Identity

Author(s): Lauren Leve

Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 4 (August 2011), pp. 513-535
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011 513

Special Section: Keywords

Identity
by Lauren Leve

Identity is a key term for anthropological analysis today. This paper explores the challenge posed
by modernist Buddhists in Nepal who participated in identity politics while grounding their claims
to identity-based rights in belonging to a religious community defined by the doctrine that there is
no such thing as a self in the conventional sense. Examining the sharp proliferation of identity-
based discourses and claims in post-1990 Nepal in light of broader structural transformations as-
sociated with the globalization of neoliberal governance strategies and against the rise of a popular
vipassana meditation movement, I suggest that the rise of ethnoreligious politics in Nepal at that
time reflects the presence of a global identity machinean apparatus that establishes not only the
categories of identity recognized and claimed in democratic states but also, indeed, their very on-
tological foundations in liberal conceptions of self, citizenship, and social relations. Nepali Buddhists
who claim religious rights while also engaging in practices that challenge the very idea of identity
are at once participating in the ideological and institutional conditions of neoliberal modernity and
also reworking these in unexpected ways. This paradox calls on anthropologists to study the processes
that produce and extend particular ways of seeing and organizing the world rather than inadvertently
naturalizing them.

Identity is a powerful organizing presence in social life to-
daya social fact, or so it would, at least, seem. Whether
measured by the amount of energy individuals expend claim-
ing, cultivating, expressing, or bemoaning the lack of it or by
the amount of attention devoted to it by institutions that
profess to address or are said to reflect popular interests and
issues, it is clear that being, in the sense of belongingto
ethnic, national, religious, racial, indigenous, sexual, or any
of a range of otherwise affectively charged, socially recogniz-
able corporate groupsis among the most compelling of con-
temporary concerns. In part, this reflects the internationali-
zation of democratic laws and institutions since the end of
the Cold War, as also perhaps the increasing commodity value
of cultural difference (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). It
also suggests the presence of an increasingly global consensus
on the nature of human beings. In every call for the protection
of indigenous cultures or the recognition of minority rights,
behind each best seller that promises to help readers change
their lives by changing themselves, and underneath every dis-
Lauren Leve is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious
Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (125
Saunders Hall, CB 3225, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 275993225,
U.S.A. [lgleve@unc.edu]). This paper was submitted 25 XI 07 and
accepted 15 VI 09.
pute over the ownership and control of cultural property lies
the conviction that people have identities and that these are
vital aspects of social personhood.
Not surprisingly, over the past 2 or 3 decades, anthropo-
logical interests have turned to engage this phenomenon.
Thus, in addition to the old tradition of making the strange
familiar and the familiar strange, we now ask questions about
the experiences of life in different kinds of bodies and the
social, political, economic, and historical processes that in-
spire particular types of collectivity. Much of this disciplinary
interest is driven by the fact that identity has become a major
preoccupation for many of our interlocutors, of course. It
reflects changes in the meaning of culture as these interloc-
utors have begun to lay claim to their own histories and
cosmologies and, often, to the exclusive right to represent
themselves. Yet, deconstructing primordialisms and essen-
tialist claims of all kinds has also taken on a kind of moral
imperative in the wake of horrific ethnic-cleansing campaigns
and the rise of a virulent post-9/11 civilizational discourse.
Indeed, as the space between culture (as a taken-for-granted
order of symbols, institutions, structures, values, and/or be-
liefs) and identity (as a reflexive construct or experiential
modality through which one knows oneself and claims rec-
ognition) has seemed to shrink, identity has become, in effect,

2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2011/5204-0003$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/660999

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 514
a kind of metaculture: cultureto use the old Hegelian ter-
minologynot just in itself but for itself.
This complexity offers unique opportunitiesamong them
the chance to make anthropological research more publicly
relevant by aligning our work with causes we support. Indeed,
who could fail to appreciate the new paths to social justice
that identity-based mobilizations have opened up, including
the victories of social movements aimed at securing autonomy
and combating discrimination, exclusion, or other forms of
violence against some of the worlds most vulnerable peoples?
It is clear that legal recognition of identity-based injuries has
been instrumental in remedying wrongs and reshaping dem-
ocratic debate within nations and globally. One might even
say that the current public interest in identity has created a
kind of new political grammar for the redress of grievances
and staking of claims. From testifying in court on behalf of
native peoples, to the swelling disciplinary interest in human
rights and activism, to the continuing critiques of state vio-
lence and/or capitalist exploitation, to new explorations of
indigeneity, many anthropologists have embraced this new
politics and the opportunities it offers to put our expertise
to work on behalf of the people on whom our livelihoods
depend.
At the same time, however, the field has not adopted this
new identitarian imperative without ambivalence or critique.
Some ethnographers report being caught in powerful ethical
double binds when anthropological knowledge contradicts in-
digenous agendas or empowers some subgroups at the ex-
pense of others (see Hodgson 1999a, 1999b; Jackson 1989,
1995, see 1999). Others have noted the repressive conse-
quences of self-imposed essentialisms that condemn practices
(and persons) deemed not to conform to normative cultural
ideals (Appiah 1994; Gledhill 1997; van Beek 2001; Warren
1998), nor are anthropologists the only scholars to reflect on
these contradictions. Philosopher/cultural critic Anthony Ap-
piah has declared this violence such that the politics of rec-
ognition equals the politics of compulsion (Appiah 1992 in
Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001:18). Sociologist Paul Gil-
roy (2000) argues that identity-based discourses are rooted
in the same romantic historicism that led to European fascism.
Equally disturbing are suggestions that the current cultur-
alist wave may actually be undercutting those it claims to
empower. Studies have suggested that ethnic revivalism and
the resurgence of neotribal identities may themselves be
partial products of late capitalist accumulative techniques
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Harootunian 2002; Jackson
and Warren 2005; Kemper 2001; Kondo 1997; Plant 2002;
Povinelli 2001, 2002) and that legal changes that present
themselves as positive responses to minority demands may
also act as strategies for the cooptation and control of citizens
by states (Gledhill 1997; Hale 2002, 2005; Jung 2008; Merlan
2005, 2009; Nash 2001; Postero 2000, 2006; Povinelli 2002;
Rata 2003; Speed 2005; Speed and Sierra 2005). For instance,
Nancy Postero (2000) has described Bolivias multicultural
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
citizenship strategy of the 90s, which grants citizenship and
property rights to indigenous people not as individuals but
as members of corporate cultural groups, as the site at which
the push from below meets incorporation from above (13;
see Postero 2006). In the Bolivian case, Postero (2000)
writes, the practices of multicultural citizenship . . . structure
indigenous participation in neoliberal economic and political
processes (13); they are part of what Corrigan and Sayer
call the concrete forms of rule and ruling and what Foucault
has called governmentality (12).
