and commodification are not always synonymous. The process of self-objectification is one inherent in the human condition, fundamentally expressed through ritual, not one that emerges exclusively in response to state policies or market forces. While processes of ethnocommodification may be common in the (post)(neo)liberal era,4 they are not the only form of ethnic objectification, nor are their resultant objects the only evidence by which the content of ethnic consciousness should be understood. Due to the specific properties of ritualized activity, in which “the celebrant has agent’s awareness of his or her action … but this is also preceded and accompanied by a conception of the action as a thing, encountered and perceived from outside” (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994:5), ethnic consciousness produced through ritual action may be “a thing” without being explicitly commodified within a market context. Moreover, “it is not the existence of collective ideas about ritual action which constitutes it as a social fact, but common acceptance of rules about ritual action” (267). We can say the same about ethnicity when we view its production as a form of ritualized action: it is not any agreement about what ethnicity is that defines it across the collectivity but rather an implicit understanding of the rules of conduct that govern its production. These entail expression through ritualized action, whether those are practices oriented internally toward other diverse members of the collectivity or performances oriented externally toward recognizing agents like the state or the divine world.
These ideas compel further consideration of the relationship between community-internal expressions of ethnic consciousness and external frameworks for recognition—such as states, markets, or global discourses of indigeneity and heritage. The Comaroffs cite a Tswana elder as saying, “If we have nothing of ourselves to sell, does it mean that we have no culture?” They interpret this to mean that “if they have nothing distinctive to alienate, many rural black South Africans have come to believe, they face collective extinction; identity … resides in recognition from significant others, but the kind of recognition, specifically, expressed in consumer desire” (2009:10). While I agree that identity resides in large part in recognition from significant others, such others may be members of one’s own extended community, or members of the divine world, or both—constituencies that are well-addressed through ritualized practices that objectify identity in terms other than that of the commodity. Collapsing all forms of recognition into “consumer desire” flattens the social world into one in which the market is the only meaningful framework for recognition.
Others, including Scott, would have us believe that the state serves as a similarly transcendent source of recognition. The long-standing Thangmi absence from ethnopolitical discourse at the national level reflects the absence of tangible objects of identity recognizable in the terms of the state but not the absence of identity itself. Thangmi performances seek to rectify this disjuncture by objectifying the sacred object of identity through performances—but these occur in tandem with, not instead of, practices that remain oriented toward other recognizing agents.
Both forms of action provoke self-conscious reflection on the frames and contents of ethnicity. The sacred object of identity is not visible on its own but manifests in the process of ritualization. The Comaroffs (2009) assert that ethnicity is experiencing a doubling—both engendering affect and serving as an instrument—and that it is the dialectic between these qualities that defines ethnicity as a whole. Anthropologists have long recognized similar qualities in ritual, and understanding ethnicity as a ritual process works to ameliorate the sense of disjuncture contained in this dual quality of ethnicity. It also moves beyond Scott’s assertion of pure intentionality in the process of ethnogenesis by nuancing understandings of how acts of both ethnicity and ritual embody subtle relationships between intention and action.
Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam offers a trenchant critique of Scott: “It is devilishly difficult to make a case for radical ethnogenesis, on the one hand, and for deep aboriginal rights on the other. Ideas of choice and agency thus come into rude conflict with notions of victimhood and the rights of victims of ‘displacement’” (2010:7). He points out that this seems at odd with Scott’s long-standing position as a champion of the dispossessed. However, coupling the Comaroffs’ proposition that ethnicity emerges from the dialectic between instrument and affect, with an attention to the ritual processes through which ethnic consciousness is produced, takes us beyond the sense of contradiction here. “Radical ethnogenesis”—or a recognition of the constructed nature of ethnicity—need not be at odds with a simultaneous recognition of the affective, deeply real nature of ethnic consciousness that leads to many collective rights claims but also transforms individual senses of self and agency.
Aesthetics, Affect, and Efficacy
The process of performing heritage sometimes has unexpected affective results for the performers. Many Thangmi in India told me that the experience of performance gave them a hint of what practice might be like and encouraged them to seek out practice experiences in the company of Thangmi from Nepal, which in turn gave them a different feel, at the level of the body, for what it meant to be Thangmi. Such interlinkages begin to show how ethnic actors themselves view both practice and performance as integral to their own identity, within a frame of reference that includes individual states, their policies, and the borders between them.
When I asked Laxmi, one of the choreographers of the Sikkim performance, how she and her colleagues conceptualized these dances as Thangmi ones, she shrugged her shoulders and said: “We just choose whichever steps look good. We want to create something that people will want to watch, and will make them remember, ‘those Thangmi, they are good dancers.’ That will help us.” When I pushed further to ask what made these dances particularly Thangmi, she said, “Well, we have Thangmi from Nepal in the group, and they know how to show sakali Thangmi culture, so we just trust them.” For her, the very presence of the dancers from Nepal—who were stereotyped as having some experience with practice owing to their background in rural villages and their competence in the Thangmi language—was enough to provide an aura of authenticity, although she admitted she did not know what constituted it. She was aware of the aesthetic differences between what she had created as performance and Thangmi practice as such—and their concomitant differences in efficacy. Later, however, she confided that she had been overwhelmed by the experience of the funerary rituals that a Thangmi shaman from Nepal had conducted after the recent death of her brother. This was the first time that Laxmi had participated in a full-blown Thangmi ritual practice because her family had been in the habit of using Hindu priests as officiants, as had been typical for many generations of Thangmi families in India. She was surprised by the positive effect that participating in the ritual as a practitioner, following the shaman’s instructions, had on her own fragile emotional state in the wake of her brother’s death—a stark contrast to the orchestrating role she was used to playing as choreographer.
That experience motivated her to seek out shamans from Nepal for subsequent rituals, such as her son’s haircutting ceremony. She spoke candidly about how participation in these had transformed her experience of what it meant to be Thangmi. She saw these serious, complicated practices as a separate domain from the upbeat performances she choreographed, but it was the former that energized her commitment to the BTWA’s political agenda, thereby producing the latter.
In the contemporary cross-border political and cultural economies that shape Thangmi lives, maintaining the pragmatic conditions in which practice can be reproduced necessarily entails mounting performances. Those performances, in turn, must allude to the ongoing life of practice in order to establish their own legitimacy as representations of a culture worthy of recognition. It follows that those with the sakali skills of performance cannot advance their own projects without collaboration from those with the nakali knowledge of practice, and vice versa. As Surbir would have put it, the beads of the broken necklace must be strung together. The combination of competence in both fields of ritualized action in a single individual is rare, although that is changing, as the examples of relatively young Thangmi like Rana Bahadur and Laxmi show.
For now, in order to advance their shared goals of reproducing the sacred object
