Rituals of Ethnicity. Sara Shneiderman
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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