Rituals of Ethnicity is a transnational study of the relationships
between mobility, ethnicity, and ritual action. Through an ethnography
of the Thangmi, a marginalized community who migrate between Himalayan
border zones of Nepal, India, and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of
China, Shneiderman offers a new explanation for the persistence of
enduring ethnic identities today despite the increasing realities of
mobile, hybrid lives. She shows that ethnicization may be understood as
a process of ritualization, which brings people together around the
shared sacred object of identity.
The first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, Rituals of
Ethnicity is framed by the Maoist-state civil conflict in Nepal and the
movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland in India. The histories of
individual nation-states in this geopolitical hotspot--as well as the
cross-border flows of people and ideas between them--reveal the
far-reaching and mutually entangled discourses of democracy, communism,
development, and indigeneity that have transformed the region over the
past half century. Attentive to the competing claims of diverse members
of the Thangmi community, from shamans to political activists,
Shneiderman shows how Thangmi ethnic identity is produced
collaboratively by individuals through ritual actions embedded in local,
national, and transnational contexts. She builds upon the specificity of
Thangmi experiences to tell a larger story about the complexities of
ethnic consciousness: the challenges of belonging and citizenship under
conditions of mobility, the desire to both lay claim to and remain apart
from the civil society of multiple states, and the paradox of
self-identification as a group with cultural traditions in need of both
preservation and development. Through deep engagement with a diverse,
cross-border community that yearns to be understood as a distinctive,
coherent whole, Rituals of Ethnicity presents an argument for the
continued value of locally situated ethnography in a multisited world.
Cover art: Lost Culture Can Not Be Reborn, painting by Mahendra Thami,
Darjeeling, West Bengal, India.
