by representing the stories they told me in their totality, even when such stories did not yield the “research results” that my simultaneously binding ethnographic contract with activist informants stipulated.
As I waded deeper into the ethical complexities of such multisited complicity (Marcus 1999) during my first in-depth fieldwork in India in 2004, I lost sleep trying to figure out how my “research” fit into the picture. What did the Thangmi activists whom I was coming to know actually want from me? On the one hand, they were skeptical of what the empirical evidence that I had collected told them about themselves. On the other hand, they repeatedly thanked me for sharing my research openly with them, telling me on numerous occasions, “You are our god,” or “You are our Sunari Ama,” the mythical ancestress of all Thangmi. Such statements made me feel not only uncomfortable, just as Rana Bahadur’s incorporation of me into his ritual chant had, but antithetical to the activists’ erstwhile requests for me to conduct “scientific” research aimed at demonstrating a “pure” culture. At first I consigned such statements to the same conceptual category of inexplicable fieldwork ephemera in which I had mentally placed Rana Bahadur’s invocation of my presence. But as I heard them over and over again, back in Nepal as well as in India, these ascriptions of divine power continued to bother me, and I came back to them later as I strove to understand the relationship between research, ritual, and politics in effecting recognition.
Perhaps the critique of “research” based on the “stories of elders” was not actually a critique of those elders or their stories themselves, but rather of the interpretive frameworks of researchers who, based on short-term encounters, had taken such “stories” at face value. These researchers had concluded that the Thangmi culture, if it could even be called that, was derivative and degenerate. By sticking with the ethnographic project past the point at which others had decided that the Thangmi were not worthy of future attention” (Northey and Morris 1928), I had demonstrated my commitment to Thangmi agendas, competing and contradictory though they might be. By appearing in the public domain alongside members of the Thangmi community repeatedly over a decade with the trappings of social scientific authority—notebook, video camera, university affiliation, research funding—I was demonstrating to outside others that the Thangmi must have some kind of culture worth recognizing.
It was in this sense that I became a recognizing agent—a catalyst who augmented Thangmi individuals’ sense of self-worth and the community’s visibility—and that the divine metaphor became comprehensible, if still disconcerting. For the Thangmi activists with whom I worked, “research” was in part a symbolic process that was not only about its empirical content but also about its form as a mode of ritual action carried out in the public domain, the efficacious performance of which could yield pragmatic results from the recognizing agents of the state (and/or the organizations that stood in for it, such as NGOs, particularly in Nepal). In this formulation, I was not so much like a deity as a ritual specialist, capable of mediating between the human and divine, the citizen and his or her state(s).
At first I tried to deny such powers—“I am just a student,” “No, I don’t have any powerful friends,” “No, I am not with any ‘project’; I am just a researcher”—but over time I realized this was disingenuous. The reality was that unlike most Thangmi, I could and did command attention when I walked into governmental or organizational offices (or wrote a letter to the editor, made a phone call, or engaged in cocktail conversation) to make a point about pressing issues, be it a badly managed road project, an idea for economic development, or a hurtful misrepresentation of the Thangmi community. It was not just my Thangmi interlocutors who believed that my work could have concrete effects; other ethnic activists, politicians, and bureaucrats lauded me for conducting “research” about a “marginalized group” that no one else could be bothered to do, so that the Thangmi might have a chance at future “advancement.”
In the larger scheme of things, it did not matter if my written research presented precisely the empirical conclusions the activists desired. They were more interested in my research as a form of efficacious action and in my role as an outside figure of academic authority—a recognizing agent—whose very attention to the social fact of “Thangmi culture” legitimized the results of their own research, which in the end were the ones they sought to promote to the state, not mine.
In short, I and social science as a whole were useful mediators between divine and political forms of recognition. Thangmi activists did not want to divest themselves entirely from their relationship with the territorial deities who had historically provided a strong sense of recognition; rather they wanted to reinterpret these relationships within the increasingly attractive terms of recognition offered by the states in which they lived. I could help in this process by presenting “data” about Thangmi history and culture as a total social fact that evidenced their “unique” identity.
By telling me repeatedly that I was like a god, Thangmi with whom I worked ensured that I would feel obligated to act as such: if they acted in a ritually correct manner, by providing me access to the information I requested, then, like a deity who responds to rituals conducted according to the appropriate protocols, or like an ethnographer under the binding terms of an ethnographic contract, I was expected to deliver the goods. In a reversal of Bronislaw Malinowski’s classic argument for the value of fieldwork—which he claimed was important because only in that context does “the anthropologist have the myth-maker at his elbow” ([1948] 1974:100)—in this case, the “myth-makers” had the anthropologist at their elbow, ready to parlay the partial truths they wanted to tell about themselves into a totality worthy of broader recognition. In this sense, ethnography may be a complicit form of identity-producing action that cannot be fully disentangled from the projects of recognition that it seeks to describe.
Acknowledging the place of ethnography (and ethnographers) in the interplay between contemporary forms of recognition—political, divine, scholarly, and beyond—can enable this complicity to become a productive tool in transforming the terms of recognition themselves. To members of a historically misrecognized group like the Thangmi, that is part of what research is for. For social scientists, as Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn argue in their discussion of contemporary indigeneity, “a role for careful, engaged scholarship can be to contribute to understanding and activism that recognizes the paradoxes, limits and possibilities” (2007:22) of indigenous projects of recognition. This vision may be extended to ethnic projects, broadly conceived, and such intentions guide my writing here.
Chapter 2
Framing, Practicing, and Performing Ethnicity
Colorful banners around Gangtok advertised the event: “Tribal Folk Dances of Sikkim, presented in honor of Shri P. R. Kyndiah, Union Minister of Tribal Affairs.” It was November 2005, and each ethnic organization registered in India’s state of Sikkim, as well as in the adjacent Darjeeling district of West Bengal, had been invited to perform a single “folk dance” that best demonstrated their “tribal culture.”
In the rehearsal session before the actual performance, it became clear that the fifty-odd dancers from fourteen ethnic organizations were well aware of the politically charged environment in which they were performing. These groups were seeking recognition from the central Indian government as Scheduled Tribes (STs), and each sought to capture the minister’s eye with a carefully framed performance that demonstrated the “tribal” nature of their identity. The rehearsing groups received stage directions from the director of Sikkim’s Department of Culture, who told them brusquely, “Shake your hips faster and make sure to flutter your eyelashes! Remember, if you look happy, the audience will be happy. And if they are not happy, why should they watch you? You must make them feel comfortable and familiar with your culture.”
The Thangmi performance troupe, sponsored by the Bharatiya Thami Welfare Association (BTWA), was composed of a combination of migrant workers from Nepal who spent several months at a time in India and Thangmi from urban Darjeeling with professional
