The Tharu of lowland Nepal are a group of culturally and
linguistically diverse people who, only a few generations ago,
would not have acknowledged each other as belonging to the same
ethnic group. Today the Tharu are actively redefining themselves as
a single ethnic group in Nepal's multiethnic polity. In Many
Tongues, One People, Arjun Guneratne argues that shared cultural
symbols -- including religion, language, and common myths of
descent -- are not a necessary condition for the existence of a
shared sense of peoplehood.
The many diverse and distinct socio-cultural groups sharing the
name "Tharu" have been brought together, Guneratne asserts, by a
common relationship to the state and a shared experience of
dispossession and exploitation that transcends their cultural
differences. Tharu identity, the author shows, has developed in
opposition to the activities of a modernizing, centralizing state
and through interaction with other ethnic groups that have
immigrated to the Tarai region where the Tharu live.
This book's claims have wide implications for the study of
ethnic identity and are applicable far beyond Nepal. The emergence
of the category of Native American, for example, may be considered
an analogous case because that ethnic identity, like the Tharu,
subsumes people of different cultural origin, and has been defined
both through the state and against it.
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