Rituals of Ethnicity. Sara Shneiderman
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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