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Abstract
This article examines jāt (‘caste, ethnicity’) through the lens of signed conversations in contemporary eastern Nepal, where both intimacy and inequality characterise inter-jāt relations. Local deaf and hearing people refer in sign to a person’s jāt with an action taken as emblematic of that jāt, such as drinking alcohol. Signers use the same phrases to discuss persons’ actions, which may or may not conform to typifications. Analysing signed discourse reveals that people negotiate a shifting social landscape through an approach to bodies as ontologically dual, belonging both to selves with idiosyncratic habits and to jāt groups with prescribed and proscribed practices.
Acknowledgements
My gratitude is first and foremost to the people in Nepal with whom I have worked, for their time, patience and generosity, not to mention food, tea and alcohol. Thank you to Eric Plemons for organising a conference in 2012 where I presented some very preliminary thoughts on this topic, to Lawrence Cohen for helping me think more carefully about (narratives of) change, and to Bharat Venkat, Rishav Kumar Thakur, Amy Johnson, Sherry Ortner, the audience of a virtual talk at UCLA, Kama Maclean, and an anonymous South Asia reviewer, who all offered encouraging and generative questions and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
*This article is in memory of Amrita Pariyar, who taught me a great deal about signing and jāt and who is missed.
1. This article is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted from late April 2010 to October 2010 in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe. In return trips during 2012, 2015 and 2018, I did not observe changes in how people signed (about) jāt. I also draw indirectly on my involvement with deaf communities elsewhere in Nepal, especially the Kathmandu Valley, from 2002 onwards. Unless otherwise noted, names of places and people are real: see E. Mara Green, ‘The Nature of Signs: Nepal’s Deaf Society, Local Sign, and the Production of Communicative Sociality’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2014.
2. Following conventions in sign language linguistics and Deaf Studies, I gloss signs in ALL CAPS (ITALICISED for glosses in Nepali) and indicate with hyphenation when multiple words gloss a single sign.
3. JĀT, jāt and the Nepali variant jāti each encompass what in English, and indeed some registers of NSL (Nepali Sign Language) and Nepali, is divided into caste and ethnicity.
4. While all language use implicates questions of epistemology as well as ontology, my claim regarding duality is about the body itself, rather than about ways of knowing the body.
5. McKim Marriott, ‘Hindu Transactions without Dualism’, in B. Kapferer (ed.), Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976), pp. 109–40; and McKim Marriott, ‘Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 23, no. 1 (1989), pp. 1–39. For Marriott, the inseparability of doing and being relates to dividualism: how persons are bound to others and in potential flux through the exchange of the substance-code that constitutes both persons and non-person entities (such as food). See also Celayne Heaton-Shrestha, ‘The Ambiguities of Practising Jat in 1990s Nepal: Elites, Caste and Everyday Life in Development NGOs’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 27, no. 1 (2004), pp. 39–63.
6. Declan Quigley, The Interpretation of Caste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Ramnarayan S. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
7. See András Höfer, The Caste Hierarchy and the State in Nepal: A Study of the Muluki Ain of 1854 (Lalitpur, Nepal: Himal Books, 2004 [1979]); Mary Cameron, On the Edge of the Auspicious: Gender and Caste in Nepal (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998); William F. Fisher, Fluid Boundaries: Forming and Transforming Identity in Nepal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Arjun Guneratne, Many Tongues, One People: The Making of Tharu Identity in Nepal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Sara Shneiderman, ‘Reframing Ethnicity: Academic Tropes, Recognition beyond Politics, and Ritualized Action between Nepal and India’, in American Anthropologist, Vol. 116, no. 2 (2014), pp. 279–95; Dinesh Paudel, ‘Ethnic Identity Politics in Nepal: Liberation from, or Restoration of, Elite Interest?’, in Asian Ethnicity, Vol. 17, no. 4 (2016), pp. 548–65; Dambar Dhoj Chemjong, ‘“Limbuwan Is Our Home, Nepal Is Our Country”: History, Territory, and Identity in Limbuwan’s Movement’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, 2017; and Andrea J. Nightingale et al., ‘The Material Politics of Citizenship: Struggles over Resources, Authority and Belonging in the New Federal Republic of Nepal’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 5 (2019), pp. 886–902.