What, then, are anthropologists doing when we study
identity? There is an awkwardness about affirming native
self-representations while stressing the contingencies that
brought these collectivities into being and/or continue to sus-
tain them. Moreover, there is a question of analytical clarity:
what happens when an analytical objectsay, culture or
identityis also allowed to operate as an interpretive term,
when a scholarly tool becomes its own subject? Like the other
authors in this special volume that addresses the relations
between anthropological keywords and neoliberal power, I
have been inspired by Jean Comaroff and John Comaroffs
(2001) caution not to be seduced into treating the ideological
tropes and surface forms of the culture of neoliberalism . . .
as analytic constructs (45). What Joan Scott (1992:45) says
of experiencethat it is not individuals who have expe-
rience, but subjects who are constituted through experience
and thus that the historians task is to focus not on experience
per se but on the conditions and means by which specific
kinds of experience come into beingapplies equally to an-
thropologists and identity.
This paper addresses these concerns by asking not about
the history or meaning of any particular collective identity
but about the epistemological status of identity as an object
in the world and of scholarly analysis. I argue that the pro-
liferation of identity-based claims and politics that is so visible
around the world today cannot be understood apart from a
powerful sociopolitical formation that I refer to as an identity
machinea transnational assemblage that is rapidly reor-
ganizing ways of being and knowing oneself and others in
liberal and neoliberal democracies, including the country
where I have been doing fieldwork since the early 90s, Nepal.
To be sure, this is not entirely new: the ascription and ma-
nipulation of social identities were key parts of colonial rule
(Cohn 1989; Dirks 1987, 2001; Mamdani 1996; Stoler 1991).
My concern here, however, is not the well-known fact that
governance may take place through identity but what is spe-
cifically neoliberal about the ways this is occurring today.
Materialized in the heavily promoted values, discourses, and
institutions associated with neoliberal democracy and devel-
opment, the identity machine produces not only the classes
and categories of social personhood that structure public rec-
ognition of social collectivities but, indeed, the very ontology
of identity itself. When scholars take identity as a universal
object or essential aspect of human existenceas, for ex-
Leve Identity
ample, when political theorist William Connolly (1995:xxiii)
says that identities exist and that the fugitive abundance of
being that they express is a vital aspect of democratic per-
sonhoodwe also help to naturalize neoliberal power and
cosmology.
The Buddhist Paradox
My interest in these problemswhich are, in fact, planetary1
in scopeemerged from ongoing research and dialogue with
Theravada Buddhists in and around the Kathmandu Valley,
dating back to the summer of 1990. It is fair to say that 1990
was the year that identity became part of Nepals political
landscape. That spring, a popular democracy movement (jana
andolan I) had compelled the king to abolish the Panchayat
system, ending 28 years of palace-based, one-party rule and
ushering in what was heralded as a new era of democratic
freedom. When a constitutional drafting committee was ap-
pointed to draw up the institutional infrastructure of the new
political order, the predominantly high-caste, Hindu, Nepali-
speaking politicians who had led the democracy movement
expected that the representative structure, control of the army,
and status of the monarchy would emerge to be the most
contentious issues. Indeed, cultural politics were not even on
the radar (Hutt 1994). But within weeks, hitherto unknown
organizations claiming to represent Nepals diverse ethnic
groups and religious minorities began to appear and to lobby
for constitutional provisions that included formal recognition,
minority rights, and the abolition of the countrys official
Hindu identity. Charging that Panchayat nationalism had ac-
tively repressed religious, linguistic, and cultural difference in
favor of policies that privileged the language, customs, and
religion of the ethnocultural group that Lawoti (2005) and
others refer to as the caste hill Hindu elite (CHHE), leaders
of these newly assertive ethnic communities (janajati) invoked
international discourses and UN conventions, including the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to support their con-
tention that unless and until Nepal adopted a specifically
secular, multicultural identity, it would not have achieved true
democracy. Today, these arguments seem remarkably presci-
ent, although it took a decade-long Maoist-led armed struggle
to abolish the monarchy and declare the country a secular
republic and despite the fact that Nepalis are waiting for yet
another constitution to be negotiated and released as different
groups take to the streets again and again.
In any case, in the summer and fall of 1990, Theravada
Buddhists were among the most active of the groups calling
for ethnic and religious equality. To do so, they networked
with ethnic activists and built alliances with Mahayana Bud-
dhists, Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities.
Monks gave lectures and offered instruction to ethnic groups
1. Here, I echo Paul Gilroys (2000) admittedly utopian vision of a
planetary humanism.
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515
seeking to reclaim the Buddhist backgrounds that many ja-
najatis now purported to have had before they were assimi-
lated into the Hindu state. Lay associations organized
marches, rallies, and other public eventsincluding the larg-
est political demonstration seen in Nepal up to that time,
when, marching under the sign of the international Buddhist
flag, Theravada monks, nuns, and more than 100,000 others
denounced the Panchayat-era definition of Nepal as a Hindu
kingdom and called on the state to formally recognize its
Buddhist citizens.2 When an elected government was installed
the following year, a Theravada monk even accepted an ap-
pointment to the upper house of Parliament, where he in-
troduced a bill that would have required the state to extend
what he perceived as full citizenship rights to all minority
groups, including self-avowed non-Hindus, by reconstituting
itself as a secular state. When the bill failed, Buddhist orga-
nizations continued the struggle through publications, sem-
inars, and Buddhist awareness programs until, by the late
90s, Maoist-state violence had escalated so much that the
religious leaders considered no activism safe.
All of these efforts amount to a sensible political strategy
for modernist Buddhist reformersas the Theravada leaders
werein a country that declared all citizens Hindus by virtue
of the kings position as head of state and that outlawed both
proselytization and conversion (as a result, most of the senior
monks and nuns had experienced jail or exile at least once
and many of their lay followers had been severely harassed).
