Reframing Ethnicity: Academic Tropes, Recognition beyond Politics, and Ritualized Action between Nepal and India

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across the Himalayan borders of Nepal and India, I revisit disciplinary debates about ethnicity. I focus on the expressive production of ethnic consciousness among members of the Thangmi (Thami) community in a context of high cross-border mobility. I argue that ethnicity is the result not only of the prerogatives of state control or market forces but also of a ritual process through which identity itself is produced as a sacred object that binds together diverse members of the collectivity. Thangmi participation in a range of ritualized actions demonstrates how mobility across national borders yields a high level of self-consciousness about the efficacy of each form of action as well as of the frames within which action unfolds. Ethnicity may be understood simultaneously as a historically contingent process and a wellspring of affectively real cultural content, enabling us to make better sense-in both scholarly and political terms-of emergent ethnic claims in South Asia and beyond.

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

“…Much of the work of this past year examined the practices that make possible a sense of shared qualities across collective subjects. From issues of citizenship contorted by contestations around ethnicity, immigration, and displacement (Byrd 2014;Oka 2014;Shneiderman 2014;Thiranagama 2014) and revised understandings of relatedness across borders, through ancestral homes, and via fictive kin terms (Bovensiepen 2014;Cole 2014a;Nakassis 2014) to renegotiations of race and indigenous recognition within settler colonial contexts (Ives 2014a; Jacobsen-Bia 2014; Merlan 2014;Sturm 2014;Wroblewski 2014) and science as authority in ethnic belonging (Tamarkin 2014), as well as practice through which reflexive identity might be assembled (Droney 2014), articles this past year show the myriad ways a sense of communal immediacy might be built, be contested, or fail. Here too of note is a Current Anthropology special issue on Christianity, showcasing a variety of situations in which Christianity becomes the idiom through which immediacy across groups is expressed and contested (Robbins 2014).…”

‘Scheduled Tribe Dalit’ and the Recognition of Tribal Casteism

“…Both Bukharian Jews and SC Gaddis represent seeming contradictions, category breaches. Not only must they struggle for legitimacy and inclusion within their community confines, what Shneiderman (2014, p. 280) calls ‘group-internal recognizing agents’, but they must also appeal to ‘group-external prerogatives’ of state ethnology, conditions of citizenship, international scholarship and NGOs. In both cases, their relative disadvantages as marginalised subgroups are obscured by the brute realities of homogenous anti-Semitism and tribal underperformance facing the dominant community.…”

Understanding Nepali Nationalism

“…The erstwhile state‐sponsored nationalism became less relevant and cultural homogeneity was strongly disputed. The Tibeto‐Burman hill communities challenged the notion of one nation, one identity (Subba :129; for a detailed commentary on the politics of ethnic identity since the mid‐1990s, see Lecomte‐Tilouine ; Shneiderman ; Whelpton et al ). Subba () endorses the view that the present crisis of Nepali national identity has to do mainly with the earlier attempt to impose a monolithic and homogenous Nepali identity on all Nepalis.…”