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, put it, “If we Thangmi forgot to worship our deities, they would not recognize us. If the deities do not recognize us, how can others recognize our ethnicity?” This compels us to reconsider recognition as a deep-seated subjective desire (Taylor 1992) that drives much of human communicative interaction (Keane 1997). While often fostered through political means, recognition should not be reductively understood only as a regime of control produced by specific sociopolitical formations (Povinelli 2002). Rather, understanding the mechanisms of recognition and the content of the consciousnesses they produce requires an exploration of the full range of “recognizing agents” with which subjects engage. For Thangmi, these have over time included the divine world, the Nepali and Indian states, social scientists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), members of other communities, and crucially, other members of the Thangmi community itself, separated by citizenship, distance, class, and other vectors of difference.
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
