THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

Others have suggested that there may be broader, cultural attitudes
affecting how particular groups perceive new possibilities and
limitations in their environment. FUrer-Haimendorf (1975:288-89) talks
of the different 'social outlook' of the (predominantly Indo-Nepalese)
'cautious cultivators' and the (predominantly Tibetan) 'adventurous
traders'.
However, most social anthropologists choose to look below this leve!
in their researches, For them, to broach the question 'who are the
people' leads directly into the subject of ethnicity, a topic of ever-
burgeoning interest within social anthropology, and one which is
particularly relevant to the anthropology of Nepal. As with most of the
richest concepts in social anthropology, ethnicity is "a term that
invites endless and fruitless definitional argument among those
professional intellectuals who think that they know, or ought to know,
what it means" (Chapman et 81 1989: l l), For the purposes of this
thesis, I would accept the broad definition that ethnicity is concerned
''with subnational units, or minorities of some kind or another", and
that as such it is a phenomenon "to be subsumed under the general study
of the classification of people (by themselves and others)", which in
turn is subsumed by c!assification in general, "an area of expertise
that anthropology has made its own" (ibid:17),
The anthropology of Nepal has long been concerned wi th subnat ional ,
minority cultural units, yet there has been a tendency to see the
quest ion of how these are defined as unproblemat ic. The basic
ethnographic 'spade work' mentioned above has been liable to present
particular tribal, caste or ethnic groups as cultural isolates, This
reflects the understandable need for simple boundaries when undertaking