8. See Jill Jepson, ‘Two Sign Languages in a Single Village in India’, in Sign Language Studies, no. 70 (1991), pp. 47–59; Raghav Bir Joshi, ‘Nepal: A Paradise for the Deaf?’, in Sign Language Studies, no. 71 (1991), pp. 161–8; Shilu Sharma, Nepāli Sāngketik Bhāshāko Udbhawa, Bikās ra Swarup (Origin, Development and Structure of NSL) (Kathmandu: Rupak Smriti Pratishthān, 2016 VS); Annelies Kusters, ‘Deaf on the Lifeline of Mumbai’, in Sign Language Studies, Vol. 10, no. 1 (2009), pp. 36–68; Upendra Khanal, ‘Age-Related Sociolinguistic Variation in Sign Languages, with Particular Reference to Nepali Sign Language’, unpublished paper, Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi, India, 2012; Green, The Nature of Signs; Michele Friedner, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Ishaare: Gestures and Signs in Mumbai (dir. Annelies Kusters, prod. MPI-MMG, 2016) [https://vimeo.com/142245339, accessed 31 Oct. 2021]; Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway, Signing and Belonging in Nepal (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2016); and Peter Graif, Being and Hearing: Making Intelligible Worlds in Deaf Kathmandu (Chicago, IL: Hau Books, 2018).
9. Exceptions include Jepson, ‘Two Sign Languages in a Single Village in India’; Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway, ‘Lending a Hand: Competence through Cooperation in Nepal’s Deaf Associations’, in Language in Society, Vol. 40, no. 3 (2011), pp. 285–306; Kusters, Annelies, and Sujit Sahasrabudhe, ‘Language ideologies on the difference between gesture and sign,’ in Language & Communication, Vol. 60 (2018), pp. 44–63; and E. Mara Green, ‘Performing Gesture: The Pragmatic Functions of Pantomimic and Lexical Repertoires in a Natural Sign Narrative’, in Gesture, Vol. 16, no. 2 (2017), pp. 329–63.
10. See, for example, Susan Goldin-Meadow, The Resilience of Language: What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us about How All Children Learn Language (New York: Psychology Press, 2003); and Mark Aronoff et al., ‘The Roots of Linguistic Organization in a New Language’, in Interaction Studies, Vol. 9, no. 1 (2008), pp. 133–53.
11. On these and related categories, see Irit Meir et al., ‘Emerging Sign Languages’, in Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 267–80.
12. In other contexts, this sign means nature, natural(ly) or learned on one’s own, i.e. not in a formal educational setting. NSL signers talk about NSL as learned in places like deaf schools and deaf organisations and about natural sign as learned in homes and neighbourhoods.
13. For more on natural and local sign and their relationship to home sign and village sign languages, see Green, The Nature of Signs, pp. 77–86. When writing about signed communication in Nepal that is not NSL, Graif in Being and Hearing uses the terms home sign, natural sign, and local sign while Hoffmann-Dilloway primarily uses the term homesign(s) in Signing and Belonging in Nepal and ‘Figure (of Personhood) Drawing: Scaffolding Signing and Signers in Nepal’, in Signs and Society, Vol. 8, no. 1 (2020), pp. 35–61, and natural sign in ‘Images and/as Language in Nepal’s Older and Vulnerable Deaf Person’s Project’ in Semiotic Review, Vol. 9 (2021).
14. This mixture of lean conventionality and immanence is reflected in how I came to use and understand sign in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe. At first, I drew on my prior experience using natural sign, albeit in Kathmandu, and also relied on translations, especially by Bhola Thapa, the deaf teacher of the NSL class. Over time, I learned more local signed conventions as well as more about the socio-material contexts in which these conventions are used.
15. Green, The Nature of Signs; and E. Mara Green, ‘The Eye and the Other: Language and Ethics in Deaf Nepal,’ in American Anthropologist (forthcoming).
