In Godelier’s terms, sacred objects are those that cannot be exchanged (as gifts or commodities) or alienated, and that give people an identity and root this identity in the Beginning” (1999:120–21). For the Baruya about whom he writes, sacred objects are in fact tangible objects as such. These objects act as an inalienable extension of the human body in their ability to simultaneously contain and represent identity.
For Thangmi, however, such tangible sacred objects have historically been almost nonexistent. There is no easily discernible Thangmi material culture—no icons, art, architecture, texts, or costumes—that might be objectified as sacred. In the absence of tangible signifying items, identity must serve as its own sacred object. Identity itself must be objectified and presented to the representatives of the divine or the state since there is little else in the material world that can stand in for it.
This absence of material culture contributes substantially to the problems of recognition that Thangmi face at the political level in Nepal and India. Moreover, for generations, Thangmi intentionally retreated from the gaze of the state rather than engaging with it, and the Thangmi ethnonym remains largely empty of significance to anyone but Thangmi themselves. Accordingly, to an outside eye, there is little to distinguish a Thangmi individual or village from the next person or place.
There is, in fact, an enormous amount of Thangmi cultural content, but it is all contained in the intangible aspects of practice: origin myths; propitiation chants to pacify territorial deities; the place names along the route that the Thangmi ancestors followed to Nepal and India; the memorial process of reconstructing the body of the deceased out of everyday foodstuff; the way in which offerings to the ancestors are made of chicken blood, alcohol, and dried trumpet flowers.
It is telling that the only notable exceptions to the generally true statement that the Thangmi have no unique material culture are the ritual implements of take (T: drum) and thurmi (T: wooden dagger). However, these are both pan-Himalayan shamanic implements also used by other groups across the region and as such have little sacred power as identity-signifying objects per se. They only become sacred when used in the specific context of Thangmi ritual language invoked by Thangmi gurus to marshal the power of Thangmi territorial deities (Figure 3). But as soon as such rituals are over, the take and thurmi become generic objects, not particularly Thangmi nor particularly sacred. In order to work, take and thurmi must be used by a guru who received these ritual implements from his own father or shamanic teacher. This suggests that in the appropriate context, such objects may also work as signifiers of shared descent—but not in an abstractable manner beyond the guru’s lineage itself. This is why the BTWA’s use of a thurmi image for its logo (Figure 4), along with the more complex diagram of one submitted as part of its ST application, are viewed as nakali uses of the object by gurus who use such items in ritual practice. Recall, however, that nakali is not necessarily a negative attribute. Rather, it implies the reobjectification of the sakali in a new context for a different purpose. As the late Latte Apa, Darjeeling’s senior Thangmi guru put it, “I always think it’s strange when I see the thurmi on the BTWA certificates. It is not a ‘real’ thurmi. But then I think, the government doesn’t know us yet, but we must make them know us. If they see the thurmi, they will know, ‘That is Thangmi.’”
Such statements show how the sacred object of Thangmi identity remains constant, although it may be objectified in a diverse range of sakali and nakali forms. The nakali use of the thurmi as a logo for the Thangmi ethnic organization did not compromise its continued sakali use by Latte Apa in ritual practice; he acknowledged the value of the former yet continued with the latter. The audiences who reaffirm the sacrality of the thurmi in each context may be different, but each plays a comparable and equally necessary role. Latte Apa was both a practitioner and a performer without a sense of internal contradiction; the sacred object toward which his various forms of ritualized activity were oriented did not change, and both practice and performance reaffirmed the primacy of that sacred object. His practices ensured that deities came to know the Thangmi and validated their special relationship with territorial deities, whereas his performances ensured that state officials and other outsiders came to know the Thangmi as a community worthy of recognition. The mechanisms of recognition in each domain are different, but both realms of ritualized action regulate key arenas of the social world in which the sacred object of Thangmi identity is reproduced.
Figure 3. Guru Maila displays his thurmi as he prepares to propitiate Bhume, in Suspa-Kshamawati, Dolakha, Nepal, April 2008. Photo by the author.
Figure 4. BTWA member Shova shows the association’s thurmi logo, as displayed on the banner affixed to the back wall of the BTWA Darjeeling office, November 2004. Photo by the author.
Recognition and Self-Consciousness
A concern with “recognition” runs throughout Godelier’s discussion of the sacred. He asks, “To what extent do humans not recognize themselves in their replicas?” (1999:178), and soon answers, “To be sure he can see himself in these sacred objects because he knows the code, but he cannot recognize himself in them, cannot recognize himself as their author and maker, in short as their origin” (1999:178–79; italics in original). Although Godelier accords his subjects the power to “see” themselves, he stops short of granting them the ability to “recognize” themselves, therefore suggesting that ritual behavior cannot be fully self-conscious. Handler similarly hedges his bets, suggesting first that actors have a certain level of self-consciousness: “Audiences, too, will have differing kinds of awareness of the frame and the contents of heritage rituals. And of course, both actors and audiences will be more or less aware of each others’ interpretations of such issues” (2011:52). Soon after, however, Handler returns to a more traditional Durkheimian position by suggesting that “modern social groups worship at the altar of their own identity, but they do not consciously realize that the idea of identity itself, like the idea of god, is a social production” (53).
Such arguments allude to larger anthropological debates over authenticity and the role of objectification in constituting the modern “culture concept.” Crediting Bernard Cohn (1987), Handler defines “cultural objectification” as a quintessentially modern process that is “the imaginative embodiment of human realities in terms of a theoretical discourse based on the concept of culture” (1984:56). Along with this argument comes the assumption that engaging in the process of objectification somehow removes one from the realm of pure, un-selfconscious, and, by implication, nonmodern culture. Recall also Guneratne’s (1998) separation of Tharu identity into two distinct domains—that of un-selfconscious doxa versus that of self-conscious political posturing—a formulation that draws upon Bourdieu’s dichotomous separation of the fields of “practice” and “theory” and their respective identification with worlds of the “native” and the “analyst” (1990).
These arguments entail two paradoxes regarding the self-consciousness (or lack thereof) of cultural actors. The first paradox: on the one hand, those who do not engage in objectification—“natives” in whose world “rites take place because … they cannot afford the luxury of logical speculation” as Bourdieu puts it (1990:96), or nonmodern actors in Handler’s terms—are portrayed as unable to see the frames within which their social world is produced, instead taking “identity” and “culture” for granted as sacred realities without recognizing themselves as the authors of these phenomenon. On the other hand, those who do engage in objectification—analysts and modern cultural actors—may be able to see the frames within which social reality and identity are produced, yet they still perceive the resulting