Rethinking Tibeto-Burman:
Linguistic Identities and Classifications
in the Himalayan Periphery
Mark Turin
University of Cambridge & Cornell University
© Mark Turin
Introduction
‘To be human you must have a tribe. To have tribe you must have
mother tongue’ stated a Shona tribesman, when asked by the fieldworker
John Hofman for a definition of his identity (1977: 289). While by no
means a universal truth, this assertion encapsulates a widespread sentiment
held by both indigenous peoples and those who study them that language
and identity are inextricably linked. In this short article, I offer
some structured reflections on linguistic identities along the Tibetan
margins and the classificatory tools that are used to define them. In
particular, I argue against the uncritical extension of models of linguistic
classification to categorise ethnic communities in the Himalayan periphery.
Invoking and debunking Tibeto-Burman
It is common practice for scholars to refer to many of the minority
ethnic groups of the greater Tibetan and Himalayan region as ‘Tibeto-Burman’.
The terms ‘Tibeto-Burman ethnic group’ and ‘Tibeto-Burmese
people’ often appear as erroneous short cuts for an array of standard
characteristics believed to be shared by various peoples: being more
egalitarian, consuming alcohol and meat, practising shamanism and animism,
and generally not being part of one of the ‘great’ religious
traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism which surround them.
The incorrect deployment of linguistic terminology to convey ethnic
or social characteristics is extremely common in Himalayan studies,
as illustrated by the following few examples. The anthropologist James
Fisher writes that the ‘predominantly rural population at the
periphery, whether Tibeto-Burmese [sic] or Indo-Aryan, was too remote,
scattered, poor, and uneducated to launch an effective movement against
the powerful groups which controlled the centre’ (1997: 13). The
French scholar Gérard Toffin addresses the ‘classifications
of the Tibeto-Burman hill tribes into Tamang, Gurung, Magar, Rai, Thakali…’
(1981: 39, cited in Gellner et al. 1997: 15), while Christian Schicklgruber
suggests that ‘the Khumbo’ are distinct from ‘many
other Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups’ in terms of marriage practices
(1993: 343). The Nepali intellectual Prayag Raj Sharma describes the
Newars of the Kathmandu Valley as being of ‘mixed Indo-Aryan and
Tibeto-Burman extraction’ (1993: 364) and the British-trained
anthropologist Gil Daryn describes the Magar and Rai communities as
‘both of Tibeto-Burmese [sic] origin’ (2003: 171). Health
care professionals are also wont to conflate linguistic with ethnic
classifications, as illustrated by Pratima Poudel Acharya and Fiona
Alpass who posit that their ‘data analysis showed Indo-Aryan and
lower caste ethnic groups had significantly lower weight babies than
Tibeto-Burman and Newar groups’ (2004: 40). As a final example
of the imprudent mainstreaming of linguistic classification to map ethnic
or social categories we need look no further than the Encyclopædia
Britannica, the bastion of trusted popular information, from which we
learn that:
Of the three principal ethnic groups in the Indian subcontinent—Indo-Europeans,
Tibeto-Burmans, and Dravidians—the first two are well represented
in the Himalayas, although they are mixed in varying proportions in
different areas. (2004)
Although widely used and generally accepted, such uses of the term
‘Tibeto-Burman’ warrant closer examination and critical
re-evaluation. First of all, no group or person can be said to be, or
speak, ‘Tibeto-Burman’, since Tibeto-Burman is simply the
language family which comprises all extant and extinct languages under
its umbrella. Tibeto-Burman is therefore neither an ‘ethnic’
category nor is it a classification which can be used to impute socio-cultural
behaviour. Just as nobody actually speaks ‘Romance’, or
is ‘Germanic’, so too there are there no speakers of a language
called ‘Tibeto-Burman’ and no clear set of cultural characteristics
which can be attributed to all ethnic communities who speak languages
belonging to this family. Instead, we may simply say that the Himalayan
region is home to millions of mother-tongue speakers of languages which
are part of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Finally, the term ‘Tibeto-Burmese’,
illustrated in two of the above examples, is as linguistically inaccurate
as it is ethnically dubious. While referring to the language family
as ‘Sino-Tibetan’ or ‘Sino-Bodic’ rather than
‘Tibeto-Burman’ implies that one is taking a stance on the
genetic affiliations of subgroupings within the language family, the
term ‘Tibeto-Burmese’ is simply incorrect and conveys no
specific cultural or linguistic meaning.
There are several reasons why the above point is worth making. First,
the phrase ‘Tibeto-Burman (speaking) ethnic group’ betrays
a widespread misunderstanding of linguistic classification and a reluctance
on the part of many non-linguists to examine what the term actually
conveys in the greater Himalayan context. Second, and more importantly,
the proliferation of this vague ethnolinguistic category implies a sense
of cohesion between an ancestral origin and a contemporary, spoken mother
tongue, when in fact such cohesion rarely exists. Similarly, just because
English and German are related languages, it does not necessarily follow
that this close linguistic relationship engenders an intimate social
tie or shared cultural worldview between English and German speakers.
In the context of Nepal, for example, a case in point are the Newar,
who speak a Tibeto-Burman language but whose culture has been so profoundly
influenced by values from the south, that it would be incorrect to represent
the whole Newar population as sharing cultural traits with ethnic groups
in Yúnnán—who also speak Tibeto-Burman languages—solely
on the basis of linguistic classification. This point was succinctly
made by the Newar linguist Kamal Prakash Malla when he spoke of Newar
literature being the ‘most tangible evidence of the symbiosis
between a Tibeto-Burman language and the Indo-Aryan culture’ (1982:
4).
Malla’s example is particularly apt since the term ‘Tibeto-Burman
speaking’ is often used to convey the sense that a community has
no historical literary tradition or documented written culture. The
Newar of the Kathmandu valley and beyond, with their ornate architecture,
refined art and classical language, are thus Tibeto-Burman in linguistic
classification only and share few of the typical or ascribed characteristics
of minority ethnic communities who speak Tibeto-Burman languages. Similarly,
aside from linguists, it is distinctly rare for scholars of or from
Tibet to refer to Tibetans as speaking a ‘Tibeto-Burman language’,
even though the classification would be correct. Literate forms, such
as Tibetan and Burmese, are thus commonly held to be the parent languages
from which other spoken tongues derive, placing them hierarchically
above modern ‘Tibeto-Burman languages’.
__________________________
I am grateful to Professor Dr. George van Driem, Dr. Daniel
Barker, Heleen Plaisier and Sara Shneiderman for their valuable comments
on earlier versions of this paper. Sections of this paper were presented
at the Agenda of Transformation: Inclusion in Democracy conference in
Nepal in April 2003, then under the title ‘The many tongues of the
nation: ethnolinguistic politics in post-1990 Nepal’.
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