Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India

American Anthropologist, 2014

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.

Inner Asia, 2016

Through an astute ethnography of the Thangmi’s sense of belonging, Sara Shneiderman provides us with a timely discussion of the production of identity. Her book is also a transparent meditation on her own role as anthropologist in the production of Thangminess and the dilemmas associated with this process. An important contribution to the anthropology of the Himalayas, this book will also prove useful for scholars of migration, ritual practice and performance, identity formation and indigenous activism far beyond.

Studies in Nepali History and Society, 2006

“Revisiting Ethnography, Recognizing a Forgotten People: The Thangmi of Nepal and India” in Studies in Nepali History and Society. 11 (1): 97-181. Co-authored with Mark Turin.

Conference Proceedings 2012: The Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya, Kathmandu: Social Science Baha., 2018

Among the Rai of Eastern Nepal, the recitations pronounced during shamanic rituals include countless references to the natural and sacred topography of the landscape and to aspects of the natural habitat inhabited by the performers. For every Rai group, often even for every clan of it, these references are “localized” to a great extent and therefore every social entity has its own way of being “rooted” in their natural and sacred environment. In a Post-Doc project by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna, I explore these connections in great detail with a focus on the Dumi Rai, an ethnic group settling in the northern parts of Khotang district in Eastern Nepal. By re-travelling the pronounced ritual journeys together with the shamans and knowledgeable elders within the real topography, these mental or “recitational” travels are mapped onto the real world. Using GPS technology and different means of multimedia documentation of the visited places and the related ritual texts, a wide array of information is gathered in a database that will eventually be worked into different kinds of multimedia publications. By complementing the data collected in the rural areas of Eastern Nepal with findings gathered among the diaspora Rai communities in other parts of Nepal and foreign countries, the influence of such concepts onto the understanding of the Rai’s own ethnic identity can be investigated. This experimental project was still underway at the time the paper was given in 2012 and some of its preliminary findings, methods and possible uses were discussed.

Tibetan Borderlands. P. Christiaan Klieger, ed. Leiden: …, 2006

2020

Ethnicity is a social and historical process, which carries changes and continuity simultaneously in different dimension of ethnic identity among the ethnic groups. Historical forces in terms of their social, political and economic dimension shape how ethnic identity is defined and created as well as recreated in contemporary society. Given the discussion this paper focuses on how the members of an ethnic group define themselves as a social group over time according to the social and political field in which they are in. The study has aims to describe the historical chronology of the transformation of Pahari identity over time in Nepal. Further, the paper particularly attempted to see how the political system of the country shapes the creation and recreation of identity among the members of the given ethnic group. The study is based on primarily on number of in-depth interviews of the members of the given ethnic community living in middle hills in and around around Kathmandu valley ...

2017

This book presents a close look at the growth, success, and proliferation of ethnic politics on the peripheries of modern South Asia, built around a case study of the Nepal ethnic group that lives in the borderlands of Sikkim, Darjeeling, and east Nepal. Grounded in historical and ethnographic research, it critically examines the relationship between culture and politics in a geographical space that is home to a diverse range of ethnic identities, showing how new modes of political representation, cultural activism, and everyday politics have emerged from the region.