Many tongues, one people

Arjun Guneratne

What Benedict Anderson, Paul Brass, Anthony Smith and Fredrik Barth share, despite their very different approaches to the analysis of ethnicity and national identity, is the assumption that somewhere at the bottom of it all is culture. A shared culture — or at least, some shared significant symbol — is seen as fundamental to ethnic identity, even though scholars disagree whether the culture is of ancient provenance or a ‘construct’ of modern times. This book challenges these notions: using the example of the Tharus of Nepal to illustrate his case, the author argues that ethnicity does not have to be predicated on shared cultural symbols. On the contrary, a sense of shared ethnic identity can come about among culturally dissimilar groups based on their common relationship to the state. The term Tharu is an ethnonym shared by a number of culturally and linguistically diverse...

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