David Holmberg

Ethnographic agency, field assistants and the rise of cultural activism in Nepal:

This paper explores 38 years of association and collaboration with Ngyema Karma Himdung in the genesis of ethnographic projects related to the western Tamang of Nepal. During this time, Tamang people have moved from the peripheral position of a degraded population to a dynamic presence in contemporary attempts to construct a ‘new Nepal’ and our work was structured in these transformations. I seek to point out how ethnographic agency paradoxically depends to a significant degree on the suspension of that very agency to the agency of others, including assistants, and how ethnographers and the communities among whom they live are in turn caught up in encompassing contexts where agency is always constrained in transforming culturally embedded structures of power. I conclude with discussion of the multiple institutional and ethical constraints at play in the question of recognition of field assistants.

Transcendence, power and regeneration in tamang shamanic practice

This article analyzes (1) the production of magical or symbolic power and (2) symbolic processes of transcendence in the rituals of Tamang shamans of highland Nepal, rituals that seek to transform the afflicted from abject subjects to active agents. In convergence with Terence Turner’s theoretical contributions to the study of ritual, this article argues that magical power produced by Tamang shamans in curative soundings as well as collective pilgrimages is a form of ‘alienated consciousness’ made possible through ritual processes of symbolic transcendence. I argue that shamans or bombo, through their transcendent moves, deconstruct orders produced elsewhere in socio-ritual life and, in the process, expose the constructedness or arbitrariness of those orders, laying the groundwork for transformation of afflicted subjects from abject to agential states both individually and collectively.