Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India is the newest title in the University of Pennsylvania Press Contemporary Ethnography Series. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, the book 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.
“An entirely unique and stunning ethnography. Shneiderman finds herself assisting the Thangmi’s drive to manifest their distinctiveness and seek recognition. She manages a high-wire performance herself: one full of compassion, acute theoretical insight, exemplary balance, and respect for the sacredness of the quest—doing as much credit to ethnography as a craft as to the Thangmi as a people. Few have been as fortunate in their ethnographer as the Thangmi.” —James C. Scott, Yale University
“Brilliant and original, Rituals of Ethnicity traces how identity, ethnicity, and indigeneity are constructed by members of a marginalized group within different state structures. Arguing for the importance of often self-conscious rituals for mobilizing and objectifying ethnicity, Shneiderman shows how anthropology too can be marshalled for this project, recasting ethnography as a variety of ritualized performance.” —Kirin Narayan, The Australian National University
