and various other mediations between the communities with whom they work and broader publics. The results of such engagement are always complex and rarely morally clear-cut. The moral contract for research” (Warren and Jackson 2002:4) is always fraught, as information about and access to community-specific knowledge, actions, and discourse are exchanged for social scientific recognition. Often the ethnographic contract remains unspoken—and certainly unsigned. Yet it evokes expectations and aspirations on all sides from the moment that a scholar first engages with people from whom she wishes to collect “data.” In exchange for our data, I believe that scholars conducting ethnographic work have an ethical responsibility to, at the very least, investigate potential avenues for contributing to the agendas of those with whom we work. For me, this belief has led to carefully chosen strategies for raising Thangmi public profiles through the production of social scientific knowledge about them.
Charles Hale (2006) describes how this kind of engagement with subaltern communities, which he calls “activist research,” may conflict with the prerogatives of cultural critique (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Activist research, although always politically compromised, has the potential to create uniquely generative theoretical spaces that move beyond institutional academic commitments. Hale suggests that although cultural critique positions itself as the only approach that can adequately represent subaltern voices in a nonessentialized, politically correct manner, problems arise when subaltern communities themselves choose to use theoretically unfashionable categories: “As long as the heavy weapons of deconstruction are aimed at the powerful, the proposal remains on high ground. But what about the other ‘sites’ of a multisited ethnography? How do we responsibly address situations in which the relatively powerless are using these same vexed categories to advance their struggles?” (2006:102). This is precisely the situation I encountered. While my initial scholarly impulse was to demonstrate the processual constructedness of Thangmi ethnic identity, I ultimately could not ignore the intensity with which Thangmi from diverse backgrounds—including activists, ritual practitioners, and common people who bumped up against the problem of misrecognition in their daily lives—asked me to provide an essentializing ethnographic portrait of “the Thangmi” as a unified, unique, and historically unchanging group.
Why shouldn’t they want this when, for instance, an early application to the government of India for ST status was met with rejection and the directive to “submit total ethnographic material of your caste to the ministry”?12 It may be the case within academic anthropology that “the production of portraits of other cultures, no matter how well drawn, is in a sense no longer a major option” (Ortner 1999:9). Yet it is precisely this ethnographic portrait, presented in an authoritative academic voice, that many Thangmi desire, as an instrument of both psychological and political recognition. With no holistic portrait produced in the bygone days of anthropology when such work was not yet politically incorrect, why should Thangmi forgo this aspiration when their counterparts in other better-documented communities proudly brandish their ethnographies as important heritage objects?
It would be a sad irony if postcolonial anthropological reflexivity worked to reinforce earlier disciplinary biases—and their entanglements with local relations of power—by rejecting calls from historically understudied people to produce knowledge about them. As one young Thangmi activist writes, “We have a request for all scientists and scholars: please do research about the Thami, please write about us, and we will stand ready to help you” (Tahal Thami, in Samudaya ([2056] 2061 VS:vi). Rather than disengaging from such projects because they make us feel uneasy as scholars, we might consider how uneasy it feels to be a people without an ethnography in many contemporary political environments. The fact that ethnography itself is complicit in shaping people’s political futures is a part of anthropology’s disciplinary legacy that remains to be adequately acknowledged and transformed through collaboration with contemporary communities who are themselves engaged in the ethnographic project.
For many Thangmi, engagement in ethnographic research itself—whether as a researcher, an informant, or both—has become an important mode of ethnic expression. I write candidly about my own role in these processes as an ethnographer and acknowledge that this work is relevant not only to an academic audience but to Thangmi and the various audiences they engage.
Rituals of Ethnicity emerged as the title of choice from my discussions with Thangmi interlocutors about these issues of presence and absence, object and action, complicity and collaboration. It became clear early on that the title of this book must be recognizable in some form to Thangmi themselves (even in English), and foreground the Thangmi-specific ethnography at its core, despite what I hope is the broader applicability of the anthropological arguments contained herein. I asked many Thangmi with whom I worked what I should call the book that would emerge from my long-term engagement with their community. Most of the answers were variations of “Thangmi jati-ko sanskar ra sanskriti,” “hamro jati-ko sanskar,” or in its most concise form, “jatiya sanskar,” all in Nepali. Literally meaning “rituals and culture of the Thangmi ethnicity,” “rituals of our ethnicity,” or “ethnic rituals,” respectively,13 these phrases indicated to the people who proffered them that the book so named would be a useful compendium of ethnographic information about what constituted them as a community: the ritual practices in which they engaged. Rituals of Ethnicity preserves this meaning, while also enabling an anthropological double entendre: it refers to both the specific rituals of the Thangmi community and the general social processes through which both ritual and ethnicity, as well as consciousness itself, are produced.
Cross-Border Mobility and the Feedback Loop
Colonial documents show that people calling themselves Thangmi have been moving across what are now the borders of Nepal and India since at least the mid-nineteenth century.14 Several pilgrimage accounts authored by traveling Tibetan lamas also suggest that a group called mtha’ mi, or “people of the border” in Tibetan, lived in the borderlands between what is now China’s TAR and Nepal as early as the seventeenth century (Ehrhard 1997). Chapter 4 provides the historical context of these movements, while Chapter 6 argues that the very idea of mobility is a central feature of Thangmi ethnic identity. Yet these patterns of mobility were not at all obvious to me when I began my residence in the Thangmi heartland of rural central-eastern Nepal. Only after several months did I begin to realize that the Thangmi were anything but sedentary inhabitants of bounded villages.
My outlook was conditioned by the trajectory of Himalayan anthropology, defined by a paradigmatic series of ethnographic monographs focused on discrete communities—largely in the highlands—whose members were imagined as residents of bounded localities within a single nation-state. These monographs included works on Gurung (Macfarlane 1976; Pignède [1966] 1993), Limbu (Caplan [1970] 2000; Sagant 1996), Magar (Hitchcock 1966), Newar (Gellner 1992; Levy 1990), Sherpa (Adams 1996; J. Fisher 1990; Fürer-Haimendorf 1964; Ortner 1978, 1989), Tamang (Holmberg 1989; March 2002), Thakali (W. Fisher 2001; Vinding 1998), Tharu (Guneratne 2002; Krauskopff 1989), Yolmo (Desjarlais 2003), and various Rai groups (Gaenzsle 2000, 2002; Hardman 2000; McDougal 1979). Some of these ethnographies hint at the importance of mobility and experiences in India or historical Tibet in constituting ethnic subjectivities, but such stories were ethnographically under-unexplored.
As I conducted more interviews with Thangmi in Nepal, I was surprised by how often conversation turned to experiences of India and the TAR or to family members who were currently there. Many People spoke powerfully of how time spent in these other places had shaped their worldviews. I eventually realized that I would need to travel to India and the TAR to understand what being Thangmi meant.
The ethnographic realities that I encountered in these places demanded a middle path between two popular social scientific approaches to ethnicity. The first suggests that ethnicity is an exclusive product of modern nation-states, emerging only within clearly demarcated national boundaries (Verdery 1994; Williams
