Order in Paradox Myth, Ritual, and Exchange Among Nepal's Tamang

David H. Holmberg here examines the social forms, ritual practices, and history of a western Tamang community of Himalayan Nepal. Exploring the central question of ritual complexity, Order in Paradox demonstrates how a religious system that contains Buddhist, shamanic, and sacrificial practices may be understood as a whole.

Holmberg begins by recounting the history of the Tamang and reexamining the meaning of caste, tribe, and ethnicity in greater Nepal. Holmberg reveals how cultural patterns thought to be uniquely Tamang reflect this people's development of an "involuted" "tribal" form of Buddhist religious expression―an evolution he interprets as a result in part of the unification of the Nepalese state. Holmberg then offers descriptions of the culture, mythic imagination, and ritual field of the Tamang. Exploring both structural and historical dimensions of Tamang rituals, Holmberg shows how they form a system linked to a cultural logic of exchange upon which Tamang society is built. He also sheds light on the relationship between gender and ritual, considering in detail the close association between femaleness and the shamanic in Tamang culture.

David H. Holmberg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University.