Shifting political paradigms for evaluating and rewarding cultural “authenticity” in India and Nepal compelled Thangmi on both sides of the border to think carefully about the particularities of object and audience that defined practice and performance (two terms I will define shortly), their relative efficacy in each national context, and the need to balance both fields of cultural production in the overall process of reproducing Thangmi ethnicity.
Figure 1. Thangmi wedding dance performed in Gangtok, Sikkim, India, November 2005. Photo by the author.
Figure 2. Thangmi wedding dance performed at the Nepal Thami Samaj Second National Convention, Kathmandu, Nepal, May 2005. Photo by the author.
This chapter argues that Thangmi individuals from diverse backgrounds in both Nepal and India possess a high level of self-consciousness regarding the multiple fields of ritualized action in which they engage. They intentionally choose to deploy different types of action within different social “frames” (Goffman 1974; Handler 2011) to achieve a range of results from diverse recognizing agents: state, divine, and otherwise. This self-consciousness emerges in part through the experience of moving regularly between multiple nation-states through circular migration. Familiarity with more than one national frame within which ethnicity is conceptualized and recognized enables Thangmi, as both individuals and members of a collective, to see the framing machinery through which ethnicity is produced and reproduced in each context. They may therefore take self-conscious, agentive roles in employing appropriate framing devices for their own purposes. These may range from assuaging territorial deities through private household propitiations to assuaging skeptical state representatives through public cultural performances, but ultimately all of the ritualized action so framed has a shared sacred referent: Thangmi identity itself.
This argument takes us beyond portrayals of ethnicity as either an evasive response to state control (Scott 2009) or a creation of market forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) to reveal it instead as a ritual process. I show how the objectification of identity cannot always be reduced to a process of “ethno-commodification” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) but rather must be seen as a fundamental human process that persists through ritual action regardless of the contingencies of state formation or economic paradigm. Ultimately, ethnicity is a complex collective production, which coheres around the sacred object of identity. This serves as a shared referent that enables heterogeneous individuals—bound together by little more than name across nation-state, class, age, gender, and other boundaries—to contribute in diverse ways to collective projects of ethnicity-in-action. The affective reality of the identity that results from this synthesis draws its power from the very diversity of its component parts.
Defining Practice and Performance
My definitions of “practice” and “performance” diverge from other received definitions. The two are qualitatively distinct, but inextricably linked and mutually influential fields of “ritualized activity,” which I follow Catherine Bell in defining as “a particular cultural strategy of differentiation linked to particular social effects and rooted in a distinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment it structures” (1992:8). I acknowledge at the outset that most practice has a performative aspect (Austin 1975; Bauman 1975; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Butler 1997a), and almost all performance can be seen as a form of “practice” in Bourdieu’s sense (1977, 1990). Nonetheless, making a distinction between practice and performance is helpful at the analytical level as we attempt to understand the dynamics of consciousness and objectification inherent in the process of producing ethnicity. At the level of action, there is no question that the edges of these categories blur into one another. However, these distinctions are described as ontologically real by Thangmi themselves, which suggests that they are worth paying attention to.
“Practice” refers to embodied, ritualized actions carried out by Thangmi individuals within a group-internal epistemological framework that mediates between the human and divine world: to stop malevolent deities from plaguing one’s mind, for instance, or to guide a loved one’s soul to the realm of the ancestors. Practices are addressed to the synthetic pantheon of animistic, Hindu and Buddhist deities that inhabit the Thangmi divine world, and take place within the clearly delimited private domains of the household, or communal but exclusively Thangmi, spaces. Practices then are the actions encapsulated in what Goffman calls social “primary frameworks” (1974).
“Performances,” in the contrast I draw here, are framed “keyings,” or “transformations,” in Goffman’s terms (1974), of the practices found within primary frameworks. Performances are ritualized actions carried out within a broader discursive context created by political, economic, or other kinds of external agendas. They are mounted for express consumption by non-Thangmi audiences, which may comprise representatives of the Nepali or Indian states—as at the Gangtok performance with which this chapter began—or members of other ethnic communities, NGO representatives, anthropologists, and various others. Performances take place in the open, in public domains, with the express purpose of demonstrating to both selves and various others what practices are like.
Participation in both of these forms of ritualized action contributes to contemporary experiences of what culture, identity, and ethnicity are from the perspectives of the actors who engage in them. Neither practice nor performance can stand in for the whole of culture or as the sole signifier of cultural authenticity. Instead, practice and performance, as I define them here, are both essential aspects of contemporary cultural production and as such are mutually constitutive. Neither can be substituted or subsumed by the other. Both are necessary for groups and individuals to maintain the pragmatic and emotional well-being that derives from a sense of belonging to a shared identity that is recognized by others within the political context of individual nation-states, as well as within transnational environments shaped by cross-border movements and international discourses of indigeneity and heritage.
Arjun Guneratne’s work with the Tharu of Nepal’s Tarai provides an ethnographic touchstone for discussing the dynamics of identity and consciousness in Nepal. Guneratne distinguishes between two “levels of group identity”:
The first is implicit or unselfconscious, associated with the traditional, local, endogamous group…. In Bourdieu’s terms, it exists as doxa or the unreflected upon and “naturalized” process of social reproduction of the community (Bourdieu 1977)…. The “natural” character of social facts, hitherto accepted as part of the given order, become subject to critique when an objective crisis brings some aspect of doxa—identity—into question. This is a necessary precondition for the emergence of the second level of identity I wish to distinguish.
This second or more encompassing level of identity is a self-conscious … and politically oriented identity that draws together various local communities and groups and endows them with an imagined coherence (cf. Anderson 1991). It is imagined in the sense that the structural linkages … that help to shape the first level of group identity defined above do not exist at this level. (1998:753)
These two levels of identity are in many ways coterminous with the social fields produced by practice and performance as I define them. I extend Guneratne’s insights further by suggesting that the two fields of identity coexist and mutually constitute each other. In other words, the shift from one level of identity to another is not a quintessentially modern transformation that moves in only one direction, from a state of “identity as doxa” to a state of “identity as political imagination,” with the latter eventually eclipsing the former. Instead, both forms of identity can exist simultaneously and influence each other in a multidirectional feedback loop. This potentiality comes into focus when we turn our analytical gaze to the actions of practice and performance rather than keeping it trained on the more static notion of identity itself. Practice and performance are mutually dependent aspects of the overall processes of cultural production and social reproduction, a relationship augmented but not initiated by the politics of recognition within modern nation-states. Take away practice and there is no cultural content for performance to objectify. Take away performance