Rituals of Ethnicity. Sara Shneiderman
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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.
Chapter 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