how they represent their identity for purely expedient political and economic reasons. Rather, actors are conscious of and make choices between various forms of action that articulate different aspects of their relationship with the sacred to different but equally important audiences. Each form of action occasions recognition from a public larger than the individual or the ethnic collectivity itself, whether that be the divine world or the state, and that experience of recognition leads to a powerfully affective affirmation of the social self. For some, this strong experience of validation might come from material evidence that the divine exists and has a special relationship with believers: natural wonders, deities speaking in tongues through possessed shamans, or other “miracles.” For others, affirmation might come from evidence that the government notices and has a special relationship with their own community: constitutional provisions for special treatment, political and educational quotas, or other such policies. The desire to gain either one or both of these forms of “existential recognition” (Graham 2005) cannot exist without a minimum sense of self-recognition as a legitimate subject for recognition from others. That basic level of self-consciousness—and the ensuing confidence that external recognition will at some point be forthcoming—is the necessary impetus for individuals to undertake the often expensive, as well as mentally and physically arduous, ritual tasks of propitiating deities (multiday Thangmi rituals often require participants to go without sleep for close to a week) or submitting government applications (a process requiring repeat visits to government offices over several years at great personal expense). The objectifying actions necessary to secure each form of recognition and its evidence are different, but the affective results are comparable. For many, a complete sense of recognition may come from a combination of both.
On the Politics of Heritage and Cross-Border Frames
Building upon the notion that in the performance of heritage, “people become living signs of themselves” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:18), the Comaroffs suggest that the commodification of ethnicity “demands that the alienation of heritage ride a delicate balance between exoticism and banalization—an equation that often requires ‘natives’ to perform themselves in such a way as to make their indigeneity legible to the consumer of otherness” (2009:142). Is this what the Thangmi dancers with whom this chapter began were doing? If so, who exactly is the consumer of otherness? Most Thangmi rarely come in contact with tourists or other foreigners—the class of people, for lack of a better term, who often provoke the processes of ethnocommodification that the Comaroffs describe. The areas of Thangmi residence in Nepal’s hills were never on a tourist trekking route, and the Maoist-state conflict from 1996 to 2006 made it nearly impossible to consider development along those lines. Darjeeling does see a reasonable amount of tourists, but throughout the course of my research, I never documented any engagement with them on the part of the Thangmi community.
The “consumer of otherness” here is instead the state and, especially in Nepal, its associates in international development. But such performances for state consumption are not divorced from practices that are carried out for divine consumption, and understanding both as forms of ritualized action that objectify ethnic consciousness simultaneously to both ethnic selves and others is key. This is not an either/or proposition: at the same time that ethnic actors perform themselves for consumption by temporal or divine others, they also engage in practices that represent themselves to themselves in order to reproduce the content of ethnic consciousness. Scott is quite right that no single part of a repertoire is more “real” than others.
Echoing Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Godelier asserts that through ritual activity, People generate duplicate selves … which, once they have split off, stand before them as persons who are at once familiar and alien. In reality these are not duplicates which stand before them as aliens; these are the people themselves who, by splitting, have become in part strangers to themselves, subjected, alienated to these other beings who are nonetheless part of themselves” (1999:169–70). Beyond simply serving as a means of crass cultural commodification, performances allow people to objectify their own self-consciousness in a manner that has deep affective results. Through such self-replicating, signifying action, they generate a reflective awareness of these processes of subjectification and alienation in a manner that allows “duplicate selves” to stand without contradiction. In the end, the sacred self is inalienable. The experience of becoming “a living sign” in the process of performance or watching other members of one’s community become one—as many Thangmi are now doing—generates a consciousness of the different objectifying tools of practice and performance, and their different but equally important efficacies. In a diverse cross-border community, such consciousness emerges in part from intimate knowledge of the differences in paradigms for cultural objectification in each country and the ability to see such national ethos as frames within which one’s own action unfolds.
During a ritual to protect a Darjeeling household from bad luck, Rana Bahadur (no relation to the senior guru Rana Bahadur), a young Thangmi from Nepal who had long lived in India, described this effect: The politics here are distinct; the politics there are also distinct. In each place, culture must be deployed in different ways.” He was a respected shaman’s assistant who often played an important role during ritual practices, as well as a cultural performer who wrote and sang many of the lyrics on the popular cassette of Thangmi language songs recorded by the BTWA. Rana Bahadur was one of many Thangmi whose experiences of both India and Nepal as national frames effected a conscious recognition of the differences in technique, efficacy, and audience that defined practice and performance. Another was Sheela, the general secretary of the Sikkim branch of the BTWA, a well-educated woman in her late thirties. She explained the motivation behind the performatization of Thangmi practice I had witnessed in Gangtok: “Thami rituals and traditions are so slow and repetitive. That works back in the pahar (N: “the hills,” meaning rural Nepal), but here we need something different when we show our culture to others so that the government will notice us.” Within this diversity of experience, curiosity about the embodied effects of each form of ritualized action is constant, along with a sense that the relationship between these forms of action enables the ethnic collectivity to synthesize a coherent presence across borders and disparate life experiences.
In one direction, that curiosity manifests in the desire of seasoned Thangmi cultural practitioners from Nepal to watch and, in some cases, participate in stage-managed cultural performances like the one in Sikkim with which this chapter began. In the other direction, many Thangmi in India talk about opportunities to observe cultural practices, such as death or wedding rituals, with the same reverence with which they might discuss an audience with Sai Baba or the Dalai Lama. The increasing exposure of practitioners to performance and performers to practice—through cheaper and easier cross-border travel and the trend of home-grown VCD production—has generated a debate within the community as a whole about what constitutes Thangmi culture and what elements of it should be “standardized” for future reproduction.
The fact that this debate is actively taking place within the community itself, which includes many members for whom practice itself remains alive and a key component of identity, sets this case apart somewhat from other discussions of the production of heritage in the global economy. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines heritage as “the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct,” and as “a mode of production that has recourse to the past,” to “produce the local for export” (1995:369). In the Thangmi case, practice remains very much alive, but it has increasingly come into relationship with performance. The two coexist. Rather than fetishizing dead practices, emergent desires to demonstrate heritage through performance for political purposes within India has in fact encouraged the continuation of practice in Nepal and even the rerooting of it in India, where it had previously disappeared. For most Thangmi, heritage has not become entirely detached from living practice itself, commodified by outside forces and reconstituted for the exclusive purpose of consumption by others. I suspect that this is not so unusual and may be the case elsewhere but that the analytical obsession with dichotomizing authentic and inauthentic, practice and theory, has obscured such dynamics. Instead, although oriented toward external audiences, performance is produced by Thangmi, for Thangmi purposes, in constant conversation