Yet, the same group of people who took to the streets to
demand recognition did so in the name of a religion that
teaches that there is actually no such thing as a self! The
Buddhist doctrine of anatta-vada insists that wethat
which people everywhere in the world instinctively think of
as our selvesare merely the composite products of an
unceasing flow of physical and mental sensations and events
2. When the new constitution was promulgated in November, it re-
confirmed Nepals identity as an officially Hindu kingdom and thus
disappointed Buddhist demands (although it did recognize Nepals lin-
guistic and cultural diversity by providing various kinds of support and
protections for ethnic minorities). After an initial period of protest, Ther-
avada activists began to decrease their prosecularism activities. By 1995,
they had begun to back away from oppositional public events. By 2001,
they had laid down their political agenda because secularism was known
to be one of the Maoists main demands and, with the insurrection and
counterinsurgency raging, it was deemed too dangerous an issue to be
seen to embrace. Around 20022003, however, a young Theravada monk
began to organize a peace movement that became increasingly influential
over the next few years. In 2006, the king was deposed, and the Maoists
signed a comprehensive peace agreement with the civilian government,
following which an interim Parliament comprising nominees from dif-
ferent political parties and the Maoists was formed. At that time, the
Maoists recognized their shared political interests by appointing this
monk as a Member of Parliament, a position he accepted and performed
until new elections were held and the interim government was replaced
by a Constituent Assembly. I have written about this at greater length
elsewhere (Leve 2002, 2011).
 516
that arise, take form, and eventually dissolve away again.3 A
person is nothing more than the aggregated effect of these
formationsas the Buddha famously put it, a heapand
there is no substantive entity, no enduring, experiencing sub-
ject that is ontologically distinguishable from these processes
themselves. In other words, Buddhism teaches, the experience
of a unified self and hence of personal identity is ultimately
false.
Despite the centrality of this doctrine to Buddhist theory,
meditationand the sustained reflection on the principle of
nonself that this acetic technology bringshas historically
been reserved for monks and nuns; common advice for the
laity has been to act morally, to support the Sangha, and to
perform acts aimed at making merit. But since the late 80s
and early 90s, this has been changing. Several lay meditation
centers have been established in the Kathmandu Valley, and
increasing numbers of modernist Buddhist householders have
begun to engage Buddha dharma in a new way by practicing
vipassana, or insight-oriented meditation. The paradox pre-
sented by people who, on the one hand, understand that they
have no selves and, on the other, participate in identity politics
disrupts assumptions about identity that structure liberal law
and, in many cases, academic anthropology.
I first became aware of the specificity of the assumptions
that underlie conventional understandings of identity in an
interview that was one of the most frustrating moments of
my fieldwork in Nepal. On that afternoon, I had gone to the
home of a senior vipassana meditation instructor for a pre-
arranged interview. I had known Acharyaji for a few months
at that point, and when I asked him whether he would be
willing to set aside an hour or two to answer some questions,
he, seemingly happily, agreed. Yet, when we sat down together
in the living room of his home, he dismissed all of my ques-
tionsHow long have you been meditating? Under what
circumstances did you first come to take a vipassana course?
What made you decide that you wanted to become a med-
itation teacher?with a simple response: That doesnt mat-
ter. We drank tea and spoke comfortably about the weekly
group sittings he hosted at his house, my own recent expe-
rience at a vipassana retreat, and his daughters thesis on
Buddhist architectural history. But he systematically refused
to relate any personal experiences or to provide any kind of
narrative that would help me to construct an account of the
events by way of which he had become the person he is. I
left 2 hours later with little more information than I had
arrived with (or so I thought), feeling oddly betrayed and
thoroughly confused.
It was only later that I began to understand what had
happened that afternoon. In my concern to collect infor-
mationand my (correct) perception that has was resisting
3. Skanda (Sanskrit)/Khanda (Pali). These are physical form (rupa),
feelings/sensations (vedana), mental perceptions (samjna), mental dis-
positions/formations (samskara/sankhara), and consciousness (vijnana/
vinnana).
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
for reasons I didnt understandI failed to recognize that we
were drawing on radically different definitions of self-identity.
I had been trying to collect a life history from someone
who conceptualized life as nothing more than an imperma-
nent succession of mental and physical events. I had hoped
that he would offer me some kind of narrative of his own
subjective development that I could compare with develop-
ments at other scales of collectivityfor example, changes in
the Theravada community, changes among ethnic Newars,
and/or changes at the level of the nation-state. But Acharyaji
believed that the impression of the continuity of self over
time is an illusion: in fact, he thought it was the illusion that
binds living beings to the world of suffering (dukkha). In
hindsight, the notions of self and identity that my anthro-
pological theories and methods implied simply were not a set
of ideas that he could share, and he was unwilling to play
that language game. The problem was not cultural difference:
Acharyaji was perfectly familiar with the grammar of selfhood
implied in my questions.4 But he had learned to recognize
this mode of perception as wrong, and, especially as a teacher,
he held that my assumption of an enduring, experiencing
subject was precisely what I needed to overcome!
Notably, however, none of this stopped Acharyaji or others
like him from getting involved in struggles for self-recognition
that have required that they represent themselves in similar
terms. Acharyaji is a past president and still active member
of the Young Mens Buddhist Association (YMBA), one of
the organizations that spearheaded the 1990 secularism cam-
paign.5 While Acharyaji is a particularly advanced meditator,
he is not the only member of the YMBA who has undertaken
to learn to see things as they really areas the most popular
vipassana center in the Kathmandu Valley defines the practice
of vipassana. Indeed, by 2003, so many active YMBA members
were also committed meditators that board meetings began
with a period of group meditation.
What is going on when identity groups who were not visibly
politicized suddenly become actors on the political stage? Or
when people who refuse conventional definitions of identity
suddenly begin to speak from such a subject positionin-
deed, to shout? There is no doubt that many of the caste and
4. I am not suggesting that there are not cultural differences between
how selfhood is conceived in the United States and in Nepal. However,
these differences were mere details in comparison to the more funda-
mental divergence of self/not-self. Interestingly, although the question of
how personhood is perceived by South Asian Hindus has inspired rich
and contentious debate among anthropologists (see Appadurai 1986;
Daniel 1984; Dirks 1987; Dissanayake 1996; Dumont 1970; Marriott 1976,
1989; Mines 1994; Parish 1994), these questions have not been taken up
to the same degree in the scholarship on Buddhism, despite Obeyesekeres
(1990) efforts to remind scholars of this difference. Notable exceptions
for Nepal include McHugh (1989) and Parish (1994).
5. While he admits that he himself missed many of the largest rallies
back then, he explained that this was not because of any lack of support
for the cause. Rather, the meditation center where he teaches was just
getting going and there was a shortage of authorized instructors in Kath-
mandu at that time, so he spent a lot of his time then leading retreats.
