The People Without an Ethnography
When I returned to Kathmandu after my first visits to Thangmi villages in central-eastern Nepal in 1998, I scoured bookstores and libraries for information about the group but could find nothing. It is puzzling that this relatively sizable group failed entirely to make it onto the ethnographic map of Nepal, where several numerically smaller communities have been popular ethnographic subjects, and barely onto that of India, where colonial administrators carefully enumerated and categorized the communities they encountered. This absence, noticeable in both scholarly and political contexts, provided the impetus for my research with the Thangmi.
“Thami ke ho?” or “What is Thami?” is a common Nepali language refrain that Thangmi everywhere hear throughout their lives. Nirmala, a young woman from the village of Dumkot in Dolakha, explained how this made her feel: “Everyone in the bazaar asks, ‘Thami ke ho?’ I want to tell them ‘Yo Thangmi ho,’ or—‘This is Thangmi’ [pointing to herself]. But that is not enough; we need to know our history and culture so we can explain. Some of the books published in Darjeeling which I have read, like this one, are very helpful in that way.” Nirmala held up a copy of the 2003 publication Niko Bachinte (Our Morning, in Thangmi). Superimposed over a photo of a Thangmi shaman in Sindhupalchok (that I had shot early in my research), the text on the back cover of the publication began with the question “Thami ke ho?”
What was often encountered as a flippant query from curious outsiders had become a burning rhetorical question that the community posed to themselves. Unpacked somewhat, it actually means, “How do you fit into familiar systems of classification?” or “Where is your place in the social order?” The Thangmi ethnonym’s lack of clear signification derives in part from a history of misrecognition, which many Thangmi exacerbated by intentionally misrepresenting themselves as members of other better-known groups.3 In social interactions, Thangmi often find that they are mistaken for Kami, a dalit (previously “untouchable”) blacksmith caste, or Dhami, a socially marginalized group of folk healers, owing to the similar sounds of their names. They are just as frequently misrecognized as members of neighboring ethnic groups, primarily Tamang, Rai, or Limbu, by the general public, scholars, and members of those groups who seek to claim the Thangmi population as part of their own for political purposes.
In both countries, “Thami” is the group’s official moniker, appearing on citizenship cards in Nepal or ration cards in India as a surname. Members of the group usually prefer their own ethnonym, “Thangmi.” But neither name conveys enough information for outsiders to easily categorize those who bear it, since most People simply do not know what “Thami,” and even less “Thangmi,” indexes in terms of ethnicity, religion, or region. Despite their different citizenships and life experiences in Nepal and India, members of the current generation of the Thangmi community are drawn together by their desire for “existential recognition” (Graham 2005) of a distinctive presence in practice, which might help fill the discursive absence surrounding their name.
Although the Thangmi recognize themselves as a distinct group, they are not named in Nepal’s 1854 Muluki Ain, the legal code that provided the historical basis for political recognition in Nepal (Höfer [1979] 2004).4 Later scholarly and bureaucratic ethnographies in both Nepal and India compounded the problem. For example, the 1993 update of the Anthropological Survey of India, which has existed since the colonial era (Cohn 1987), states, “There is no idea about the origin of the Thami community or the term ‘Thami.’ Their history is indeed obscure…. The Thamis do not have any exclusive ritual worth mentioning” (Subba 1993:184–85).
Indeed, beyond Mark Turin’s description of the Thangmi language (2012), which shows that this under-documented Tibeto-Burman tongue is related to both Kiranti (Rai and Limbu) and Newar languages,5 there is no previous authoritative scholarship in English on the Thangmi. The small body of existing material is largely inaccessible. This includes the field notes of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf archived at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (this founding father of Himalayan anthropology passed through Thangmi villages several times but never made an in-depth study), American anthropologist Creighton Peet’s unpublished 1978 dissertation,6 and the notes of French linguist Genevieve Stein (who worked in the village of Alampu in the 1970s but never published her findings). Other locally published materials are now out of print (Sapkota 2045 VS; Toba 1990).7 Newspaper articles in the Nepali media are another source of information, but with some notable exceptions (Lall 1966), these are generally based on secondary sources of questionable veracity and tend to represent the Thangmi in a folkloristic idiom, casting them as a quaint, backward group notable for their cultural oddities, such as their supposed belief that they are yeti-ko santan, or “the descendants of yeti” (Manandhar 2001).8
In several compendia, the Thangmi are classified as a subgroup of other better-known groups, such as Tamang (Bista 1967:48; Gaborieau 1978:107; Majupuria and Majupuria 1978:60, 1980:57), Kiranti (Lévi, as cited in Riccardi 1975:23), or Parbatiya Hindu (Vansittart 1918:70).9 A 1994 ethnographic survey by Rajesh Gautam and Ashoke Thapa-Magar exemplifies the derogatory language often used to describe the group: “not clean in their habits” (1994:314), “when a Thami is seen it is clear that these people have recently renounced their uncivilized ways” (1994:323). Debates about the meaning of the ethnonym “Thangmi”—which most likely derives either from the Tibetan mtha’ mi (people of the border) or thang mi (people of the steppe)—are literally relegated to the footnotes of Himalayan anthropology.10 A 1928 recruitment manual for the Gurkha regiments of the British Army recognizes the Thangmi as a distinct group but powerfully sums up their marginal position within national and transnational hierarchies of recognition: “Coarse in appearance, and the inferior of the other races in social and religious matters, they do not merit further description” (Northey and Morris 1928:260).
The point on which most scholars agree, and the one they often refer to in explaining why they did not conduct further research with the Thangmi, is that they are an extremely poor group with little distinctive material culture: no unique artistic or architectural traditions, no colorful crafts or costumes, nothing visible beyond the lowest common denominator features of rural Himalayan life. To an outside eye, there is indeed little to distinguish a Thangmi individual or village from the next person or place.
However, this apparent absence of distinctive ethnic markers from an outsider’s perspective is belied by a rich cultural presence enacted through practice within the community itself. Thangmi cultural content is largely contained in the intangible, internally coherent aspects of ritualized action rather than in any tangible, externally recognizable visual form. When I asked what made Thangmi themselves, the answers nearly always pointed to ritualized action, broadly defined. Indeed, as I looked around me, I saw octogenarian shamans propitiating territorial deities, young ethnic activists mounting political performances, and householders offhandedly saluting the deities under whose auspices they went about their daily business. Only through understanding such forms of action could I understand how Thangminess itself was produced.
Why Rituals of Ethnicity? Recognition, Complicity, and the Ethnographic Contract
Although desire for political recognition from the state is a relatively new phenomenon for many Thangmi, recognition from other sources, particularly the divine world, has long been a key force in constituting Thangmi social relations. As Man Bahadur, a middle-aged Thangmi man from Dolakha,