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 concluded that “while ethnicity has an ever more insubstantial place within the narrow world of academia, … it appears to be increasingly important in the wider world” (1996:183). “Unfortunately,” he continued, “it is too late to kill it off or pronounce ethnicity dead; the discourse on ethnicity has escaped from the academy and into the field” (189). In this formulation, ethnicity exists first as an analytical rubric and only subsequently as a subjective experience.
To ground this discussion in the South Asian contexts in which my ethnography unfolds, consider this 1997 comment from David Gellner: “There is a bitter irony in the fact … that just when a scholarly and anthropological consensus is emerging that a Hindu-tribe dichotomy was hopelessly flawed as a tool for understanding Nepalese society, Nepalese intellectuals should begin to take it up with a vengeance” (22). More than fifteen years later, at the time of writing in 2014, Nepal is engaged in a historically unprecedented process of “post-conflict” federal restructuring, stalled due to the political impasse over the demand for ethnically delineated states that would take what Gellner calls the “Hindu-tribe dichotomy” for granted. Across the border in Nepali-speaking areas of India, the call for a separate state of Gorkhaland for Indian citizens of Nepali heritage (often called Gorkhas) was newly revived in 2008. An earlier agitation ended in 1989 with the creation of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC). Debate over Darjeeling’s future remains a key political issue for the Indian state of West Bengal.
Portraying such large-scale political transformations as the ironic result of the “escape” of a scholarly paradigm for ethnicity into “the field” would be analytically insufficient. Rather, we must evaluate what ethnicity signifies for those who claim it. We must investigate anew how such forms of consciousness are produced by all kinds of individuals—not only by self-proclaimed ethnic activists—who see themselves as members of a collectivity and seek recognition as such from others. Acknowledging that ethnicity is inevitably constructed is not the end of the story but rather the beginning of understanding the ongoing life of such constructions. “Tracing the contours of this new life” (Banks 1996:189) of ethnicity is important not because scholars necessarily believe it to be the most accurate way of understanding “the group,” “belonging,” or “difference” but because many contemporary ethnic subjects and the recognizing agents with which they must engage—both state and nonstate—do.
Scholarship indicates an emerging realization that ethnicity’s case is not yet closed. Whether by highlighting the cross-border nature of ethnogenesis (Scott 2009) or the power of global market forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), contemporary explorations of ethnicity broaden analyses beyond the frame of the nation-state, while recognizing the power of national borders and state-specific regimes of recognition in shaping ethnic configurations. In this vein, which productively tempers 1990s arguments about the ascendance of transnational, deterritorialized identities, this book argues that nation-states remain a key frame in relation to which ethnicity is produced, even and perhaps especially in contexts of high cross-border mobility. Furthermore, I argue that ethnicity is a result not only of the prerogatives of state control or market forces but also of a ritual process through which identity is produced as a sacred object that binds diverse people together. Such sacred objects serve as shared referents, enabling heterogeneous individuals—often dispersed across multiple nation-states, with multiple class, gender, age and educational experiences—to contribute in diverse ways to collective projects of ethnicity in action.
This argument returns to traditional anthropological formulations by building upon Edmund Leach’s supposition that “the maintenance and insistence upon cultural difference can itself become a ritual action expressive of social relations” (1964:17). Leach’s insight reveals ethnicity as not only a political project but also an affective domain in which the cultural difference constitutive of social relations is expressed to both selves and others through ritual action. In this spirit, I refocus attention on the objectification of identity as a fundamental human process that persists through ritualized action regardless of the contingencies of state formation or economic paradigm. I hope readers will find here an ethnographic explanation of how ethnicity may be both a rock and a river at once, solid yet also viscous like the muddy flow of a swollen monsoon watershed that carries boulders through Himalayan valleys.
This argument shifts attention away from the representational construction of ethnicity through discourse to foreground instead the expressive production of ethnicity in action (Bentley 1987) and its ongoing pragmatic effects, and affect, for those who enact it. The Comaroffs suggest that in academic studies of ethnicity, the overwhelming “stress on the politics of ethnicity above all else has a number of critical costs: it depends on an underspecified, almost metaphorical conception of the political, the primary referent of which is the pursuit of interest; it reduces cultural identity to a utility function, the measure of which is power, again underspecified; and it confuses the deployment of ethnicity as a tactical claim to entitlement and as a means of mobilization for instrumental ends, with the substantive content of ethnic consciousness” (2009:44). Indeed, much of the last great spell of anthropological work on ethnicity, particularly in South Asia, focused on “ethnonationalist conflict” (Tambiah 1996) and “ethnic violence” (Appadurai 1998). Although these works built valuably upon Frederik Barth’s (1969) formative insights to explain why, in certain cases, ethnic boundaries become aggravated sites of contestation, they shifted focus away from the group-specific, culturally contextual, substantive content of ethnic consciousness that lies between and animates such boundaries. Moreover, while many scholars have effectively explored how state paradigms for recognition in South Asia shape ethnic consciousness writ large, much literature presumes that the contents of all such consciousnesses are interchangeable.2 I contend instead that although the mechanisms of and criteria for state recognition with which all groups must engage may be the same, the substantive content of ethnic consciousness develops in large part through the process of mobilizing specific cultural and ethnographic content, the nature of which varies widely between groups. If we wish to understand the dialectic between ethnic consciousness and legal paradigms for recognition, we must attend to the ethnographic specifics of individual contemporary groups, both within and beyond the political frame.
The Comaroffs are hardly the first scholars to suggest that the political life of ethnicity is not its only one (Leach 1964; Williams 1989; Jenkins 2002). But the Comaroffs newly situate ethnicity under the sign of the market, understood in neoliberal terms. They call upon scholars