Leve Identity
ethnic identity groups who organized to press for greater
rights in the early 90s had legitimate complaints. Nepal has
a long history of institutionalized inequity. Even today, power,
privilege, and wealth remain concentrated among high-caste,
Nepali-speaking Hindus (hence Maoist support for secular-
ism, federalism, and reservations for minority groups). Nev-
ertheless, many of the ethnic peoples who came forward to
assert a common identity in the 90s had themselves been
produced in their current sociolegal forms by the classificatory
practices of the Nepal state (see Guneratne 1998; Hangen
2005; Hofer 1979; Holmberg 1989).6
Moreover, the conditions associated with social identifi-
cations necessarily change. Does the surname Gurung mean
the same thing to an aged pensioner who was recruited to
the British Army 60 years ago because the British considered
Gurungs particularly well adapted to military service as it does
to his grandson, a computer-programming student who pre-
fers to be called Tamu (the name for Gurung in the Gurung
language) and is a regular visitor to the Web site of the Tamu
Samaj, an organization with the motto Lets do something
to save our culture!? Both of these men are likely to conceive
of their Gurung-ness very differently from, say, a Gurung
member of the Mongol National Organization, a political
party that seeks to unite many of Nepals ethnic populations
(including Gurungs, Magars, Limbus, Sherpas, and others)
under the rubric of a common racial identity.7 For Newars,
the situation is similar. In the 1980s, David Gellners (1986)
work sought to account for the absence of a unified ethnic
identity among Kathmandu Valley Newars; a decade later, his
writings began from the fact of Newar culturalist claims (Gell-
ner 1995, 1997a, 1997b, 2001a). How did caste/ethnic iden-
tities come to trump what had been equally or more signif-
icant differences between the same people? Why did this
happen when it did? And what might we learn from the fact
that when ethnic and religious minority (janajati) groups be-
gan to express an oppositional political awareness post-1990,
they would so often begin by registering as NGOs?8
6. For a complete analysis of the politics of ethnicity in Nepal since
1990, including the relationship between ethnic activists and Maoists
post-1996, see Hangen (2007).
7. For more on changes in the structure of ethnic identity in Nepal,
see Fisher (2001), Guneratne (2002), and Hangen (2006). See also Hangen
(2005, 2009) for more on Mongol National Organization activism.
8. At first glance, all this may seem like a false problem. That human
beings may hold and act on contradictory beliefs and that different times
and places demand different kinds of performances will not surprise a
trained anthropologist. Yet, there may be more here than meets the eye.
A striking common feature of almost all of the serious vipassana med-
itators I came to know in Nepal was the remarkable effort they put into
overcoming such contradictions, the way they sought to rationalize their
lives in accord with Buddhist precepts. Moreover, there is an intriguing
(if inexact) temporal correspondence between the rise of identity-based
discourses and struggles in Nepal and the growth of the lay meditation
movement. This paper explores the relations between modernist vipas-
sana meditators critiques of self-identity and efforts within the same
communityand often by the same peopleto claim political rights and
benefits as members of identity-based groups. I take this approach because
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517
Globalizing Liberal Democracy: The
Identity Machine
My proposal is that these events reflect the power of a par-
ticular global sociopolitical imaginary, concretized in a con-
stellation of institutions, ideologies, frameworks, structures,
technologies, forms of knowledge, ethics, and norms that act
as a kind of identity machine, producing not only the cat-
egories of ethnological identity (ethnicities, tribes,
nations, cultures) but also the very ontology of identity
that underlies liberal and neoliberal democracy.
As noted, we live in a time in which culture has become
a powerful form of political currency, a morally and legally
compelling aspect of personal and collective being that can
be deployed as the basis of political claims. Arjun Appadurai
(1996) has even given this a name, culturalism: the con-
scious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a
larger national or transnational politics (15).9
There are a number of ways to conceive of this trend.
Among anthropologists and sociologists, it is most often in-
terpreted as a function of globalization and the intimate di-
alectic of objectification and encounter brought about by
postcolonial nationalism, late capitalism, majoritarian de-
mocracy, and various other forces that have transformed re-
lations between neighbors and within families and challenged
the sovereignty of nation-states. From this perspective, trans-
national flows and nativist claims are, in fact, flip sides of the
same coin in a shifting, shrinking, and evermore intercon-
nected global environment. Put together these various in-
gredients, says John Comaroff (1996), a nation-state on
the defensive and a rising cognizance (almost) everywhere of
local cultural differenceand the product is a newly animated
politics of identity (174175). From this perspective, the
ethnic and cultural attachments asserted so forcefully today
are, for analytical purposes, new, or, at the very least, they
entail dramatic transformations of older social forms.
In Nepal, however, most people attribute the new visibility
of previously marginalized groups to freedoms they have come
to perceive as modal to democracy. Here, popular opinion
holds that the new wave of demands for political pluralism
is a direct result of the 1990 Peoples Movement, which ended
Panchayat repression and made it possible for oppressed mi-
norities to articulate their discontent. By this way of thinking,
contemporary forms of identity and identity-based groups are
it was things I observed in Nepal that led me to question the relationship
between identity in anthropology and in neoliberal democracies. The
events that I will discuss in Nepal are unique in their own ways; however,
they also offer a window into other processes and relationships.
9. It has also, of course, become an equally powerful source of eco-
nomic currency. Thus, Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) observe that
those who seek to brand their otherness . . . find themselves having to
do so in the universally-recognizable terms in which difference is rep-
resented, merchandised, rendered negotiable by means of the abstract
instruments of the market (24). But this is a slightly different point
although a wholly related one, as we shall see.
 518
indeed of ancient origin, and democracy is the system that
sets them free. Two important assumptions are implicit in
this line of thought: (1) that all people naturally have identities
and (2) that recognizing, supporting, and protecting these is
a defining feature of the democratic state.
