Anthropologists themselves may become recognizing agents “complicit” (Marcus 1999) in catalyzing community efforts to achieve recognition from other sources. Ethnography that works to transform the “terms of recognition” can become part of the toolkit groups use to craft their future (Appadurai 2004). This book therefore uses the conceit of ethnography as an organizing principle, with chapters loosely structured around classical anthropological subjects: ritual, myth, economy, political organization, territory, descent and the life cycle, and the dynamics of power and agency. Organizing the book in this way provokes a reconsideration of the relationship between anthropological form and content by demonstrating that reflexive, multisited research with transnational communities need not preclude in-depth description of fundamental aspects of social life, presented in a manner that is meaningful to both scholars and communities themselves. That the rubric “Thangmi” describes a diversity of experiences not easily reconciled within a singular frame is a fundamental premise of this book; yet using the monographic form of ethnography allows me to create the coherent social scientific profile that disparate members of the Thangmi community commonly desire.
The lack of accessible, accurate scholarly material about the Thangmi is not simply an academic concern. It has concrete consequences within the crucible of janajati and tribal politics in Nepal and India, as Thangmi attempts to control the terms of their own recognition vis-à-vis the multiple states in which they live have shifted over time from a strategy of state evasion, or “dissimilation” (Geoffrey Benjamin as cited in Scott 2009:173–74), to one of direct, intentional engagement.
Historically, land and labor exploitation under the Rana and Shah regimes compelled Thangmi in Nepal to remain under the radar of state recognition whenever possible.11 Fear of the state, which primarily manifested in its tax-collecting form, encouraged the insular maintenance of cultural practices. Thangmi intentionally avoided public forms of cultural objectification that might attract curious outsiders. Many Thangmi elders told me that they actually counted themselves lucky to have been left out of the 1854 Muluki Ain legal code. This lacuna encouraged Thangmi to misrepresent themselves as members of better-known ethnic groups in encounters with authority.
But in 2002, the Nepal Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) Act first created the legal category of adivasi janajati in Nepal, listing fifty-six groups. In 2004, the nongovernmental Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN) introduced a new five-tiered classification system to further categorize these groups as “endangered,” “highly marginalized,” “marginalized,” “disadvantaged,” and “advantaged” (Gellner 2007; Hangen 2007; Middleton and Shneiderman 2008; Onta 2006b; Shneiderman 2013a). The government of Nepal ratified International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, becoming only the second Asian country to do so. Under these changing circumstances, a recognizable identity encoded in an ethnographic tome began to seem newly important to groups concerned with securing recognition in a state that might be restructured along ethnic lines. What use is remaining intentionally beyond the range of state recognition when the state begins offering options for self-governance, if autonomy” can only be provided to those groups who are already officially recognized at the point of devolution?
In India, by contrast, there has long been a dialectic between indigenous self-representation and state-sponsored ethnography (Cohn 1987; Dirks 2001). The Indian Constitution of 1950 provides for the “upliftment” of marginalized groups through official recognition (known as “scheduling”) and quotas (Galanter 1984; Jenkins 2003). In the early 1990s, in the wake of the Mandal Commission report, which revamped India’s affirmative action system, Thangmi in India demanded Other Backward Class (OBC) status, which they received in 1995. Since then, they have campaigned for—but not yet received—Scheduled Tribe (ST) status, which is perceived to offer greater political, educational, and economic benefits. These descendants of Thangmi migrants, who left Nepal as long as 150 years ago, for the most part no longer speak the Thangmi language and grew up in environments where Thangmi ritual practitioners were often not available. In the process of applying for ST status, however, many Thangmi in India have become interested in rediscovering Thangmi “culture.” Chapter 5 examines these processes in depth.
Nowhere does the Indian constitution specifically define the criteria for ST recognition. In 1965, the Lokur Committee established these semiofficial guidelines, which remain in place today: “indication of primitive traits; distinctive culture; geographical isolation; shyness of contact with the community at large; and backwardness” (Galanter 1984:152). The first two criteria are almost universally interpreted by aspirant groups to mean that ethnographic materials must be submitted as part of their application.
Much of the onus for presenting ethnographic data lies with the aspirant communities themselves. The potential for social science research to contribute to such campaigns for recognition, as well as to become complicit in them, has been discussed at length elsewhere in the world, particularly in Latin America and Australia. In these regions, scholars have contributed ethnographic knowledge to indigenous land-rights claims, cultural performances, and various other mediations between the communities with whom they work and broader publics. The results of such engagement are always complex and rarely morally clear-cut. The moral contract for research” (Warren and Jackson 2002:4) is always fraught, as information about and access to community-specific knowledge, actions, and discourse are exchanged for social scientific recognition. Often the ethnographic contract remains unspoken—and certainly unsigned. Yet it evokes expectations and aspirations on all sides from the moment that a scholar first engages with people from whom she wishes to collect “data.” In exchange for our data, I believe that scholars conducting ethnographic work have an ethical responsibility to, at the very least, investigate potential avenues for contributing to the agendas of those with whom we work. For me, this belief has led to carefully chosen strategies for raising Thangmi public profiles through the production of social scientific knowledge about them.
Charles Hale (2006) describes how this kind of engagement with subaltern communities, which he calls “activist research,” may conflict with the prerogatives of cultural critique (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Activist research, although always politically compromised, has the potential to create uniquely generative theoretical spaces that move beyond institutional academic commitments. Hale suggests that although cultural critique positions itself as the only approach that can adequately represent subaltern voices in a nonessentialized, politically correct manner, problems arise when subaltern communities themselves choose to use theoretically unfashionable categories: “As long as the heavy weapons of deconstruction are aimed at the powerful, the proposal remains on high ground. But what about the other ‘sites’ of a multisited ethnography? How do we responsibly address situations in which the relatively powerless are using these same vexed categories to advance their struggles?” (2006:102). This is precisely the situation I encountered. While my initial scholarly impulse was to demonstrate the processual constructedness of Thangmi ethnic identity, I ultimately could not ignore the intensity with which Thangmi from diverse backgrounds—including activists, ritual practitioners, and common people who bumped up against the problem of misrecognition in their daily lives—asked me to provide an essentializing ethnographic portrait of “the Thangmi” as a unified, unique, and historically unchanging group.
Why shouldn’t they want this when, for instance, an early application to the government of India for ST status