in the contrast I draw here, are framed “keyings,” or “transformations,” in Goffman’s terms (1974), of the practices found within primary frameworks. Performances are ritualized actions carried out within a broader discursive context created by political, economic, or other kinds of external agendas. They are mounted for express consumption by non-Thangmi audiences, which may comprise representatives of the Nepali or Indian states—as at the Gangtok performance with which this chapter began—or members of other ethnic communities, NGO representatives, anthropologists, and various others. Performances take place in the open, in public domains, with the express purpose of demonstrating to both selves and various others what practices are like.
Participation in both of these forms of ritualized action contributes to contemporary experiences of what culture, identity, and ethnicity are from the perspectives of the actors who engage in them. Neither practice nor performance can stand in for the whole of culture or as the sole signifier of cultural authenticity. Instead, practice and performance, as I define them here, are both essential aspects of contemporary cultural production and as such are mutually constitutive. Neither can be substituted or subsumed by the other. Both are necessary for groups and individuals to maintain the pragmatic and emotional well-being that derives from a sense of belonging to a shared identity that is recognized by others within the political context of individual nation-states, as well as within transnational environments shaped by cross-border movements and international discourses of indigeneity and heritage.
Arjun Guneratne’s work with the Tharu of Nepal’s Tarai provides an ethnographic touchstone for discussing the dynamics of identity and consciousness in Nepal. Guneratne distinguishes between two “levels of group identity”:
The first is implicit or unselfconscious, associated with the traditional, local, endogamous group…. In Bourdieu’s terms, it exists as doxa or the unreflected upon and “naturalized” process of social reproduction of the community (Bourdieu 1977)…. The “natural” character of social facts, hitherto accepted as part of the given order, become subject to critique when an objective crisis brings some aspect of doxa—identity—into question. This is a necessary precondition for the emergence of the second level of identity I wish to distinguish.
This second or more encompassing level of identity is a self-conscious … and politically oriented identity that draws together various local communities and groups and endows them with an imagined coherence (cf. Anderson 1991). It is imagined in the sense that the structural linkages … that help to shape the first level of group identity defined above do not exist at this level. (1998:753)
These two levels of identity are in many ways coterminous with the social fields produced by practice and performance as I define them. I extend Guneratne’s insights further by suggesting that the two fields of identity coexist and mutually constitute each other. In other words, the shift from one level of identity to another is not a quintessentially modern transformation that moves in only one direction, from a state of “identity as doxa” to a state of “identity as political imagination,” with the latter eventually eclipsing the former. Instead, both forms of identity can exist simultaneously and influence each other in a multidirectional feedback loop. This potentiality comes into focus when we turn our analytical gaze to the actions of practice and performance rather than keeping it trained on the more static notion of identity itself. Practice and performance are mutually dependent aspects of the overall processes of cultural production and social reproduction, a relationship augmented but not initiated by the politics of recognition within modern nation-states. Take away practice and there is no cultural content for performance to objectify. Take away performance and there is no means for groups to demonstrate in a public forum their existential presence.
Ethnicity as Synthetic Action
Let us pause to reflect again on one of the central questions of this book: why does ethnicity still matter, and how can a focus on its ritualized nature add value to what sometimes appears to be a fully saturated sphere of scholarly discourse? The answer to this question requires a brief foray into an anthropological notion of “practice” broader than my own, as described above: that which came to the fore in the 1980s and early 1990s in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work in outlining a “theory of practice” (1977, 1990). Appropriating Bourdieu’s well-known concept of habitus as a “system of durable, transposable dispositions” (Bourdieu 1977:72), G. Carter Bentley argued for a “practice theory of ethnicity” through which we might understand ethnicity as a “multi-dimensional habitus [in which] it is possible for an individual to possess several different situationally relevant but nonetheless emotionally authentic identities and to symbolize all of them in terms of shared descent” (1987:35). For Bentley, “the theory of practice provides an efficient means of explaining the conjunct of affect and instrumentality in the phenomenon of ethnicity” (28), but following Bourdieu, Bentley suggests that the dispositions of habitus are “not normally open to conscious apprehension” (27).
The promise of such action-oriented approaches to understanding ethnicity—summarized succinctly by Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary Crain’s call for anthropologists to “consider identity less as being, and more in terms of doing” (1998:15)—has been to some extent compromised by the Marxist-inflected legacy of Bourdieu’s emphasis on the unconscious nature of practice. This influence is also evident in work that treats ethnicity as a “fetish,” which conceals the true conditions of its production (van Beek 2000; Willford 2006). As ethnicity began to decline as a fashionable topic of anthropological inquiry by the late 1990s, work like Bentley’s, which sought to understand how ethnic subjectivity itself was produced in action, was eclipsed by work that foregrounded the discursive construction of ideas about ethnicity (Anderson 1991).
James Scott takes a different position toward the intentionality of ethnic actors in his framing of the problem of “ethno-genesis” in Southeast Asia, while at the same time returning to the insights of earlier scholars who sought to understand ethnicity-in-action long before the turn toward practice theory, notably Edmund Leach. Scott casts ethnic communities—particularly those he defines as “highland peoples”—as key players in shaping the states on whose margins they live. Scott focuses on a metalevel historical discussion of these dynamics, offering only brief but enticing insights into how ethnic consciousness is actually produced on the ground. “A person’s ethnic identity … would be the repertoire of possible performances and the contexts in which they are exhibited,” he writes, but “there is, of course, no reason at all to suppose one part of the repertoire is more authentic or ‘real’ than any other” (2009:254–55). This assertion hearkens back to Bentley’s (1987) description of a multidimensional habitus in which multiple authentic identities may coexist, while also according ethnic action a degree of consciousness that Bentley and others working within the confines of formal practice theory cannot. I seek to carry forward the promise of both these approaches by marrying an analysis of ethnicity-in-action with a focus on intentionality.
Enacting simultaneous, multiple subjective states that are all affectively real requires a substantial degree of self-consciousness and self-objectification on the part of actors who practice and perform ethnic identities. For many Thangmi, this consciousness emerges in the subjective space created by the repeated process of shifting frames between multiple nation-states as circular migrants. For Thangmi settled in one location or another, contact with Thangmi circular migrants and their worldviews can effect different but comparably intimate shifts in frame. The self-consciousness engendered through these regular reframings is evident in the manner in which individuals recognize the gap between practice and performance, and work to synthesize these fields of action into an identity that is both productive, in the affective sense of belonging, and constructive, in the political sense of rights (cf. Ortner 1996). An action-based approach to ethnicity enables us to see how a wide range of different intentions and motivations held by many individuals belonging to a putatively singular ethnic group can in fact work in concert to produce a multidimensional ethnic habitus, of which the recognition of intragroup difference is itself a key feature.