Inasmuch as this explanation appears to echo the sequence
of events that brought identity to the forefront of political
life in Nepal, it is hardly surprising that Nepalis should see
things in this way. Yet, the roots of this explanation originate
well outside of Nepal, in Cold War critiques of state socialism
that characterized itand, by association, government-reg-
ulated, planned economies as a wholeas the enemy of in-
dividual choice and, hence, human freedom in all possible
forms. This is, of course, the ideological root of neoliberal
thought, which extols a free market as the best and most
efficient mechanism for distributing work, wealth, and social
goods within and between societies. For decades, neoliberal
ideas and related policies have been promoted internationally
by the United States and its allies under the banner of ex-
tending democracy. In Nepal, they were first disseminated
primarily through the foreign-aid infrastructure and devel-
opment discourses. As the country has opened economically,
however, powerful commercial conduits have also appeared,
including Rupert Murdochs News Corporation, which
reaches directly into Nepali homes 24 hours a day via its
popular Asian subsidiary, Star TV.10
The extent to which development ideologies have come to
shape Nepali popular understandings of themselves and the
world cannot be underestimated (Pigg 1992; Shrestha 1995),11
yet the power of international regimes to influence peoples
most basic understandings of self and politics is hardly limited
to this one place. This is surely one reason behind the pro-
nounced scholarly interest in a range of new global ideological
and administrative technologiesinstitutions such as the
WTO and IMF, transnational alliances of grassroots organi-
zations and activists, and voluntary organizations supported
by complex networks of international and national funding
and personnelthat anthropologists and others have come
to understand as part of an emerging system of transnational
governmentality that is transforming the topography of po-
litical authority and popular practice (Ferguson and Gupta
2002:990).12
My focus here is on one part of this system, that is, the
identity machine. In particular, I propose that the current
profusion of identity talk and also the political compulsion
for states to recognize citizens sub- and supernational iden-
10. See Rankin (2004) for an extended description of economic lib-
eralization in Nepal and its relationship to indigenous cultures and values;
see also Liechtys (2003) description of the rise and culture of the middle
class during this period.
11. For more examples of this, see Adams (1998), Ahearn (2001), Des
Chene (1996), Fujikura (1996), Leve (2007a, 2001), Liechty (2003), Ran-
kin (2001), Tamang (2002).
12. See also Comaroff and Comaroff (2009).
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
tities are at once parts and products of this global assemblage,
which works by extending a particular style of thought and
social organization in which identity proliferates and identities
proliferate and in order to do certain kinds of politics, you
have to represent yourself in certain terms and make your
claims in certain ways.13 Embodied in the institutions, prac-
tices, values, and regimes that have come to define democracy
for people all over the worldand, in particular, the emer-
gence of a global regime of nongovernmental organizations
that . . . bore with them the mantras of late liberalism: struc-
tural adjustment, privatization human rights [and] intellectual
property (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009:30)the identity
machine comprises a contingent convergence of processes,
structures, discourses, and rationalities. It is inevitably diverse,
fragmentary, and internally contradictory; both its architec-
ture and its utterances are always in flux. Yetwhether despite
or because of thisit has been remarkably successful in es-
tablishing identity as a national and transnational govern-
mental strategy that convinces citizens to assist in their own
management by embracing the classificatory logics of liberal
states and regulating their practices accordingly. By extending
an identity-based model of political subjectivity, participation,
and rights, the identity machine facilitates the globalization
of neoliberal democracy.
Internationality
My conception of the identity machine is inspired in part by
British philosopher Jonathan Rees (1992) critique of modern
nationalism and the assumptions about personal and collec-
tive identity on which nationalist sentiment is based. Ac-
cording to Ree, nationalism is neither a natural social sen-
timent nor an imagined political community but rather the
effect of a larger political and economic rationale that precedes
the formation of nation-states. He calls this internationality:
a way of thinking and dividing up space which tries to gen-
erate a plurality of nations, in order that, for any piece of
land, and for any human being, there should be a definite
answer to the question which nation is responsible? (Ree
1992:10). In the same way that the meaning of any one text
derives in part from its location vis-a`-vis other texts within
a broad field of intertextuality, he suggests, the logic of in-
ternationality informs the division of the world into nation-
states and invests each with the appearance of a unique essence
and individuality.
Ree is particularly troubled by two things about this: (1)
the way that internationality is tied to a particular set of
political and economic interests and (2) the fact that nation-
alism works to advance these. Specifically, he proposes that
internationality works to secure state power by convincing
those classes of people that Partha Chatterjee (2004) refers to
13. Here, I echo Rees (1992:10) description of internationality as a
style of thought and global social organization, which I discuss below.
Leve Identity
as the governed to support the monopolization of political
power by political and economic elites (Ree 1992:10):
Nations . . . are groups of people considered in relation to
the local traditions and values which give them their cul-
tural identity, but states are organizations which place
themselves above society in order to monopolize the means
of warfare and violence, and perhaps of welfare and culture
too. . . . My argument is that the logic of internationality
is deceptive because it attempts to confound and conceal
the difference; it conspires to make us give our consent to
state power by disguising it as an expression of our own
feelings. (Ree 1992:9)
In this way, according to Ree, internationality has repre-
sented the interests of a historical ruling class as the essence
of mankind for the past 300 years or more. And the magic
of it, he observes, is that it constantly covers its tracks.
Processes which are actually the effect of internationality are
experienced as an expression of the natures of individual
nations and individual members, whereas, in truth, the idea
that the states which define national boundaries are expres-
sions of a prior popular will is nothing more than pretense
and deceit (Ree 1992:9).
Given that 300 years is a long time to maintain such a high-
stakes charade, it does not seem unreasonable to ask how
nationalism has achieved this feat. Ree finds the answer in
what he proposes are two criticaland now institutional-
izedflaws in liberal political thought, both of which he
traces to John Lockes (1813) Essay Concerning Human Un-
derstanding. The first, which he suggests obscures a profound
conceptual slippage between individuals and the collectivities
to which they are said to belong, is the assumption that groups
have identities in the same way that individuals do. Ree
locates this error in an inherent ambiguity in the word iden-
tity, which, he says, has the effect of
[covering] over the differences in nature and structure be-
tween individuals and the collectivities in which they par-
ticipate: an identity can be attributed to a collective, which
may then be conceived of as having exactly the same struc-
ture as an individual, and it can become natural to suppose
that a personal identity can be identical not only with itself
. . . but with a collective identity too. (Ree 1992:9)
It is this indeterminacy that makes it possible to personify
groups, allowing us to speak as if collectivities had wills (what
women want) and also to think of them as having histories
that are common to all members regardless of whether any
one individual has, in fact, taken part in every aspect of the
collective experience. Thus, my universitys sports victory is
my own regardless of whether I played inor even watched
the game.