16. Krishna P. Adhikari and David N. Gellner, ‘New Identity Politics and the 2012 Collapse of Nepal’s Constituent Assembly: When the Dominant becomes “Other”’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 50, no. 6 (2016), pp. 2009–40.
17. See, for example, Fisher, Fluid Boundaries; and Guneratne, Many Tongues, One People.
18. See Paudel, ‘Ethnic Identity Politics in Nepal’.
19. I thank Durga Chemjong for sharing these data.
20. Regarding the 2015 changes to administrative boundaries, see Nightingale et al., ‘The Material Politics of Citizenship’, p. 892.
21. Höfer, The Caste Hierarchy and the State in Nepal, p. 9.
22. Government of Nepal, National Population and Housing Census 2011 (Village Development Committee/Municipality): Dhankuta (Kathmandu: Central Bureau of Statistics, 2012).
23. It would be interesting to learn more about whether and which shopkeepers owned or rented the buildings in which they ran their businesses. On questions of land ownership in eastern Nepal, see Chemjong, ‘“Limbuwan Is Our Home, Nepal Is Our Country”’; and Lionel Caplan, Land and Social Change in East Nepal: A Study of Hindu–Tribal Relations (Lalitpur, Nepal: Himal Books, 2000 [1970]).
24. A young Limbu woman argued with him, and he revised his opinion: younger generations can understand Limbu but not speak it.
25. Fieldnotes, 25 May 2010.
26. I unfortunately do not have data for other spoken languages in the area such as Limbu, but to the best of my knowledge, they also have category-level terms.
27. Similar to the setting described by Cameron (On the Edge of the Auspicious, p. 15), this and other Dalit hamlets are not outside village boundaries.
28. Fieldnotes, 23 Oct. 2010.
29. The commercial tailors I know sew on machines, but the form of the sign, bivalent in natural sign and NSL, enacts the hand guiding a needle through fabric. Iconicity bears traces of the past.
30. The table relies on my fieldnotes and videos as well as on my embodied knowledge of natural sign in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe. Regrettably, I do not know how natural signers name Rais or Yakkhas nor how and in what contexts they distinguish among Limbus, Rais and Yakkhas. There was one Yakkha participant in the NSL class, but he stopped attending regularly. For discussion of the relationships among these groups, see Chemjong, ‘“Limbuwan Is Our Home, Nepal Is Our Country”’.
31. Höfer, The Caste Hierarchy and the State in Nepal, p. 10.
32. That Tamangs are not referred to in natural sign as such indicates that natural signers have made further typifying distinctions.
33. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability, pp. 5, 8–9.
34. Mary Des Chene, ‘Is Nepal in South Asia? The Condition of Non-Postcoloniality’, in Studies in Nepali History and Society, Vol. 12, no. 2 (2007), pp. 207–23, cited in Sara Shneiderman, ‘The Affective Potentialities and Politics of Ethnicity, Inc. in Restructuring Nepal: Social Science, Sovereignty, and Signification’, in George Paul Meiu et al. (eds), Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), p. 195–223.
35. Höfer, The Caste Hierarchy and the State in Nepal, p. 17.
36. Shneiderman, ‘Reframing Ethnicity’.
37. Chemjong, ‘“Limbuwan Is Our Home, Nepal Is Our Country”’, p. 101.
38. Nepal National Federation of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (NFDH), Nepāli Sānketik Bhāshāko Shabdakosh (Nepali Sign Language Dictionary) (Kathmandu: NFDH, 2003), pp. 59–61; see also Sarah Taub, Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), on the ‘schematization’ involved in signed language iconicity.
39. Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway, ‘Many Names for Mother: The Ethno-Linguistic Politics of Deafness in Nepal’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 33, no. 3 (2010), pp. 421–41.
