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