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Hope, Negation, and Becoming in Changing “Ethnic” Claims by People of Byans, Far Western Nepal

Sun, June 26, 3:00 to 4:50pm, Shikokan (SK), Floor: 1F, 121

Abstract

The people who share the ethnonym “Rang” have lived in and around three Himalayan valleys of Byans, Chaudans, and Darma. Their homeland has been politically divided between Nepal and India for nearly two centuries, though they have kept their sociocultural unity and identity across the border. Politically marginalized within the (then) world’s only Hindu kingdom of Nepal, Rangs in Nepal repeatedly argued to various outsiders from South Asia and beyond in Nepali, Pahari, and English that they were Hindus (more specifically Matwali Chhetris) throughout the latter half of twentieth century. A crucial corollary of this claim which they tried to persuade to these outsiders was that they were not Buddhists and thus not Tibetans. In the twenty-first century, however, they started to claim in these languages that they are Rang, one of the indigenous janajatis (nationalities) in Nepal. What has really been at stake in these different claims, in which they have tried to become someone within other people’s ethnogreligious imaginations? One plausible answer would be that they have hoped to be treated with respect by their compatriots, responding to the changing state policies and global discourse on minority while securing their own social world almost intact. More specifically I focus on the contrast between the moment of waiting always accompanying these claims and their immediate wrathful rejection against (what they regard as) pejorative behaviour toward them, critically referring to Hirokazu Miyazaki’s conception of the method of hope.

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