The second paradox: any sign of consciousness in the manipulation of cultural forms is portrayed negatively as a fall from nonobjectified, genuine grace. Such “calculating, interested, manipulated belief” comprises acts of “bad faith” in Godelier’s words (1999:178). At the same time, consciousness on the part of those who attempt to identify instances of such manipulation is seen as evidence of good social science at work.
There are two problems with such arguments. First, they assume that there is a moment of rupture, an “epistemological break” (Bentley 1987:44, citing Foucault 1977) heralding “epochal difference,”3 when social groups—conceived of as coherent, homogeneous individuals—make the transition, never to return, from nonobjectified to objectified cultural action, from identity as doxa to identity as politics, from practice (in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, not mine) to theory, from ethnic community to “ethno-commodity” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Consider Guneratne’s description of the Tharu community’s transformation: “While the cultural practices of their elders become in one sense marginal to their everyday concerns, in another sense they undergo a reification and reappear as an essential aspect of their modern identity. It is no longer culture as doxa in Bourdieu’s sense but culture as performance, a tale that Tharus tell themselves about themselves” (1998:760). Second, regardless of how and when that moment of rupture occurs, individuals are not portrayed as gaining genuine self-consciousness through the transition. Rather, they are portrayed as moving from a state in which they lack self-consciousness entirely to a state in which total belief in their analytical capacities—belief in the power of objectification inherent in the modern culture concept—obscures their real inabilities to comprehend their contributions to the production of sacred objects like identity.
It is time to reconsider these assumptions. First, I question the dividing lines between the types of actors discussed above (modern/nonmodern; native/analyst) since all engage in processes of objectification. Second, I suggest that all such actors (rather than none of them) may act with a substantial level of self-consciousness. Finally, I argue that there is no singular moment of rupture when groups shift from one form of objectification to another. I propose instead that multiple forms of objectifying action, each with different intended audiences and effects, are employed simultaneously in the production of sets of social rules like ethnicity. By refocusing on the entire range of things that individuals belonging to a collectivity—defined by name and the associated implication of shared descent—actually do to objectify various parts of their social world, we can see that culture as doxa, or practice, does not necessarily give rise, in a unidirectional, evolutionary manner, to culture as performance. Instead, people across the collectivity engage in multiple fields of ritualized action that coexist and inform each other.
This argument revisits some of the territory covered by debates over change and continuity, tradition and modernity, that dominate much anthropological work on questions of cultural objectification and authenticity (Briggs 1996; Handler 1986; Jackson and Ramírez 2009; Linnekin 1991). Rather than focusing on cultural objects themselves, foregrounding the diverse forms of sacralizing action people use to produce their cultural world and the constantly shifting interplay between such forms—which are not inherently attached to specific chronological conjunctures—helps move beyond limiting dichotomies. Furthermore, acknowledging that there is a range of simultaneously available objectifying actions that people may employ to express their relationship with the sacred object of identity allows us to see there is a modicum of choice—and therefore self-consciousness—in the decisions that people make about which forms of action to employ in which circumstances, and thus come to recognize themselves as creators of their own social world.
I am not suggesting, as Scott (2009) seems to, that people make fully rational, strategic choices about how they represent their identity for purely expedient political and economic reasons. Rather, actors are conscious of and make choices between various forms of action that articulate different aspects of their relationship with the sacred to different but equally important audiences. Each form of action occasions recognition from a public larger than the individual or the ethnic collectivity itself, whether that be the divine world or the state, and that experience of recognition leads to a powerfully affective affirmation of the social self. For some, this strong experience of validation might come from material evidence that the divine exists and has a special relationship with believers: natural wonders, deities speaking in tongues through possessed shamans, or other “miracles.” For others, affirmation might come from evidence that the government notices and has a special relationship with their own community: constitutional provisions for special treatment, political and educational quotas, or other such policies. The desire to gain either one or both of these forms of “existential recognition” (Graham 2005) cannot exist without a minimum sense of self-recognition as a legitimate subject for recognition from others. That basic level of self-consciousness—and the ensuing confidence that external recognition will at some point be forthcoming—is the necessary impetus for individuals to undertake the often expensive, as well as mentally and physically arduous, ritual tasks of propitiating deities (multiday Thangmi rituals often require participants to go without sleep for close to a week) or submitting government applications (a process requiring repeat visits to government offices over several years at great personal expense). The objectifying actions necessary to secure each form of recognition and its evidence are different, but the affective results are comparable. For many, a complete sense of recognition may come from a combination of both.
On the Politics of Heritage and Cross-Border Frames
Building upon the notion that in the performance of heritage, “people become living signs of themselves” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:18), the Comaroffs suggest that the commodification of ethnicity “demands that the alienation of heritage ride a delicate balance between exoticism and banalization—an equation that often requires ‘natives’ to perform themselves in such a way as to make their indigeneity legible to the consumer of otherness” (2009:142). Is this what the Thangmi dancers with whom this chapter began were doing? If so, who exactly is the consumer of otherness? Most Thangmi rarely come in contact with tourists or other foreigners—the class of people, for lack of a better term, who often provoke the processes of ethnocommodification that the Comaroffs describe. The areas of Thangmi residence in Nepal’s hills were never on a tourist trekking route, and the Maoist-state conflict from 1996 to 2006 made it nearly impossible to consider development along those lines. Darjeeling does see a reasonable amount of tourists, but throughout the course of my research, I never documented any engagement with them on the part of the Thangmi community.
The “consumer of otherness” here is instead the state and, especially in Nepal, its associates in international development. But such performances for state consumption are not divorced from practices that are carried out for divine consumption, and understanding both as forms of ritualized action that objectify ethnic consciousness simultaneously to both ethnic selves and others is key. This is not an either/or proposition: at the same time that ethnic actors perform themselves for consumption by temporal or divine others, they also engage in practices that represent themselves to themselves in order to reproduce the content of ethnic consciousness. Scott is quite right that no single part of a repertoire is more “real” than others.
Echoing Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Godelier asserts that through ritual activity, People generate duplicate selves … which, once they have split off, stand before them as persons who are at once familiar and alien. In reality these are not duplicates which stand before them as aliens; these are the people themselves who, by splitting, have become in part strangers to themselves, subjected, alienated to these other beings who are nonetheless part of themselves” (1999:169–70). Beyond simply serving as a means of crass cultural commodification, performances allow people to objectify their own self-consciousness in a manner that has deep affective results. Through such self-replicating, signifying action, they generate a reflective awareness of these processes of subjectification and alienation in a manner that allows “duplicate selves” to stand without contradiction. In the end, the sacred self is inalienable. The experience of becoming “a living sign” in the process of performance or watching other members of one’s community become one—as many Thangmi are now doing—generates a consciousness of the different