Rituals of Ethnicity. Sara Shneiderman
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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,