Lockes second mistake, according to Ree, is his assertion
that identities are simply a matter of memory. On asking
himself how it is that we believe that an object, particularly
a person, can be one and the same across time and space
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519
for instance, how an infant of 8 days can be the same person
at 80 yearsLocke answers that what we are depends entirely
on what we think we are and remember having been. I am
the same person I was when I was when I was 6 because I
remember having been her. There are obvious problems with
this proposition that, in reducing selfhood to self-image, al-
lows that people are actually, indeed, precisely what they be-
lieve themselves to be. If this notion were applied consistently,
it would mark a stunning reversal of the entire legacy of
critical social theory: a rejection of the most basic premises
of Marx and Freud and, for that matter, Foucault and De-
leuzeof anyone who believes in the possibility of misre-
cognition or false consciousness (or, anyone who, like Ther-
avada Buddhists, believes that true knowledge is a matter of
stripping away ordinary appearances, as we will see). Yet, Ree
(1992) notes, this is exactly what conventional understandings
of personal identity assume: your identity is the sort of per-
son you are and take yourself to be (9).
When this supposition, that human beings are transparent
to themselves, comes together with the above-mentioned slip-
page between individuals and groups and the self-interested
sleight of hand affected by internationality, something rather
remarkable happens: a geopolitical logic becomes the truth
of the self. The result is an individual feeling of national
identity, a logically flawed but experientially effective personal
identification with a conception of the many that naturalizes
the power of a few.
Rees analysis is helpful for understanding the identity ma-
chine, which works in a similar way and reflects a similar
logic. As internationality produces nations and patriotic cit-
izens, the identity machine creates an identitarian grammar
that reshapes preexisting forms of sociality and/or fabricates
new ones in accord with liberal and neoliberal forms of po-
litical-economic rationality, among which lie the normative
institutions of global democracy.14 It does this by offering
incentives to organize ones own and others identities in
particular waysmost powerfully, the promise of recognition
and support from the state, transnational civil society, or both.
By representing the bureaucratic rationality of the enumer-
ative framework by which citizens become legible to states as
the innermost essences of who we really areand then
offering multicultural democracy as the framework of free-
domthe identity machine helps facilitate a particular po-
litical order and style of rule. Seen thus, the explosion of
14. For example, Guneratne (2002) describes the transformation of
Tharu from a moniker that the Nepal state applied to any number of
localized groups who lived in the Tarai but spoke different languages,
did not intermarry, and shared few, if any, common social or ritual bonds
to an ethnonym that organizes social commitment, political action, and
a sense of who one is in relation to oneself and that evokes a sense of
shared victimization. Note that one thing that happens in this transfor-
mation is that the states role in creating and populating this ethnic
category disappears, along with the reformative agency that it is exercising
today. See also Holmberg (1989).
 520
identities in Nepal and other parts of the world today is much
more than a sign of increasing freedom in the world; it is the
sign of a highly successful global governance strategy. Yet, the
identity machine would have us believe that the ontological
assumptions that order its system of social classifications re-
flect the nature of the reality of identity itself.15
Possession/Property/Personhood
What, then, are these ontological assumptions? To answer this
question, I turn to C. B. Macphersons (1962) analysis of
possessive individualism and its intellectual legacy. Simply
put, Macphersons insight is that liberal democratic thought
is founded on a set of assumptions about human nature and
society that naturalize behaviors and conditions associated
with market capitalism. The essence of possessive individu-
alism, Macpherson says, is the conceptualization of every in-
dividual as the owner or proprietor of himself or herself and
of society as an aggregation of individuals engaged in ex-
change. Possessive individualisms possessive quality is found
in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor
of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for
them, he writes. The individual was neither seen as a moral
whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as owner of
himself (Macpherson 1962:3).
Macpherson traces these assumptions and the view of hu-
man nature that rests on them to a specific historical event:
the expansion of the market in seventeenth-century Britain
and the reorganization of social life that this entailed. With
the breakdown of the agrarian order and the cutting loose of
large numbers of people from land and kin-based socioeco-
nomic bonds, he notes, hitherto noncommodified relations
become subject to market mediation, extending commercial
rationalities into new domains. With this, he speculates, peo-
ple began to apply the price-making mechanism of the mar-
ket to human beings themselves, for in this market . . . all
individuals are essentially related to each other as possessors
of marketable commodities, including their own powers
(Macpherson 1962:55).
The relation of ownership, having become for more and
more men the critically important relation determining their
actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full
potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individ-
ual. The individual, it was thought, was free inasmuch as
he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human
essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others,
and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes
a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as pro-
15. All of this is far tidier on paper than in practice, of course: ide-
ologies may be contradictory, institutions are far from uniform, and
ordinary events can change things in unexpected ways. Similarly, as any
number of successful identity-based struggles show, the fact that the
politics of identity serves the interests of governments does not mean
that it is not also a powerful weapon in the hands of the people.
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
prietors of their own capacities and what they have acquired
by their own exercise. Society consists of relations of ex-
change between proprietors. Political society becomes a cal-
culated device for the protection of this property and for
the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange. (Mac-
pherson 1962:3)
In other words, possessive individualism transforms the logic
of the labor market into a theory of self.16
One aspect of this ideology that is particularly important
for the argument here is the way that the possessive-individ-
ualist ontology imbues abstractions with a seeming materi-
ality. In this way, it acts very much like nationalism. Following
Richard Handler (1994), we could say that possessive indi-
vidualism turns relations into thingsseemingly essential
identities that are both constitutive parts of the individual
and that these same individuals own. It does this by taking
collective representations that come into being through social
relationsin Handlers (1994) words, symbolic processes
that emerge and dissolve in particular contexts of action
and representing them as objects in the natural world (30).17
It is in this way that identities come to appear as forms of
individual wealth.
This transformation, which endows social products with a
seeming autochthony, such that identities appear to precede
individuals embeddedness in society rather than to reflect it,
is critical to establishing democratic states obligations to mi-
nority peoples and cultures. Indeed, it is only when British
is hypostasized as a thing in the worldcomparable to a leg
or a lung, as opposed to a category of relation that makes
sense only in reference to others who are French, Mexi-
can, or Thaithat it becomes possible to argue that British
culture is a necessary component of human flourishing that
should be entitled to protection, as reflected in the UNs
declaration of culture as a fundamental human right (see also
Coombe 1993). This is the same way of thinking that, in
combination with Lockes philosophical equation of self-iden-
tity with memory, makes history conceivable as a kind of
privately owned wealth. Possessive individualism helps create
the ethical and institutional conditions of possibility that give
identity its political purchase by recasting forms of relation
as essential personal properties. When the individual becomes
identified with these objectified possessionswhen identity
is . . . claimed as property by its living heirs (Comaroff and
16. Gershons essay in this issue discusses what is perhaps the newest
twist on the market model of self: in a post-Fordist economy that renders
labor immaterial or invisible and in which the investment banker has
replaced the factory owner as capitalist par excellence, possessive indi-
vidualism means seeing people as the managers of their personal assets,
which are skills and abilities, rather than as contractors who market their
labor per se.
