28 Spring 2005 EUROPEAN BULLETIN OF HIMALAYAN RESEARCH European Bulletin of Himalayan Research The European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (EBHR) was founded by the late Richard Burghart in 1991 and has appeared twice yearly ever since. It is a product of collaboration and edited on a rotating basis between France (CNRS), Germany (South Asia Institute) and the UK (SOAS). Since October 2002 onwards, the German editorship has been run as a collective, presently including William S. Sax (managing editor), Martin Gaenszle, Elvira Graner, András Höfer, Axel Michaels, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Mona Schrempf and Claus Peter Zoller. We take the Himalayas to mean, the Karakorum, Hindukush, Ladakh, southern Tibet, Kashmir, north-west India, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and north-east India. The subjects we cover range from geography and economics to anthropology, sociology, philology, history, art history, and history of religions. In addition to scholarly articles, we publish book reviews, reports on research projects, information on Himalayan archives, news of forthcoming conferences, and funding opportunities. Manuscripts submitted are subject to a process of peer- review. European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, c/o Dept. of Anthropology South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University Im Neuenheimer Feld 330 D-69120 Heidelberg / Germany e-mail: [email protected]; fax: (+49) 6221 54 8898 For subscription details see: http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/ebhr Contributing editors: France: Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, Pascale Dollfus, Anne de Sales Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UPR 299 7, rue Guy Môquet 94801 Villejuif cedex France e-mail: [email protected] Great Britain: Michael Hutt, David Gellner, Ben Campbell School of Oriental and African Studies Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square London WC1H 0XG U.K. e-mail: [email protected] Netherlands: Mark Turin Himalayan Languages Project, Silodam 355 1013 AW Amsterdam Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] This issue of the Bulletin is published from Kathmandu, in collaboration with Social Science Baha (http://www.himalassociation.org/baha) EBHR 28 Spring 2005 ARTICLES Agency and Resistance in the Thangmi-Newar Ritual 5 Relationship: An analysis of Devikot-Khadga Jatra in Dolakha, Nepal Sara Shneiderman Ethnonymy in a Multiethnic Context: A note on Kinnaur 43 Isabelle Riaboff Staying in Place: The social actions of Hindu Yoginis 54 Sondra L. Hausner The “Descent of the Pandavas”: Ritual and cosmology of the Jad 67 of Garhwal Subhadra Mitra Channa CORRESPONDENCE, ANNOUNCEMENTS, REPORTS The Chintang and Puma Documentation Project (CPDP) 90 Martin Gaenszle, Balthasar Bickel, Goma Banjade, Elena Lieven, Netra P. Paudyal, Arjun Rai, Iccha P. Rai, Manoj Rai, Novel K. Rai, Vishnu S. Rai, Narayan P. Sharma, and Sabine Stoll BOOK REVIEWS Marie Lecomte-Tilouine and Pascale Dollfus (eds.): Ethnic 100 Revival and Religious Turmoil: Identities and representations in the Himalayas Sara Shneiderman, Ithaca, NY Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Vergleichende Hochgebirgsforschung 103 (ed.): Arbeiten aus Nepal. Erwin Schneider zum Gedächtnis Dietrich Schmidt-Vogt, Bangkok Deepak Thapa with Bandita Sijapati: A Kingdom under Siege: 110 Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, 1996 to 2003 Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Bielefeld Manjushree Thapa: Forget Kathmandu: An elegy for democracy 113 Elvira Graner Editorial Every three years, the EBHR rotates between Heidelberg, Paris, and London. Number 28 marks the last number of the EBHR to be published from Heidelberg for the time being. It now moves on to Paris, and a new editorial team, which will produce issues 29-34 (Autumn 2005-Spring 2008). Their contact details are: EBHR c/o CNRS-Himalaya, 7 rue Guy Môquet, 94801 Villejuif, France tel: (+33) 1 49 58 37 31 [email protected] In order to avoid the confusion that has until now resulted from establishing a new website every three years, we have decided to run one central website which is kindly hosted by Digitalhimalaya and managed by Mark Turin. The address is: http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/ebhr If you log on, you will find downloadable back issues of the Bulletin, currently numbers 1-22. If you look through those issues, I think you will find that the quality of the Bulletin has steadily increased over the years, so that it is now an indispensable source of scholarly articles, reports, and reviews from the Himalayas. Therefore, we would like to ask you not only to renew your subscription (the form will be included in subscribers' issues, otherwise it is available on the website) but to encourage your friends and colleagues to subscribe as well. The cost is