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.
Roots & Rituals: The Construction of Ethnic Identities
Archaeological data from Las Varas, Peru, that establish the importance of ritual in constructing ethnic boundaries Recent popular discourse on nationalism and ethnicity assumes that humans by nature prefer “tribalism,” as if people ...
For changes in Appalachian burial practices in the twentieth century , see ]ames K. Crissman , Death and Dying in Central Appalachia : Changing Attitudes and Practices ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 1994 ) . 2.
The Institutional Embeddedness of Ethnicity Jana Obrovská ... Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(5), 655–673. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/13613324.2010.547848 Bell, W. (1956). ... Racism, gender identities and young children.
This book, based on the Institute of Policy Studies' Ethnic Relations Project, aims to understand the current state and complexity of ethnic pluralism in Singapore, and to identify key trends...
The contributors to this volume investigate the ways in which religious experience is shaped by the new ethnic, national, and global contexts.
Public Ritual and Ethnic Diversity Within Southern Regionalism Celeste Ray. Pittock, Murray. 1998. ... Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North ... Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind.
The chapters comprising this book investigate a diverse array of contemporary and historical phenomena relating to the symbolic life of nations, from the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan to the Louvre in France, written by an interdisciplinary cast ...
A Comparative Study of the Social Meaning of Liturgical Ritual in Synagogues Jack N. Lightstone, Frederick B. Bird, ... Jonathan Edwards found, in the 1730s and 1740s, that his congregations began speaking in tongues spontaneously ...
This book examines interethnic relationships between groups and the dynamics of exchange networks throughout Asia and includes case studies based in Vietnam, Burma, Laos, Nepal, China, and Siberia.