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

ethnographic fieldwork in a new area such as Nepal, but also a
traditional approach in social anthropology, which sees the description
of bounded cultural units (principally ethnic groups, studied at
community level) as the stock-in-trade of the anthropological
enterprise. However, this boundary is frequently one of the
anthropologist's @wn making rather than that of the people themselves.
We are thus in danger of perpetuating what Allen calls the "traditional
and stereotypic ethnographic map of a tribal area", Such a map "shows
a patchwork or mosaic of subareas, each with its own language, customs
and ethnonym, and the typical tribal study takes one such group as the
unit of description" (1981:168; cf. Holmberg !989:12-13).
What are the problems with what Allen labels the "one tribelone
culture" (1976:501> view? One is that the interact ion which there may
have been between a particular group and wider pan-Nepalese phenomena is
often downplayed, Similarities between the group in question and other
groups in Nepal can thus be overlooked. This is perhaps excusable
considering the cultural complexity of Nepal as a whole, the limited
amount of time a researcher of ten has in the field and the consequent
difficulties of accumulating comparative, contextualising data on the
group in question. Nepalese scholars are at an advantage here, because
when conducting research in their own country they should at least have
the contextual knowledge of their natal culture with which to compare
their fieldwork experiences, However, as the amount of ethnographic
data from across Nepal increases it should be possible for scholars from
whatever background to give a more comparative dimension to their
research.
This is necessary, because to write about an ethnic group as if it