within a market context. Moreover, “it is not the existence of collective ideas about ritual action which constitutes it as a social fact, but common acceptance of rules about ritual action” (267). We can say the same about ethnicity when we view its production as a form of ritualized action: it is not any agreement about what ethnicity is that defines it across the collectivity but rather an implicit understanding of the rules of conduct that govern its production. These entail expression through ritualized action, whether those are practices oriented internally toward other diverse members of the collectivity or performances oriented externally toward recognizing agents like the state or the divine world.
These ideas compel further consideration of the relationship between community-internal expressions of ethnic consciousness and external frameworks for recognition—such as states, markets, or global discourses of indigeneity and heritage. The Comaroffs cite a Tswana elder as saying, “If we have nothing of ourselves to sell, does it mean that we have no culture?” They interpret this to mean that “if they have nothing distinctive to alienate, many rural black South Africans have come to believe, they face collective extinction; identity … resides in recognition from significant others, but the kind of recognition, specifically, expressed in consumer desire” (2009:10). While I agree that identity resides in large part in recognition from significant others, such others may be members of one’s own extended community, or members of the divine world, or both—constituencies that are well-addressed through ritualized practices that objectify identity in terms other than that of the commodity. Collapsing all forms of recognition into “consumer desire” flattens the social world into one in which the market is the only meaningful framework for recognition.
Others, including Scott, would have us believe that the state serves as a similarly transcendent source of recognition. The long-standing Thangmi absence from ethnopolitical discourse at the national level reflects the absence of tangible objects of identity recognizable in the terms of the state but not the absence of identity itself. Thangmi performances seek to rectify this disjuncture by objectifying the sacred object of identity through performances—but these occur in tandem with, not instead of, practices that remain oriented toward other recognizing agents.
Both forms of action provoke self-conscious reflection on the frames and contents of ethnicity. The sacred object of identity is not visible on its own but manifests in the process of ritualization. The Comaroffs (2009) assert that ethnicity is experiencing a doubling—both engendering affect and serving as an instrument—and that it is the dialectic between these qualities that defines ethnicity as a whole. Anthropologists have long recognized similar qualities in ritual, and understanding ethnicity as a ritual process works to ameliorate the sense of disjuncture contained in this dual quality of ethnicity. It also moves beyond Scott’s assertion of pure intentionality in the process of ethnogenesis by nuancing understandings of how acts of both ethnicity and ritual embody subtle relationships between intention and action.
Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam offers a trenchant critique of Scott: “It is devilishly difficult to make a case for radical ethnogenesis, on the one hand, and for deep aboriginal rights on the other. Ideas of choice and agency thus come into rude conflict with notions of victimhood and the rights of victims of ‘displacement’” (2010:7). He points out that this seems at odd with Scott’s long-standing position as a champion of the dispossessed. However, coupling the Comaroffs’ proposition that ethnicity emerges from the dialectic between instrument and affect, with an attention to the ritual processes through which ethnic consciousness is produced, takes us beyond the sense of contradiction here. “Radical ethnogenesis”—or a recognition of the constructed nature of ethnicity—need not be at odds with a simultaneous recognition of the affective, deeply real nature of ethnic consciousness that leads to many collective rights claims but also transforms individual senses of self and agency.
Aesthetics, Affect, and Efficacy
The process of performing heritage sometimes has unexpected affective results for the performers. Many Thangmi in India told me that the experience of performance gave them a hint of what practice might be like and encouraged them to seek out practice experiences in the company of Thangmi from Nepal, which in turn gave them a different feel, at the level of the body, for what it meant to be Thangmi. Such interlinkages begin to show how ethnic actors themselves view both practice and performance as integral to their own identity, within a frame of reference that includes individual states, their policies, and the borders between them.
When I asked Laxmi, one of the choreographers of the Sikkim performance, how she and her colleagues conceptualized these dances as Thangmi ones, she shrugged her shoulders and said: “We just choose whichever steps look good. We want to create something that people will want to watch, and will make them remember, ‘those Thangmi, they are good dancers.’ That will help us.” When I pushed further to ask what made these dances particularly Thangmi, she said, “Well, we have Thangmi from Nepal in the group, and they know how to show sakali Thangmi culture, so we just trust them.” For her, the very presence of the dancers from Nepal—who were stereotyped as having some experience with practice owing to their background in rural villages and their competence in the Thangmi language—was enough to provide an aura of authenticity, although she admitted she did not know what constituted it. She was aware of the aesthetic differences between what she had created as performance and Thangmi practice as such—and their concomitant differences in efficacy. Later, however, she confided that she had been overwhelmed by the experience of the funerary rituals that a Thangmi shaman from Nepal had conducted after the recent death of her brother. This was the first time that Laxmi had participated in a full-blown Thangmi ritual practice because her family had been in the habit of using Hindu priests as officiants, as had been typical for many generations of Thangmi families in India. She was surprised by the positive effect that participating in the ritual as a practitioner, following the shaman’s instructions, had on her own fragile emotional state in the wake of her brother’s death—a stark contrast to the orchestrating role she was used to playing as choreographer.
That experience motivated her to seek out shamans from Nepal for subsequent rituals, such as her son’s haircutting ceremony. She spoke candidly about how participation in these had transformed her experience of what it meant to be Thangmi. She saw these serious, complicated practices as a separate domain from the upbeat performances she choreographed, but it was the former that energized her commitment to the BTWA’s political agenda, thereby producing the latter.
In the contemporary cross-border political and cultural economies that shape Thangmi lives, maintaining the pragmatic conditions in which practice can be reproduced necessarily entails mounting performances. Those performances, in turn, must allude to the ongoing life of practice in order to establish their own legitimacy as representations of a culture worthy of recognition. It follows that those with the sakali skills of performance cannot advance their own projects without collaboration from those with the nakali knowledge of practice, and vice versa. As Surbir would have put it, the beads of the broken necklace must be strung together. The combination of competence in both fields of ritualized action in a single individual is rare, although that is changing, as the examples of relatively young Thangmi like Rana Bahadur and Laxmi show.
For now, in order to advance their shared goals of reproducing the sacred object of Thangmi identity and securing “existential recognition” from a range of audiences, Thangmi with a diversity of life experiences—in Nepal and India, circular migrants and settled residents of both countries, young and old, gurus and activists, practitioners and performers—continue to work together in a synthetic manner to maintain the rules of conduct governing Thangmi ethnicity. This text is my part of the production, fully costumed in the garb of social scientific authority.
