A Tamang Case from North Central Nepal

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 4 Number 2 Himalayan Research Bulletin, Article 5 Monsoon 1984 1984 Talking About the Household: A Tamang Case from North Central Nepal Thomas E. Fricke Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Fricke, Thomas E.. 1984. Talking About the Household: A Tamang Case from North Central Nepal. HIMALAYA 4(2). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol4/iss2/5 This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The importance of the household for a fuller understanding of village socio-cultural organization and economy has been acknowledged in anthropology since Fortes' (1958) early essay on the developmental cycle. Indeed, hardly an anthropologist who has worked in Nepal has failed to notice the special place of the household in village life. For the Gurung, the household is the primary "labour, ritual, commensal, and child-rearing group" (Macfarlane 1976: 15). Further west, Magar family life centers around "farmstead households", spatially and psychologically distinct from one another (Hitchcock 1966: 35). And for the Tamang, too, the household provides a critical focus for the organization of work and exchange (Fricke 1984). In spite of this, few studies in the Himalaya have concerned themselves directly with household processes. The literature on these processes straddles disciplines and is growing rapidly. A recent bibliography (Smith 1983), for example, includes selections from sociology and history in addition to anthropology. Most of these listings come after 1970, with many of them devoted to shattering the myth of a rigid evolutionary sequence from large, extended family households to the post-industrial nuclear family home of contemporary society (see, for example, Laslett 1972; Goody 1972; Wilk and Netting 1981). Two other trends of special interest in this literature are (1) the efforts to define exactly what we mean when we talk about the household (cf. Bender 1967; Yanagisako 1979) and (2) continuing discussions of the household developmental cycle (Berkner 1972; Hareven 1974; Foster 1975, 1978). In this paper I will use the case of a Tamang village in North Central Nepal to illustrate problems of definition and to highlight factors constraining household developmental cycles. The Tamang whose households I am describing live in the village of Timling, comprised of 132 households and 639 people and lying at about 6,500 feet at the headwaters of the Ankhu Khola. Although a part of Sertang Gaon Panchayat at the time of fieldwork, Timling was historically atl independent chiefdom with status equal to the other chiefdoms in the upper Ankhu Khola valley- Sertang, Borang, and Laba. Even today, in spite of being joined administratively to Sertang, the traditional territory of Timling is topographically distinct and the people of this village and its daughter settlements tend to exploit the resources within the traditional boundaries, some 67 square miles of the most rugged country in the Ankhu Khola valley. The 639 people of Timling are divided into four clans and one other group, the Ghale, who can be treated as another clan (see Toffin 1976 for a discussion of the Tamang of this area based on Sertang). Each of these clans has its own tradition about arrival into the village and worships its own deity (Tm. kulm lha) represented by a stone near the hearth. The clans and their numbers in Timling are: Ghale (278 , Damrong (181), Gomtsa (72), Mamba (77), and Mepa (31). According to informants, the Gomtsa and Mepa are actually subgrouops of the Lama clan and cannot intermarry; the traditional occupation of the Gomtsa is shaman (Tm. bombo), while that of the Mepa is lama. Each of the village neighborhoods is to some extent defined by a dominant clan and are often referred to by a clan name rather than by the more formal name of the area. Timling's people pursue an agro-pastoral subsistence typical of the Nepali hills, although with a somewhat larger pastoral investment than people at lower elevations. Table 1 shows average household capital investment for various categories in Timling and the Gurung village of Thak. Timling 1981 Thak* 1969 Rs. % Rs. % Land 24340 61.9 28150 68.5 Livestock 5685 14.5 1423 3.5 Housing 4950 12.6 5060 12.3 Household goods, tools, etc. 3049 7.8 5617 13.7 Clothing 1300 3.3 856 lol ------------------------------------------------------ Total 39324 100 41106 100 Other features of Timling's subsistence also parallel those for the Gurung. Agricultural land available per person is about the same with about .654 acres in Timling compared to .64 for Thak (Macfarlane 1976: 47), although this obviously ignores differences in productivity. Moreover, the Tamang are faced with a declining land base with which to support their population and consequently increasing dependence on outside wage labor as documented elsewhere (Hitchcock 1966: 105; Macfarlane 1976: 199). The problems involved in cross-culturally valid definitions of the household have been amply reviewed by Yanagisako who suggests that the most appropriate focus be on activities ·central to the domestic relationships in each particular society, rather than with its domestic groups· (1979: 186). Wilk and Netting offer a similar antidote to proceeding from! priori constructs: analysis must proceed from a focus on behavior-production, distribution, transmission, reproduction and co-residence-and then determine the overlapping personnel who act. As it happens, the concept of household organization favored by the Tamang themselves agrees substantially with some of the traditional assumptions about peasant family and household; there are, however, differences and any attempt to discover a strictly bounded unit filling all of the functions attributed to households must be discarded. For the people of Timling, the existence of the household is best determined by the presence of a cooking hearth. The hearth defines this social space even in the absence of solid walls or a separate doorway. Identifying those activities vital to the maintenance of social life does not challenge the primacy of the hearth as an organizing principle in Tamang society. Beginning with production, we see that Timling's subsistence economy is geared to extracting resources from a more or less bounded environment within which land use rights are extended either to the whole population or to specific segments of it centered around hearths. In another part of the adaptation, individuals leave the village territory for extended periods to earn money as porters, laborers, or as soldiers in British and Indian Gurkha regiments. Wages are expected to be contributed to the common good of the hearth. With arable land, the produce from piots go to the very people who work them. Likewise, with the extraction of forest resources, those people who do the cutting will take their lumber to their own hearths for their own fires. In both of these cases, the units of production and consumption are essentially the same even though the same people may not be involved in all aspects of production; work is for the common good of those who share the hearth. Grain and timber are stored and used by that collection of people sharing the hearth and when individuals from other hearths are invited to partake of this production, there is a clear sense of their being given a product that is not theirs to freely take. Agriculture dominates the Tamang economy with some 26% of the average household's capital being tied up in land. But other segments of Timling's subsistence pattern ratify the identification of hearth members as the essential group in village production. Livestock are owned by these same members and even when their care is entrusted to others, the products that come from them-milk, wool, meat- -can be distributed only through the authority of these same people. The transmission of property and the creation of new domestic units in Timling further underline the role of the hearth. At its most fundamental, the hearth group consists of a husband and wife and new members are recruited through childbearing. It is sometime after marriage that a son will ask to establish his own hearth, in effect demanding the economic independence of his production and consumption unit. At the creation of a new hearth, the land held by the older unit is divided and separate stores of grain, potatoes and timber are created. Ritual serves to emphasize this separation. Even when poverty forces the establishment of the new commensal unit to be no more than the construction of a new firepit at one end of the same building, the kulgi lha must receive the first food cooked on the hearth each day. This offering must be made by the household head to prevent any affliction caused by the jealousy of the hearth god from hurting the members of his domestic unit. Other rituals focus on the hearth: shamans and lamas are called periodically to cleanse a site of ghosts and their ministrations always center around the hearth and are for the benefit of those who share it. The Tamang household, so defined, bears a clear resemblance to Marshall Sahlins' Domestic Mode of Production (DMP) (1972: 74-79). The sine qua non of the DMP is the organization of the economy around domestic groups, usually the family, although co-operative links must necessarily be established between them (1972: 78). Sahlins begins with the bounded domestic group and proceeds to the question of what that group actually does, the reverse of what I have done here, but his conclusions about the nature of the group are very similar.

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