40. Gellner and Adhikari, ‘New Identity Politics and the 2012 Collapse of Nepal’s Constituent Assembly’, p. 22. See also Shneiderman’s analysis of an image of ‘Madhesi (plains-dwellers) protestors, dressed in dhoti, holding signs demanding a dhoti pradesh, or a “dhoti state”’. She argues that, in Nepal, the ‘expert objectification’ of/by certain ethnicities through emblematic symbols has been possible because these ethnic groups live in the hills and (are able to) present themselves as ‘Pahadis (hill-dwellers) with a difference (from the dominant high-caste norm)…but still Pahadis’ and thus unquestionably ‘Nepali’, whereas Madhesis’ cultural objectifications risk being read as ‘Indian’: Shneiderman, ‘The Affective Potentialities and Politics of Ethnicity, Inc. in Restructuring Nepal’, pp. 213, 210–1. Research on natural signs for Madhesi jāt groups would be interesting in this regard.
41. Some Limbu clans are prohibited from eating pork: Pauline Limbu, personal communication; see also Chemjong, ‘“Limbuwan Is Our Home, Nepal Is Our Country”’, p. 67.
42. Similarly, in On the Edge of the Auspicious, Cameron writes: ‘Applying the label occupational to low-caste work in general is misleading because although it may accurately describe many low-caste men’s work, it does not accurately describe the productive work of today’s untouchable women’ (p. 127, italics in original).
43. NFDH, Nepāli Sānketik Bhāshāko Shabdakosh (Nepali Sign Language Dictionary).
44. See also Hoffmann-Dilloway, ‘Lending a Hand’, pp. 294–5; and Green, ‘Performing Gesture’, pp. 334–5, on NSL classes for natural signers.
45. Fieldnotes, 9 June 2010.
46. My use of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ here reflects NSL pedagogical practices, in which teachers did not hesitate to tell their students when they deemed their answers (in)correct.
47. Description of conversation based on 18 May 2010 video.
48. Several minutes later, Chandra says that he eats pork, buffalo and bull/ox, though not cow.
49. Description of conversation based on 6 Aug. 2010 video.
50. A pseudonym.
51. Seale-Feldman’s essay on the relational quality of affliction in Nepal draws inspiration from Skultans’ work on substitution, or the ‘movement of illness between family members’. Embodied relationality and substitution both help to explain how family members’ habits relate to one’s own: see Veida Skultans, ‘The Management of Mental Illness among Maharashtrian Families: A Case Study of a Manubhav Healing Temple’, in Man, Vol. 11, no. 4 (1987), pp. 661–79, cited in Aidan Seale-Feldman, ‘Relational Affliction: Reconceptualizing “Mass Hysteria”’, in Ethos, Vol. 47, no. 3 (2019), pp. 307–25.
52. Marriott of course did not necessarily believe that people always acted in accordance with prescriptions; his focus was on understanding how the people with whom he worked understood the relationship between being and doing: Bharat Venkat, personal communication, 2020, telephone conversations in Los Angeles, CA, USA. I have sought to show here that the people with whom I work frame that relationship in two distinct ways. It is interesting to consider how the differences between Marriott’s conclusions and my own might be based in, among other factors, the regions where and years when we worked, our particular ethnographic perspectives, or the focal communicative practices in question.
53. According to the Muluki Ain, in the past, doing did have effects on being, at least legally. Of course, it may well do so today in non-categorical terms, and with important variations across region, gender, class and jāt. Mark Liechty analyses how shifts in middle-class norms create disparate effects and demands on men and women: Mark Liechty, ‘Women and Pornography in Kathmandu: Negotiating the “Modern Woman” in a New Consumer Society’, in Shona Munshi (ed.), Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia: Global Media/Local Meanings (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001), pp. 34–54.
54. Shneiderman, ‘Reframing Ethnicity’.
55. William F. Hanks, Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
56. See Green, The Nature of Signs, pp. 140–1.
57. Friedner, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India.
58. See Green, The Nature of Signs, pp. 64–76.
59. See also Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters, ‘On the Possibilities and Limits of “DEAF DEAF SAME”: Tourism and Empowerment Camps in Adamorobe (Ghana), Bangalore and Mumbai (India)’, in Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, no. 3 (2014), pp. 1–22 [https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/4246/3649, accessed 21 Oct. 2021].
60. Don Kulick and Jens Rydström, Loneliness and Its Opposite (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).