17. Dominguez (1989:190) makes a similar point when she notes that
collective identities are conceptual representations masquerading as ob-
jects, which are brought into beingand continuously renewed
through everyday discourses and practices that make the concept of peo-
plehood appear to be something real and natural in the world.
Leve Identity
Comaroff 2009:29)liberal institutions are compelled to de-
fend ownership rights.
Despite the very real material consequences of this object-
ification, however, identitys thingness is not a natural feature
of the world. As Virginia Dominguez (1989:190) observes,
collective identities are nothing more than conceptual rep-
resentations masquerading as objects brought into being
and continuously renewedthrough everyday discourses and
practices that make the concept of peoplehood appear to
be a self-existent fact. As such, we might say that the various
forms of identity that have been asserted in Nepal (and else-
where) in the postCold War period have been made real by
variously overlapping components of the identity machine
that invests these relations with concrete agency. It does this
by associating social difference with risks and/or rights, em-
powering those who embody it vis-a`-vis other social subjects
and formations, and generally granting identities forms of
institutional recognition that encourage (or discourage) the
habitation of identity and identities in the broadest sense. Yet,
the nationalist (or subnationalist) imaginary is just one (if a
particularly foundational) product of the identity machine.
Late Capitalism and the Identitarian
Impulse
So far in this paper, we have seen how the possessive indi-
vidualist underpinnings of liberal political and economic phi-
losophy provide an ontological foundation for the politici-
zation of identity in contemporary democracies. But Ree
(1992) and Macpherson (1962)as also Dominguez (1989)
and Handler (1994)focus on liberal nationalism, whereas
I have been speaking of a transnational, multiscalar, neoliberal
identity machine. I do not make this distinction in order to
suggest that Nepals political institutions are not liberal: the
affirmation of popular sovereignty and the legalization of po-
litical parties in 1990 signaled a clear shift in the normative
horizon of governance in Nepal and its institutional frame-
work even if it did not completely erase prior forms of political
organization and subjectivity. What makes the identity ma-
chine neoliberal as well, however, is its location in an envi-
ronment that is organized according to neoliberal principles
and governed by policies that aim to enact these ideals.
Neoliberalism, it is generally agreed, refers to a set of po-
litical and economic ideas that tie the liberal political com-
mitment to maximal individual autonomy to a laissez-faire
economic ideology. Initially proposed by the political philos-
opher Fredrich van Hayek after the Second World War and
developed by Hayek and others over the following decades,
neoliberalism argues that governmental attempts to regulate
markets constitute illegitimate infringements on individual
liberty and property rights that interfere with economic ef-
ficiency and reflect totalitarian tendencies. At first, these con-
victions put Hayek at odds with the Keynesian orthodoxy that
dominated U.S. and Western European policy making from
World War II into the 1960s. Over time, however, his ideas
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521
gained support, and by the mid-80s, they were being put into
practice in the United States and Britain and by powerful
development institutions such as the IMF and its allied de-
velopment banks. Over the past 3 decades, neoliberal gov-
ernments have opened national markets, dismantled protec-
tions and subsidies, rolled back citizens entitlements, and
shrunk governments by privatizing state services from security
operations to hospital administration, from prison manage-
ment to public utilities, all over the world.18 These acts have
helped globalize laissez-faire capitalism by reducing barriers
to and governmental regulation of the circulation of capital
and commodities (some would also say persons) within and
across national borders.19
In practice, neoliberal economic logic is by no means a
single set of principles or policies but has evolved and taken
various forms over the past half century.20 Furthermore, and
immediate postCold War triumphalism aside, it has never
reigned uncontested. Harvey (2005) has noted its inconsis-
tencies, including the intense planning and monitoring re-
quired to maintain the putatively unregulated market con-
ditions that this theory presumes, as well other contradictions
between neoliberal doctrine as it exists in theory and the on-
the-ground realities of its implementation. Nevertheless, the
idea that democracy is incomplete unless the freedom of the
people is matched by the freedom of the marketthat is, that
liberal democracy demands a liberalized economyhas
guided development planning in Nepal and elsewhere for
more than 2 decades.
It is no coincidence that Nepals first post-Panchayat fi-
nance minister came directly from a position at the World
Bank or that the early 1990s saw the privatization of a number
of publicly owned enterprises, the deregulation of major in-
dustries (including banking, health care, and education), the
lowering of import tariffs and adoption of policies intended
to encourage foreign investment, and multiple other changes
aimed at transforming a state-led, import substitutionbased
economy into an export-driven open market. While these
reforms have hardly gone uncontested, there can be no doubt
that the opening of Nepals economy to late-capitalist accu-
mulative practices, forms of consumption, and instantaneous
global reach has benefitted and perhaps been benefitted by
the identity machine and its possessive individualist ontol-
ogy.21
For example, one effect of the much-debated shift in the
structure of capitalism from industrial production to a ser-
vice-based economy is the substitution of consumption for
18. In many cases, these policy reforms have been imposed in asso-
ciation with structural adjustment loans.
19. See Harvey (2005) for more on the history of neoliberal thought
and politics.
20. It also, as we will see, has come to influence and organize domains
of life that extend far beyond the economy. See also Barry, Osborne, and
Rose (1996), Cruikshank (1999), and Rose (1996, 1999).
21. See Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) for more on these types of
relations, especially in regard to ethnicity.
 522
production as the dominant means of identity formation. In
many parts of the world, this transformation has been so
complete, in fact, that Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff
(2001) can declare it a truism . . . that postmodern persons
are subjects made with objects (4). The culture of late
capitalism, they write, re-envisions persons not as producers
from a particular community, but as consumers in a planetary
marketplace: persons as ensembles of identity that owe less
to history or society than to organically conceived human
qualities (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001:13). While the mar-
ket has always made capital out of human difference and
difference out of capital, they observe that these processes
intensify when the liberal commitment to individual freedom
also becomes the basis for economic policy (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2001). With the era of the liberal citizen-state
ending and the neoliberal consumer-state emerging in its
place, the property-based logic that was implicit in liberal
democracy has become an explicit trade in difference.22 Iden-
tities look and act much like commoditieshumanly pro-
duced objects that nevertheless appear to have an independent
essence and a value of their own.23 In their most recent work,
Comaroff and Comaroff (2009:15) have dubbed these events
and their outcomes the identity industry and ethnicity,
Inc.
