Navel of the Demoness : Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in ...

2
Inside the Shöyul
As we have seen, the Shöyul, the five Seke-speaking communities of
Baragaon, became increasingly isolated by the cultural changes that
transformed the enclave. This is not to say that the five have been
preserved in an archaic condition while the rest of the world has gone
on without them. Far from it: the question of social change and its
management is a subject to which I shall give close attention in
later chapters. The point is that largely as a consequence of political
events in the region, probably beginning in the fifteenth century, there
was a bifurcation in the two parts of Baragaon that resulted in a
greater Tibetanisation of the south, the appearance of an increasingly
distinct linguistic and ethnic boundary, and the reification of the
Shöyul as a community.
The Shöyul we see today are not simply the result of five villages
waiting passively to be circumscribed and marginalised. They, too,
have seen internal movements, and indeed their present configuration
is largely the result of a demographic implosion that occurred
around three centuries ago. That the Shöyul do form a distinct enclave
within Baragaon was made clear in the previous chapter, where I
explored something of southern Bargaon’s perspective on the group
as both an ethnic anomaly and a political faction.
This chapter, which is divided into two parts, will examine the two
main processes whereby Taye, Tshug, Gyagar, Tsele, and Te became
a single community: first, the straightforward matter of the creation