latter. The audiences who reaffirm the sacrality of the thurmi in each context may be different, but each plays a comparable and equally necessary role. Latte Apa was both a practitioner and a performer without a sense of internal contradiction; the sacred object toward which his various forms of ritualized activity were oriented did not change, and both practice and performance reaffirmed the primacy of that sacred object. His practices ensured that deities came to know the Thangmi and validated their special relationship with territorial deities, whereas his performances ensured that state officials and other outsiders came to know the Thangmi as a community worthy of recognition. The mechanisms of recognition in each domain are different, but both realms of ritualized action regulate key arenas of the social world in which the sacred object of Thangmi identity is reproduced.
Figure 3. Guru Maila displays his thurmi as he prepares to propitiate Bhume, in Suspa-Kshamawati, Dolakha, Nepal, April 2008. Photo by the author.
Figure 4. BTWA member Shova shows the association’s thurmi logo, as displayed on the banner affixed to the back wall of the BTWA Darjeeling office, November 2004. Photo by the author.
Recognition and Self-Consciousness
A concern with “recognition” runs throughout Godelier’s discussion of the sacred. He asks, “To what extent do humans not recognize themselves in their replicas?” (1999:178), and soon answers, “To be sure he can see himself in these sacred objects because he knows the code, but he cannot recognize himself in them, cannot recognize himself as their author and maker, in short as their origin” (1999:178–79; italics in original). Although Godelier accords his subjects the power to “see” themselves, he stops short of granting them the ability to “recognize” themselves, therefore suggesting that ritual behavior cannot be fully self-conscious. Handler similarly hedges his bets, suggesting first that actors have a certain level of self-consciousness: “Audiences, too, will have differing kinds of awareness of the frame and the contents of heritage rituals. And of course, both actors and audiences will be more or less aware of each others’ interpretations of such issues” (2011:52). Soon after, however, Handler returns to a more traditional Durkheimian position by suggesting that “modern social groups worship at the altar of their own identity, but they do not consciously realize that the idea of identity itself, like the idea of god, is a social production” (53).
Such arguments allude to larger anthropological debates over authenticity and the role of objectification in constituting the modern “culture concept.” Crediting Bernard Cohn (1987), Handler defines “cultural objectification” as a quintessentially modern process that is “the imaginative embodiment of human realities in terms of a theoretical discourse based on the concept of culture” (1984:56). Along with this argument comes the assumption that engaging in the process of objectification somehow removes one from the realm of pure, un-selfconscious, and, by implication, nonmodern culture. Recall also Guneratne’s (1998) separation of Tharu identity into two distinct domains—that of un-selfconscious doxa versus that of self-conscious political posturing—a formulation that draws upon Bourdieu’s dichotomous separation of the fields of “practice” and “theory” and their respective identification with worlds of the “native” and the “analyst” (1990).
These arguments entail two paradoxes regarding the self-consciousness (or lack thereof) of cultural actors. The first paradox: on the one hand, those who do not engage in objectification—“natives” in whose world “rites take place because … they cannot afford the luxury of logical speculation” as Bourdieu puts it (1990:96), or nonmodern actors in Handler’s terms—are portrayed as unable to see the frames within which their social world is produced, instead taking “identity” and “culture” for granted as sacred realities without recognizing themselves as the authors of these phenomenon. On the other hand, those who do engage in objectification—analysts and modern cultural actors—may be able to see the frames within which social reality and identity are produced, yet they still perceive the resulting cultural objects as real and sacred, without self-consciously recognizing the role of their own actions in reifying the frames within which such objects are created.
The second paradox: any sign of consciousness in the manipulation of cultural forms is portrayed negatively as a fall from nonobjectified, genuine grace. Such “calculating, interested, manipulated belief” comprises acts of “bad faith” in Godelier’s words (1999:178). At the same time, consciousness on the part of those who attempt to identify instances of such manipulation is seen as evidence of good social science at work.
There are two problems with such arguments. First, they assume that there is a moment of rupture, an “epistemological break” (Bentley 1987:44, citing Foucault 1977) heralding “epochal difference,”3 when social groups—conceived of as coherent, homogeneous individuals—make the transition, never to return, from nonobjectified to objectified cultural action, from identity as doxa to identity as politics, from practice (in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, not mine) to theory, from ethnic community to “ethno-commodity” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Consider Guneratne’s description of the Tharu community’s transformation: “While the cultural practices of their elders become in one sense marginal to their everyday concerns, in another sense they undergo a reification and reappear as an essential aspect of their modern identity. It is no longer culture as doxa in Bourdieu’s sense but culture as performance, a tale that Tharus tell themselves about themselves” (1998:760). Second, regardless of how and when that moment of rupture occurs, individuals are not portrayed as gaining genuine self-consciousness through the transition. Rather, they are portrayed as moving from a state in which they lack self-consciousness entirely to a state in which total belief in their analytical capacities—belief in the power of objectification inherent in the modern culture concept—obscures their real inabilities to comprehend their contributions to the production of sacred objects like identity.
It is time to reconsider these assumptions. First, I question the dividing lines between the types of actors discussed above (modern/nonmodern; native/analyst) since all engage in processes of objectification. Second, I suggest that all such actors (rather than none of them) may act with a substantial level of self-consciousness. Finally, I argue that there is no singular moment of rupture when groups shift from one form of objectification to another. I propose instead that multiple forms of objectifying action, each with different intended audiences and effects, are employed simultaneously in the production of sets of social rules like ethnicity. By refocusing on the entire range of things that individuals belonging to a collectivity—defined by name and the associated implication of shared descent—actually do to objectify various parts of their social world, we can see that culture as doxa, or practice, does not necessarily give rise, in a unidirectional, evolutionary manner, to culture as performance. Instead, people across the collectivity engage in multiple fields of ritualized action that coexist and inform each other.
This argument revisits some of the territory covered by debates over change and continuity, tradition and modernity, that dominate much anthropological work on questions of cultural objectification and authenticity (Briggs 1996; Handler 1986; Jackson and Ramírez 2009; Linnekin 1991). Rather than focusing on cultural objects themselves, foregrounding the diverse forms of sacralizing action people use to produce their cultural world and the constantly shifting interplay between such forms—which are not inherently attached to specific chronological conjunctures—helps move beyond limiting dichotomies. Furthermore, acknowledging that there is a range of simultaneously available objectifying actions that people may employ to express their relationship with the sacred object of identity allows us to see there is a modicum of choice—and therefore self-consciousness—in the decisions that people make about which forms of action to employ in which circumstances, and thus come to recognize themselves as creators of their own social world.
I am not
