to heart in their lively, upbeat performance of what the emcee introduced as a “Thami wedding dance.” The participation of the dancers from Nepal made the choreographers from India more confident about the efficacy of their performance. The former knew how to perform the slow, repetitive steps that characterize Thangmi cultural practice in village contexts, while the latter knew how to transform these plodding moves into Bollywood-style numbers that carried the weight of “culture” in the generically recognizable South Asian sense. The end result as danced for the minister (Figure 1) bore little resemblance to anything one would see at a Thangmi wedding or other ritual event, but the performance was greeted with resounding applause. Afterward, the minister sent a message to the BTWA expressing his appreciation. The members of the group from India were hopeful that the performance would serve as a catalyst in getting their ST application approved.
Although they participated in the event with apparent enthusiasm, some of the members of the group from Nepal later told me that they felt uncomfortable with the choreographers’ appropriation of elements of ritual practice into another performative context. The dancers from Nepal found the experience unsettling because the audience was not the assembly of deities propitiated through comparable elements of ritual action at home but rather the representatives of a state in which they did not hold full citizenship. This ambiguity could be overcome, since although bureaucratic audiences might require different offerings than divine ones, the overall ritualized form of the event was similar. The larger problem was that the performers from Nepal stood to gain little direct benefit from this transformation of practice into performance since the minister and his colleagues answered to the Indian state alone. Only those Thangmi with fully documented Indian citizenship would be eligible for benefits if the government of India recognized the group as an ST. As will be explored further in Chapter 4, although many Thangmi consider themselves “dual citizens” at the level of belonging and hold some documentary trappings of Indian citizenship, most circular migrants from Nepal cannot prove adequate evidence of the full citizenship required to apply for the special rights offered by an ST or Other Backward Class (OBC) certificate in India.
The Thangmi from Nepal were not outright opposed to the performatization of practice—a process akin to what Richard Handler (2011) has called the “ritualization of ritual,” following Erving Goffman (1971:79). In fact, I had seen several of them applaud heartily at a similarly staged performance of a “wedding dance” at a conference in Kathmandu, hosted by the Nepal Thami Samaj (NTS) earlier in the same year (Figure 2). Rather, they felt that the political results had to be worth the phenomenological and ethical trade-offs that such transformation entailed. In other words, the objectification of culture was acceptable—even desirable—as long as it was done in the service of a specific goal, and as long as the resulting field of performance was recognized as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the field of practice out of which it emerged. Once the dust had settled, the Gangtok experience prompted some of the initially uneasy performers from Nepal to consider how they might also deploy cultural performance to bolster emerging claims to the Nepali state about their rights to special benefits as members of a “highly marginalized” janajati group. Such claims, if recognized, could help create the material conditions necessary to maintain the field of practice itself. These views were forged in the context of ongoing debates within the cross-border Thangmi community about the ownership of cultural knowledge and its power to define ethnic identity. Shifting political paradigms for evaluating and rewarding cultural “authenticity” in India and Nepal compelled Thangmi on both sides of the border to think carefully about the particularities of object and audience that defined practice and performance (two terms I will define shortly), their relative efficacy in each national context, and the need to balance both fields of cultural production in the overall process of reproducing Thangmi ethnicity.
Figure 1. Thangmi wedding dance performed in Gangtok, Sikkim, India, November 2005. Photo by the author.
Figure 2. Thangmi wedding dance performed at the Nepal Thami Samaj Second National Convention, Kathmandu, Nepal, May 2005. Photo by the author.
This chapter argues that Thangmi individuals from diverse backgrounds in both Nepal and India possess a high level of self-consciousness regarding the multiple fields of ritualized action in which they engage. They intentionally choose to deploy different types of action within different social “frames” (Goffman 1974; Handler 2011) to achieve a range of results from diverse recognizing agents: state, divine, and otherwise. This self-consciousness emerges in part through the experience of moving regularly between multiple nation-states through circular migration. Familiarity with more than one national frame within which ethnicity is conceptualized and recognized enables Thangmi, as both individuals and members of a collective, to see the framing machinery through which ethnicity is produced and reproduced in each context. They may therefore take self-conscious, agentive roles in employing appropriate framing devices for their own purposes. These may range from assuaging territorial deities through private household propitiations to assuaging skeptical state representatives through public cultural performances, but ultimately all of the ritualized action so framed has a shared sacred referent: Thangmi identity itself.
This argument takes us beyond portrayals of ethnicity as either an evasive response to state control (Scott 2009) or a creation of market forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) to reveal it instead as a ritual process. I show how the objectification of identity cannot always be reduced to a process of “ethno-commodification” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) but rather must be seen as a fundamental human process that persists through ritual action regardless of the contingencies of state formation or economic paradigm. Ultimately, ethnicity is a complex collective production, which coheres around the sacred object of identity. This serves as a shared referent that enables heterogeneous individuals—bound together by little more than name across nation-state, class, age, gender, and other boundaries—to contribute in diverse ways to collective projects of ethnicity-in-action. The affective reality of the identity that results from this synthesis draws its power from the very diversity of its component parts.
Defining Practice and Performance
My definitions of “practice” and “performance” diverge from other received definitions. The two are qualitatively distinct, but inextricably linked and mutually influential fields of “ritualized activity,” which I follow Catherine Bell in defining as “a particular cultural strategy of differentiation linked to particular social effects and rooted in a distinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment it structures” (1992:8). I acknowledge at the outset that most practice has a performative aspect (Austin 1975; Bauman 1975; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Butler 1997a), and almost all performance can be seen as a form of “practice” in Bourdieu’s sense (1977, 1990). Nonetheless, making a distinction between practice and performance is helpful at the analytical level as we attempt to understand the dynamics of consciousness and objectification inherent in the process of producing ethnicity. At the level of action, there is no question that the edges of these categories blur into one another. However, these distinctions are described as ontologically real by Thangmi themselves, which suggests that they are worth paying attention to.
“Practice” refers to embodied, ritualized actions carried out by Thangmi individuals within a group-internal epistemological framework that mediates between the human and divine world: to stop malevolent deities from plaguing one’s mind, for instance, or to guide a loved one’s soul to the realm of the ancestors. Practices are addressed to the synthetic pantheon of animistic, Hindu and Buddhist deities that inhabit the Thangmi divine world, and take place within the clearly delimited private domains of the household, or communal but exclusively Thangmi, spaces. Practices then are the actions encapsulated in what
