shouted out comments like, Oh, how nicely they have dressed up [literally “imitated”]! They look really great!” After the video viewing, one elderly man commented to me, “That nakali dance works well to show our Thangmi ethnic culture (jatiya sanskriti [N]), but it’s a bit different from the sakali.” In this statement, nakali is not necessarily a negative quality but rather a positive and efficacious quality, which in its very contrast to the sakali enables an alternative set of objectives to be realized. Through their demonstrative capacity to “show” and make visible “Thangmi culture” to audiences beyond group members and their deities, nakali performances do something that sakali practices cannot; yet the nakali cannot exist without constantly referring to and objectifying the sakali.
The difference between sakali and nakali glosses the distinction between practice and performance well. It was these concepts proffered by Thangmi interlocutors that compelled me to appreciate the different techniques of objectification each form of ritualized action entails. At some level, every expressive action, every ritual, is fundamentally an act of objectification: the process of making deeply held worldviews visible in social space. In the Durkheimian sense, rituals are “the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of … sacred objects” ([1912] 1995:56). As a set of rules enacted in the public sphere, rituals are inherently objectified forms of social action that articulate human relationships with the sacred.
My argument therefore is not that practice—the sakali—is somehow unobjectified, raw, or pure doxa lost in the process of objectification that creating the nakali entails. Rather, I suggest that the techniques and intentions of objectification operative in the sakali field of practice are different from those operative in the nakali field of performance. To put it in Goffman’s terms (1974), primary social frameworks are still frameworks. Nakali performance objectifies in a new and differently efficacious manner the already objectified sakali field of practice. Thangmi gurus who go into trance to conduct private ritual practices in homes objectify the set of rules that governs their relationship with territorial deities. In the same manner, Thangmi youth who perform a staged rendition of such shamanic practice to a pop music soundtrack reobjectify the gurus’ practice in order to themselves objectify the rules that govern their relationship with the Indian state.
In other words, each field of action entails intentionally different strategies of ritualization, implemented with the help of different framing devices (of which the nation-state is one), in order to make claims upon different community-external entities that will yield different results. Yet one field of action does not supersede the other. Rather, sakali practice and nakali performance both continue to exist simultaneously and mutually influence each other. Individual Thangmi may employ one, the other, or both in making their own contributions to the collective production of ethnicity.
The constant that links these disparate forms of action together is the enduring presence of the “sacred object” of ritual attention that requires certain rules of conduct to be set out in ritualized form. Handler (2011) follows Durkheim closely by suggesting that the sacred object of heritage performances may be the “social self.” I take this notion a step further by proposing that in the Thangmi case, the sacred object is identity itself. Ethnicity then is one set of the “rules of conduct” that govern behavior in the presence of this sacred object. These rules are expressed in a synthetic set of ritualized actions produced by disparate members of the collectivity, which taken together objectify the inalienable but intangible sacred originary in a manner simultaneously recognizable to insiders and outsiders.
Creating Sacred Objects
“The sacred,” writes Maurice Godelier, “is a certain kind of relationship with the origin” (1999:169). People’s relations with each other across a collectivity—as enacted in moments of practice and performance—objectify as sacred human connections with their origins, along with their concomitant position in social, political, and cosmic orders. This combination of introverted knowledge of one’s origins and extroverted relationships with states, markets, and other temporal regimes of recognition is ethnicity itself. It is produced through a range of diverse but simultaneously existing fields of action maintained by the disparate individuals who compose the collectivity.
In Godelier’s terms, sacred objects are those that cannot be exchanged (as gifts or commodities) or alienated, and that give people an identity and root this identity in the Beginning” (1999:120–21). For the Baruya about whom he writes, sacred objects are in fact tangible objects as such. These objects act as an inalienable extension of the human body in their ability to simultaneously contain and represent identity.
For Thangmi, however, such tangible sacred objects have historically been almost nonexistent. There is no easily discernible Thangmi material culture—no icons, art, architecture, texts, or costumes—that might be objectified as sacred. In the absence of tangible signifying items, identity must serve as its own sacred object. Identity itself must be objectified and presented to the representatives of the divine or the state since there is little else in the material world that can stand in for it.
This absence of material culture contributes substantially to the problems of recognition that Thangmi face at the political level in Nepal and India. Moreover, for generations, Thangmi intentionally retreated from the gaze of the state rather than engaging with it, and the Thangmi ethnonym remains largely empty of significance to anyone but Thangmi themselves. Accordingly, to an outside eye, there is little to distinguish a Thangmi individual or village from the next person or place.
There is, in fact, an enormous amount of Thangmi cultural content, but it is all contained in the intangible aspects of practice: origin myths; propitiation chants to pacify territorial deities; the place names along the route that the Thangmi ancestors followed to Nepal and India; the memorial process of reconstructing the body of the deceased out of everyday foodstuff; the way in which offerings to the ancestors are made of chicken blood, alcohol, and dried trumpet flowers.
It is telling that the only notable exceptions to the generally true statement that the Thangmi have no unique material culture are the ritual implements of take (T: drum) and thurmi (T: wooden dagger). However, these are both pan-Himalayan shamanic implements also used by other groups across the region and as such have little sacred power as identity-signifying objects per se. They only become sacred when used in the specific context of Thangmi ritual language invoked by Thangmi gurus to marshal the power of Thangmi territorial deities (Figure 3). But as soon as such rituals are over, the take and thurmi become generic objects, not particularly Thangmi nor particularly sacred. In order to work, take and thurmi must be used by a guru who received these ritual implements from his own father or shamanic teacher. This suggests that in the appropriate context, such objects may also work as signifiers of shared descent—but not in an abstractable manner beyond the guru’s lineage itself. This is why the BTWA’s use of a thurmi image for its logo (Figure 4), along with the more complex diagram of one submitted as part of its ST application, are viewed as nakali uses of the object by gurus who use such items in ritual practice. Recall, however, that nakali is not necessarily a negative attribute. Rather, it implies the reobjectification of the sakali in a new context for a different purpose. As the late Latte Apa, Darjeeling’s senior Thangmi guru put it, “I always think it’s strange when I see the thurmi on the BTWA certificates. It is not a ‘real’ thurmi. But then I think, the government doesn’t know us yet, but we must make them know us. If they see the thurmi, they will know, ‘That is Thangmi.’”
Such statements show how the sacred object of Thangmi identity remains constant, although it may be objectified in a diverse range of sakali and nakali forms. The nakali use of the thurmi as a logo for the Thangmi ethnic organization
