suggesting that locality and national borders are no longer the primary factors in shaping ethnic identity. In the Thangmi case, neither of these interpretations applies. Rather, ethnicity is at once shaped by country-specific discourse and policy, yet is also dependent on a dialogue between members of a community across state borders.
Economic remittances earned largely in the Middle East and Malaysia are increasingly recognized as crucial in sustaining Nepal’s contemporary economy, just as transnational mobility is increasingly recognized as crucial to anthropological accounts of rural modernity (Chu 2010). This book adds to such conversations by showing that cross-border labor migration to adjacent countries has been a long-standing component of Himalayan livelihood strategies rather than a new experience emerging from modern processes of economic globalization. I argue that the relative impact of “social remittances” (Levitt 2001) and the “spaces of cultural assertion” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003) opened through migration—the changes in worldview and values that return migrants bring home—have been as, or more, important in the long run than cash earned in India or Tibetan parts of China.
I locate experiences in India and China as central to ethnicity formation in Nepal and, conversely, experiences in Nepal as relevant to related processes in Himalayan areas of India and China. I term this the “cross-border feedback loop”: the process of communication and exchange through which ideologies of ethnicity originating in discrete nation-states become embedded in the discursive and practical aspects of cultural production elsewhere. This creates a cyclical process of consciousness formation that on the one hand emerges within each national context but, on the other, transcends national boundaries to create a synthesis independent of any single nation-state. The agents of the feedback loop are Thangmi themselves, as they move back and forth and engage with others across the collectivity.
Being “In” Place: The Himalayas, South Asia, and Area Studies
My focus on the cross-border feedback loop within the Thangmi community shapes a larger conversation across academic area studies. Rather than a project of comparison, which analyzes tit-for-tat the differences in ethnicity formation as experienced in three discrete nation-states, mine is an ethnography of connection (Tsing 2005), which explores the links between those experiences, and the scholarly and political discourses surrounding them, in multiple national and regional frames.
In many academic contexts, South Asian studies in practice refers to the study of India. Nepal and other smaller South Asian states are relegated to the periphery of major debates, or perhaps scholars of the peripheries intentionally keep to themselves. Much of this positioning has to do with the historical effects of what Mary Des Chene (2007) calls Nepal’s “condition of non-postcoloniality.” Ironically, while the fact that the country was never fully colonized is one of the central tenets of Nepali nationalism, it also accounts for the country’s near absence from the English-language historiographic record15 and Nepal’s subsequent marginalization within South Asian studies.
I contend here that processes of state and ethnicity formation in Nepal cannot be adequately understood in isolation. Rather, they must be situated within more expansive transregional conversations that both acknowledge the reality of cross-border mobility on the ground and make use of conceptual categories from South Asian studies to develop comprehensive analytical frames. At the same time, work on Nepal has great potential to deepen the empirical basis and theoretical purchase of analyses emerging from India. Nepal offers an alternative, non-postcolonial South Asian vantage point, at once shaped by similar long-term cultural trajectories as its southern neighbor yet possessing a very different modern political history. The story of Thangmi ethnicity formation engages in South Asian conversations on ethnicity, caste, class, and the politics of marginality, not as an anomalous case from Nepal conceptualized as somewhere “other” but rather by probing how such discourses extend beyond the political borders of India to influence dynamics of subject formation in South Asia writ large.
Beyond South Asia, both political and cultural Tibet (Goldstein 1998:4) have been important points of reference for Thangmi over time. As described in Chapter 4, the border between Nepal and the TAR is only a few miles away from several of the largest Thangmi villages. Many members of the community regularly travel across it, making use of the “border citizen” card issued jointly by the Nepali and Chinese governments that allows them to engage in cross-border travel without a passport or visa (Shneiderman 2013b). In such contexts, contemporary Thangmi generally refer to the political entity north of them as “China,” although older individuals at times still use “Tibet.” When describing the geopolitical entity, I refer to the territory directly north of Nepal as “China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region,” or “TAR.” I use “Tibetan” to describe broader cultural, religious, or linguistic concepts that relate to the Tibetan cultural world but are not necessarily limited to the boundaries of political Tibet. Chapter 3 explains how the complexes of Tibetan language and Buddhist religion perceived to originate across the border to the north figure prominently in Thangmi ideologies of synthesis, providing an important counterpoint to the Nepali and Hindi languages, as well as Hindu religion, emanating from the south.
My initial intentions to conduct research in an equally balanced manner between Thangmi communities in Nepal, India, and the TAR never came to fruition. I could not secure research permission for more than one month in the TAR. The people represented in this book are, therefore, primarily those whom I describe as “Thangmi in Nepal” and “Thangmi in India” (although “Thangmi in China” make brief appearances, especially in Chapter 4).
Brian Axel pinpoints the potential problem with such terminology in his ethnography of the Sikh diaspora: “One would be hard put to say that, preferring the local to the global, there are no diasporas, rather Chinese in New York or, for example, Sikhs in London” (2001:1). He opts instead for the doubled “Sikh diaspora as a diaspora” (8) to reiterate that it is the diaspora itself that is his object of study, not “exemplary” members of it in any particular location (1). Chapter 6 explains why the Thangmi case complicates such definitions of diaspora. My point here is that focusing on a diaspora, or any other type of multisited community, as the object of one’s study does not obviate the need to evaluate carefully how various members of it orient themselves within specific nation-state frameworks at specific historical junctures.
For me, the word “in” locates a set of actions within the ideological framework of a nation, not a body within a bounded physical territory. When I write “Thangmi in Nepal,” I mean “Thangmi acting in relation to the nation-state of Nepal as a primary frame, although they may have spent time in India, or at other times have acted in relation to the nation-state of India as a primary frame, and/or may be aware of the relationship between the two frames in shaping their actions, even if they have not actually visited the other country.” “Thangmi in India” means the converse. By “Thangmi in Nepal” or “Thangmi in India,” I do not intend to imply “Thangmi who have never left Nepal” or “Thangmi who have a certain essential quality because they were born in, or live in, India.” Sometimes, I use “Thangmi from Nepal” when referring to “Thangmi acting in relation to the nationstate of Nepal as a primary frame, but who are physically present in India at the point of action,” and “Thangmi from India” when I mean the opposite.
Why do I not simply use the more obvious “Nepalese Thangmi” or “Nepali Thangmi,” and “Indian Thangmi”? As described in the Preface to this book, for political and legal reasons that must be taken seriously, each of these terms is rejected by some subset of those ostensibly described by it.
Historical, Political, and Personal Contexts
The Thangmi story unfolds against