quite reasonable, and goes a long way toward supporting the Bulletin, which is self-supporting and receives no subsidies other than the free labour (and love!) of many dedicated people. In previous editorials I have thanked some of those people, who have worked hard to ensure that the Bulletin was published in a timely fashion, and that its standards were maintained; especially Martin Gaenszle and Susanne Kleinmann. I would like to conclude my last editorial by giving a special thanks to András and Sylvia Höfer, who have taken over the lion's share of the burden of producing the Bulletin, ever since Martin Gaenszle took up his new duties in Nepal (see his Research Report, this issue). We couldn't have produced the last few numbers without their help. Bo Sax Managing Editor Notes on Contributors Subhadra Mitra Channa teaches Social Anthropology at the University of Delhi. She is interested in the study of marginal groups in Indian society, including those belonging to the dalits, tribes and women as a category. She is the author of two books and editor of two books, and has edited two encyclopedias. She was the President of the Indian Anthropological Association and currently is editor of the Indian Anthropologist, the journal of the Association. She is also co-chair of the Commission on the Anthropology of Women, an international body. Sondra L. Hausner is an anthropologist based in Kathmandu, Nepal. She currently works as the Research Advisor for Save the Children, an international NGO, on projects relating to migration, sexuality, social structure, and religion in South Asia. Her forthcoming book Wandering in Place: The social world of Hindu renunciation won the 2004 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences and will be published next year by Indiana University Press. Isabelle Riaboff specializes in the anthropology of the Tibetan-speaking population groups of the Western Himalayas. Her current research focuses on cultural hybridity and identity construction in the Indo-Tibetan borderland, with particular emphasis on the regions of Paldar and Kinnaur. She is associate member of the Paris-based “Langues et Cultures de l’Aire Tibétaine” project team (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique & Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes). Sara Shneiderman is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA. She has worked in Nepal since 1994, holding a Fulbright Fellowship there in 1999-2000. Her dissertation research ventures across the Nepal border to India (Darjeeling) and China (Tibet) to focus comparatively on the construction of ethnic, religious, and political identity in multiple national contexts for the Thangmi, a marginalized community with populations in all three countries. Agency and Resistance in the Thangmi-Newar Ritual Relationship: An Analysis of Devikot-Khadga Jatra in Dolakha, Nepal Sara Shneiderman Introduction1 Every year on the tenth day of the autumn Dasain (Daśaĩ) festival, a diverse crowd gathers in the courtyard of Devikot (Devīkoṭ), a temple complex dedicated to the tantric goddess Tripura-Sundari (Tripurā-Sundarī) in the historic town of Dolakha (Dolakhā), in Nepal’s central-eastern district of the same name.2 The crowd is here to watch two men go into trance and drink the blood of a live buffalo calf. The blood drinkers are members of the Thangmi ethnic group, a population of approximately 40,000 who speak a Tibeto-Burman language and are marginalized within Nepal’s ethnic and caste hierarchies.3 These men’s possession, which culminates in a dramatic act of impurity — drinking the blood of an animal which symbolizes the demonic realm — is the visual highlight of a much larger ritual cycle comprised of the two festivals of Devikot Jatra (Devīkoṭ jātrā) and Khadga 1 This paper is based on research conducted in 1999-2000, which was funded by a Fulbright Fellowship administered by the United States Education Foundation in Nepal, and in 2001-2005 by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Additional funds were provided by the Department of Anthropology and the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. I thank Bir Bahadur Thami, Ram Bahadur Thami, Sukhbir Thami, and Surya Krishna Shrestha for their help in the field, and Mark Turin, Jane Marie Law, Marie Lecomte-Tilouine and Martin Gaenszle for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I am indebted to Pushpa Hamal, Prerana Rai, and Suren Thami for their translations of Nepali materials. 2 I have included diacritic transliteration at the first instance of indigenous names, except for personal, ethnic and place names for which there are standard English spellings, such as “Thangmi”, “Newar”, “Kathmandu” and “Nepal”. All foreign terms are Nepali, unless otherwise indicated as Thangmi or Newar. 3 “Thangmi” is the indigenous ethnonym used by members of the group to refer to themselves. “Thami” is the Nepali derivative