Anthropology Colloquium is the department’s speaker series that invites a mixture of anthropologists from within and outside of UBC to present their research. This speaker series is scheduled throughout the academic year, typically with a lunch reception in the AnSo Lounge.
A book talk with Sara Shneiderman – Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India
Thursday, November 26 2015
Anthropology and Sociology Building (ANSO) 134
11:30am-1pm
Event Poster: PDF
Dr. Sara Shneiderman
Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the Institute of Asian Research at UBC
Abstract
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 multi-sited world.
Bio
Sara Shneiderman is Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the Institute of Asian Research at UBC. She previously taught at Yale University. Current research projects include an ethnography of “post-conflict” state restructuring in Nepal, with a focus on citizenship, territory, and religiosity, and an exploration of trans-Himalayan citizenship across the historical and contemporary borders of India, China, and Nepal. The state restructuring project is now expanding to consider how the 2015 earthquakes have affected sociocultural and political processes of transformation.
