The proposed paper is an inquiry into the psychology of caste and identity in Nepal. It asks whether inter-caste marriage can change the way in which people think of caste, and if so, how and to what extent.
The vast majority of people in Nepal view caste and ethnicity as categories of identity which are acquired at birth and which remain stable throughout an individual’s life course. This way of thinking represents a striking display of “psychological essentialism”, a cognitive bias well-known among psychologists (e.g. Gelman 2003), and which has come under recent anthropological scrutiny (e.g. Bloch, Solomon, and Carey 2001; Astuti et al. 2004; Regnier 2012).
Endogamy is believed to play a central role in the emergence of psychological essentialism (Gil-White 2001). Caste endogamy, therefore, likely forms an important part of the explanation for the aforementioned, essentialist construal of caste so common in Nepal. (On psychological essentialism and caste, see Mahalingam 1998) If this is the case, what happens for non-endogamous couples? Do they, so to speak, “escape” or “renounce” essentialist understandings of caste?
Anthropologists have noted dramatic shifts in marital practices in Nepal (Ahearn 2001), yet the specific cases of inter-caste and inter-ethnic marriage remain mostly unstudied (with the exception of a few, short reports submitted to the “Social Inclusion Research Fund” in Nepal: Kansakar and Ghimire (2008), Gurung (2011), and others. See also Mody (2008) for a more complete ethnography of mixed marriages in India). When such marriages occur, a number of questions arise: does one spouse “become” a member of the caste or ethnic group of the other? What happens to the children of such couples? Are they thought to be of “mixed” identity? If not, which of their parents’ identities do they inherit?
The paper focuses specifically on marriages between Dalit and non-Dalit people, by far the most controversial kind of marriage in Nepal because of the ongoing stigma of untouchability associated with being Dalit. The paper will show that while a small number of people are promoting “mixing” through exogamy in Nepal, such as the political actors behind the policy whereby NRs. 100’000 is offered to newly-wed Dalit/non-Dalit inter-caste couples, the idea of “mixing” and the notion that one might be of “mixed identity” is still mostly absent from the general population.
Surprisingly, this notion also seems foreign to many people themselves in inter-caste marriages. Part of the explanation for this absence might lie in the gap between the kind of inter-caste marriage envisioned by policy makers and the kind which actually takes place in non-urban contexts.
The paper is based on observations and interviews conducted and collected during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the hills of East Nepal, where I lived with a Bishwokarma family.