There were no Thangmi, and few members of other marginalized groups like them, in the hotel ballroom filled to capacity with several hundred representatives of Nepal’s political and academic elite. I was invited to present a paper as a “foreign expert” on ethnicity in Nepal but found myself unsure of the implications of my statements in this highly politicized context. Social scientific arguments about the nature of ethnicity were being deployed in novel ways to argue for or against recognizing ethnicity as a valid basis for demarcating Nepal’s newly proposed federal units.
An influential sociologist from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu took the podium. “Ethnic distinctions and boundaries keep shifting and multiplying and coalescing,” he said, “‘before’ and ‘after’ and in-between are akin to waves on the move rather than to fixed rocks” (Mishra 2012:88). He was describing ethnicity in terms similar to those I had heard over and over in the Thangmi chants. But here the relationship between the two possibilities was cast in oppositional terms—either a rock or a wave, a fixed object or a mutable flow—while in the shamans’ formulation these were complementary properties of a holistic state of being reproduced through ritualized action.
This book considers the implications of each of these points of view for contemporary understandings of ethnicity. Is ethnicity a rock or a river? Fixed or fluid? Both at once? To whom? At what particular places and times? How can interpreting the process of ethnicization as a process of ritualization, which brings disparate individuals together around the shared sacred object of identity, offer new explanations for the powerful persistence of ethnic identities despite the increasing realities of mobile, hybrid lives?
I consider these questions through the story of one putatively singular community, the Thangmi, and their life experiences as they move across the Himalayan borders of Nepal, India, and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). But this story raises larger questions about how ethnicity and identity are produced, ritual and politics enacted, cross-border migration lived, and consciousness experienced for many people across the region and the world who have something in common with those who recognize themselves as Thangmi. At the most intimate level, this category of commonality includes those who identify as members of other adivasi janajati (indigenous nationality) groups in Nepal, as Indians of Nepali heritage, and as border people in China.1 At the next level of abstraction, it includes those who define themselves, or are defined by others, as indigenous, tribal, marginal, or “out-of-the-way” (Tsing 1993) anywhere in the world. At the most general level, the category can be expanded to include all those whose lives entail cross-border, transnational, diasporic, or migratory movements and hybrid or synthetic practices. While I tell the Thangmi story for its own sake, this narrative comes to articulate with many others through the telling.
Why Ethnicity?
Mishra (2012) was not the first scholar to use the metaphor of rocks and rivers to describe the nature of cultural processes in the Himalayas. In his ethnography of the Thakali, Fluid Boundaries, William Fisher writes of the Kali Gandaki river running through his informants’ villages in western Nepal in just such a way:
Thakali culture … is like the Kali Gandaki River. It flows in a wide riverbed that allows it to break up into several meandering streams that merge again downstream. These separations and mergings vary unpredictably over time, but the separated channels always rejoin further downstream…. The river changes over time …. But it is nevertheless the same river.
Similarly, any description of Thakali culture is at best a representation of a moment in an ongoing cultural process. The difficulty of locating cultural coherence does not mean that Thakali culture has broken down or that it is in a transitional phase between one coherent structure or another. It merely reflects the process in which Thakali culture has been continually renewed. (2001:19–20)
I read this description early in my fieldwork and pondered it often as I struggled to understand the eddies of Thangmi culture swirling around me. I took my cue from ethnographers like Fisher and Arjun Guneratne (2002), whose work was emerging just as I began my research, to define the initial subject of my study as the process of producing Thangmi identity in its totality in a cross-border context.
Yet I entered the field at a very different historical moment, in both scholarly and political terms, than my immediate predecessors in the lineage of Himalayan anthropology. By the late 1990s, cultural critique was at its pinnacle, and much anthropological writing on the region demonstrated the constructedness of ethnic categories and cultural forms. During the same period, both Nepal and India experienced an explosion of public debate over the nature of social difference. This was due in part to national political developments, including the 1990 return of democracy in Nepal, and the subsequent promulgation of a new constitution that for the first time recognized this extremely diverse country as a “multiethnic” nation, but stopped short of attaching entitlements to specific identities. The year 1990 also saw India’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report, which revised that country’s system of affirmative action—constitutionally mandated since 1950—followed in 1991 by economic liberalization (Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011). The accelerated circulation of global discourses also played a role in fostering debate: multiculturalism, indigeneity, and inclusion, all couched in the broader terms of “rights.” These were often given programmatic teeth by international development actors (Shneiderman 2013a).
Taken together, these developments yielded the somewhat paradoxical intellectual environment of the late 1990s in which I first became acquainted with the Thangmi. On the one hand, the constructed nature of ethnicity and its limitations as an analytical tool were becoming taken for granted in the scholarly world. On the other hand, the ability to make political claims in ethnic terms was viewed as an increasingly valuable skill by people I encountered on the ground. I began to feel that the processual interpretation of culture espoused by Fisher and others was incomplete. It was not wrong, but it could not account entirely for the proliferation of ethnic expressions I observed or for the desire among those with whom I worked to possess what we might call the objects, rather than the processes, of culture. I do not mean objects only in the tangible sense but also in the intangible sense in which such concepts as identity, origins, territory, and indigeneity can be constituted as sacred objects through ritualized action.
To pursue Fisher’s metaphor, most of the Thangmi I met were not content just to watch the river flow, as a tourist—or a scholar—might be. Rather, they sought to engage with it as an entity in the phenomenal world: to build a bridge across it, to drink from it, to catch fish in it. In other words, many Thangmi were aware at some level that identity was produced through processual action, but this consciousness of identity-as-process did not preclude their desire for identity-as-object. The capacity to engage in ritualized action that produced ‘Thangminess’ as a recognizable object was the key to community membership. That such ritualized action could take multiple forms, from deity propitiations to political conferences, was understood as a key feature of the synthetic, collectively produced nature of Thangmi identity itself.
The persistence of this fundamental human desire to objectify one’s identity in terms recognizable to others is, I argue, why ethnicity still matters, as an analytical construct, a political resource, and an affective anchor for identity. This is the case despite a general agreement by the late 1990s within anthropology and perhaps across much of the social sciences that ethnicity, and even the concept of “the group,” was dead. In a 1996 survey of the topic, Marcus Banks