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

introduction 5
What was especially interesting, however, was that it sounded archaic. These
are siren voices, and anthropologists do not listen to them.
I returned to Nepal as soon as I had completed my doctorate, with the aim
of finding out more about this exotic, archaic village. Nyima met me on the day
I arrived. I hardly recognised him. He was stout and well-dressed and he had a
gold tooth. He had left his job in the sweatshop and entered the lucrative goldsmuggling
business, which was then at its height. I could not hope to employ
him as an assistant at a competitive salary, but he agreed to help me whenever
he was in Nepal—which, as it turned out, was frequently—on the condition
that I did not pay him. He preferred, he said, to work out of interest and
friendship rather than to be an unreliable employee.
Lengthy periods of fieldwork in Te were out of the question because Upper
Mustang, where the village is located, was still prohibited to foreigners.
A handful of European scholars had visited Mustang in the past, but their interest
had been directed to the northern, Tibetan-speaking area, which had the
special attraction of boasting a walled city and a king. Perhaps the only author
to have said anything of interest about Te and its neighbours was Christoph
von Fürer-Haimendorf, who had described the people as ‘‘Ur-Thakalis.’’ The
Thakalis are an ethnic group who live primarily in south Mustang, below the
Tibetan-speaking area, and the language spoken in Te is a variety of Thakali.
The Thakalis have attracted the attention of an even more researchers than
have the Sherpas. It was known that they had gone through successive phases
of acculturation by the Tibetan north and the Indo-Aryan south. The Tepas (the
people of Te), as ‘‘Ur-Thakalis,’’ might offer a clue to an earlier phase of civilisation
in Mustang (Fürer-Haimendorf 1966: 157; 1975: 132–203).
The idea was not completely fantastic. I knew that animal sacrifices to
territorial gods had been common practice in the Tibetan-speaking area within
living memory, and that all the villages had abandoned such rites at the instigation
of one or another Buddhist or Bonpo missionary from Tibet. The
custom of blood-offerings still persisted in Te. (Much later I was to discover
that Te was not in fact alone in this regard—at least two other villages in the
north still offer animals to their gods.) The survival of the tradition was likely to
be an indicator of the endurance of other aspects of pre-Buddhist religion, and
the probability of this was increased by the evident conservatism of the culture.
Contrary to the case of other villages, the headmen of Te were endowed with
real authority to maintain both secular and religious traditions and to punish
even minor violations of customary law.
Fieldwork at this time, I have said, was necessarily an exiguous aspect
of my research, and most of the information was gathered by Nyima, who
paid visits to the village with a tape recorder and a list of questions, or by