This beautifully crafted monograph enriches our appreciation of the cultural strategies of Himalayan communities and showcases the sophistication of the civil institutions that shape people's lives. Drawing on local sources, Western writings, and oral history, Ramble introduces the inhabitants of Te, in Mustang, Nepal, and explodes common misconceptions without appearing to scold. Later chapters illustrate Ramble's interdisciplinary edge. Drawing on sources as diverse as architecture and archaeology, irrigation, and Tibetan texts, the author unpicks the complexities of village strategies of cooperation to show how solidarity and secrecy are integral to the formation of local political relationships.
These lasting alliances between settlements were designed to be pragmatic agreements in the common interest based on “shared obligations to the regional administration” and their “ethnic distinctiveness” (p. 71). The insular “tightness” that results, an intimacy so difficult for outsiders to penetrate, manifests itself not only in a unique internal administrative and civic system, but, more impressively, in the “near-elimination from the community of what conventionally passes for religion” (p. 72). This extraordinary development serves as an intellectual backdrop to much of the book.
But Te is no secular backwater: the village is home to Molha Chutsen Nyenpo, a fallen star who landed by the river bank and is now revered as the mother goddess of the entire settlement. What could be the role of a mother goddess in a village free of organized, traditional religion, and how do conventional beliefs penetrate it?
The author paints a picture of business-like lamas and commonsensical clients who function in a socioreligious climate where compromise is valued. In Te, priests were free to “devote their energies to the prosperity of the household, either working on the land or trading” (p. 184). Ramble situates the collection of activities conventionally referred to as religion firmly within the boundaries of everyday life rather than outside of it.
While the pacification of a pagan landscape by encroaching Buddhist forces has been an enduring theme in the scholarly literature on Tibet, the degree to which this Buddhicization was “piecemeal and haphazard” (p. 188) is truly surprising. In Te, as in other locations across Mustang, the landscape is studded with territorial gods. These place-bound deities have “position but no substance” (p. 202): they are from Te and of Te, and in some ways, they are Te, and the villagers remain adept at reconfiguring space in order to bring the divine closer to hand.
The “lazy sobriquet of syncretism” is too easy a phrase that leaves “unexplored the principles underlying the selection of elements from Buddhism and their integration—or confrontation—with pagan interests” (p. 215). And if a clash exists at the conceptual level between Te's local territorial cult and the “soteriological creed” that is Buddhism, this is not manifested in the minds of the villagers. The ends-justify-the-means approach to the buffet of religious, moral, and customary life choices in Te displays no signs of confusion for its industrious inhabitants (cf. p. 232). Whether civil or religious, then, social life in Te is as much about alliance as it is about belief.
Not only is Buddhism “kept at arm's length” by the inhabitants of Te, but—more dramatically still—“tenets that are seen as inimical to village tradition are rejected” (p. 233). The image of a civil, pagan “ivy” growing out of the cracked brickwork of Buddhist infrastructure is searing. One can only imagine the profound challenge that this would have posed to any itinerant proselytizing lama hoping to convert this village of functionalists. Even in Mustang, it seems that Durkheim is never far away.
Yet, Te's richly woven civil fabric is made up of independent people with specific needs, and the author turns his attention to individual estates as the focus of “affective and economic interest” (p. 267). While certain public events encourage villagers to think about “how the community might best be sustained and protected,” these are blessedly infrequent, after which they can “stop worrying about the village as a whole and bring their attention back to the problems of their own estates” (p. 304). What is good for individuals is good for society, and the constitution of the village remains a far more effective “nomic edifice” than either Buddhism or the local territorial cults of the area.
General readers should not be put off by the apparently esoteric nature of this important work. It is Ramble's singular ethnographic achievement to extrapolate from a village of forty-eight houses in borderland Nepal a narrative that speaks to wider, theoretical issues. With a powerful and well-wrought conclusion that brings the book to a close, this excellent monograph can be read in its entirety or as a series of discrete lectures on the civil, religious, and psychological frames that shape Tibetan culture.