For the Comaroffs, the main problem posed by a primary
politics of identity is that it sets social groups against one
another and thereby helps to protect neoliberal capitalism and
its partner states from potentially threatening popular alli-
ances. But Harry Harootunian (2002) goes further still. In
the long run, rather than helping subjugated communities
contest exploitation, Harootunian (2002) charges, the iden-
titarian impulse actually works to dilute politics into what
Jacques Rancie`re (1999) has called consensus democracy
(22):
What this identitarian impulse seeks to promote is . . . not
a democratic politics as such, but a post-democracy where
. . . the victims of modernity . . . are finally assimilated
to their proper place and all are included and accounted
for. In the name of a democratic polity serving late capi-
talism and its neoliberal avatar, multicultural capitalist de-
mocracy authorizes the primacy of claiming cultural diver-
sity or difference as a candidate for a universal regulative
idea. (Harootunian 2002:22)24
22. See also McMichael (1998), Paley (2001), Povinelli (2001), and
Schild (2000).
23. Indeed, this could well be described as a kind of classic fetishism.
See van Beek (2001).
24. In both conception and language, this charge sounds remarkably
like Rees (1992) description of internationality, and, in fact, the argu-
ments have strong similarities. In particular, Rees argument that inter-
nationality tricks people into assenting to a political-economic order that
benefits only a small elite by generating the idea of nations and producing
the felt experience of nationalism parallels Harootunians (2002) under-
standing of the identitarian impulse. It also resonates strongly with my
analysis of the identity machine, both as a theoretical construct and in
the concrete forms that it takes in Nepal.
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
Under these circumstances, the sub- and transnational
identities that seem to pose such a challenge to nation-states
at a time when London-based financiers press enter to move
investment capital from Argentina to India on behalf of Amer-
ican-owned companies registered in the Cayman Islands are
not, in fact, so different from nationalism in the way that
they mobilize popular sentiment in support of a particular
political order. Neoliberal economic policiesand the com-
modification of self and society that the now-freed market
has wroughthave created a culture in which everything
. . . is sold and bought, Harootunian observes, including
the remnants and ghostly reminders repressed by an earlier
modernization, which are now reappearing as reifications
serving an insatiable market for . . . signs of generic authen-
ticity (Harootunian 2002:27). He concludes that the com-
munity of difference is identical to a global order devoted to
consumption (Harootunian 2002:22).
In places such as Nepal, where liberal political institutions
and neoliberal ideologies are still relatively new, the identity
machine is helping to inculcate a possessive individualist con-
ception of personhood and a market-mediated model of so-
ciety. The rapid liberalization of Nepals economy that began
in the late 80s and intensified after 1990 opened the door to
a rush of new products, services, and lifestyles that have be-
come the building blocks of a consumer middle class, which
Mark Liechty (2003) says has adopt[ed] consumption as its
mode of identity production (147) and for whom property
has become the marker of propriety (116). According to
Liechty (2003), a sensitive chronicler of these changing cul-
tural dynamics, the state-sponsored commercialization that
has confronted urban Nepalis since 1990 is a language that
turns people into things . . . [and] draws the performance of
self into the logic of the market (222). All of this may have
helped to lend possessive individualist formulations of self
and society an experiential aura of common sense, at least
among the urban bourgeoisie. But this has not necessarily
taken place entirely uncontested.
Doing: Identity as Process (and as
Illusion)
Another thinker whose work raises doubts about the relation
between identity-based politics and democracy is political the-
orist Chantal Mouffe (2000). For Mouffe, identity politics
as also the recent ethical turnsignify not the success but
the evisceration of meaningful democracy. Neoliberal dis-
courses and policies are exceedingly effective at eradicating
political differences while intensifying social ones, she charges.
But,
when the agonistic dynamic of the pluralist system is hin-
dered because of a lack of democratic identities with which
people could identify, there is a risk that this will multiply
confrontations over essentialist identities and non-negotia-
ble moral values. (Mouffe 2000:92)
Leve Identity
If Mouffe is right, then Theravada Buddhist meditators who
call on the state to recognize their human rights as Buddhists
in order to secure the most favorable conditions for their
religious campaign to spread the Buddhas dharmawhich
they conceive as a timeless, objective universal truthwould
seem to constitute a textbook-worthy example of what hap-
pens when democratic institutions are subverted by capitalist
hegemonies!25
There may, however, be another way to look at this. One
author I read while preparing this argument, for example,
was the Scottish Marxist John Holloway. In Change the World
without Taking Power, Holloway (2002) takes the ontological
argument about the relation of identity and property about
as far, perhaps, as it can possibly be taken. He begins by
arguing that what philosophers, parliamentarians, and the rest
of us perceive as thingsdiscrete, self-identical objectsare,
to the contrary, fluid and collective. When it is self-evident
that the real world around us is in constant flux, what we
consider objects are really processes, creating and contin-
ually transformed by human activity, or doing. Moreover,
he suggests, doing is not ever an isolated activity; it is in-
herently social, comprising the interdependent labor of mul-
tiple persons and communities:
Doing is inherently plural, collective, choral, communal.
This does not mean that all doing is (or indeed should be)
undertaken collectively. It means rather that it is difficult
to conceive of a doing that does not have the doing of others
as a precondition. I sit at the computer and write this,
apparently a lonely and individual act, but my writing is
part of a social process, a plaiting of my writing with the
writing of others (those mentioned in footnotes and a mil-
lion others), and also with the doing of those who designed
the computer, assembled it, packed it, transported it, and
those who installed the electricity in the house, and those
who generated the electricity, those who produced the food
that gives me the energy to write, and so on. . . . Our doings
are so intertwined that it is impossible to say where one
ends and another begins. (Holloway 2002:26)
On some level, of course, people are perfectly aware of this.
Yet, he notes, we nevertheless fall back into viewing the world
through the logic of identity, the tautology of A p A. Why
is it that we assume the world is made up of discrete self-
identical objects that can be understood as the sum of their
propertiesespecially when it appears to be contradicted on
almost every level of experience?
25. Although I am focusing primarily on identity in this paper,
Mouffes (2000) critique of the recent ethical turn (observable all over
the world in everything from the return of religion, to the ethics-in
the-professions movement, to the public debates over medical engineer-
ing, to the renewed interest in ethics in philosophy and other branches
of the academy) is a common one. A number of observers have worried
about the rejection of political engagement that the popularity of religion
and public preoccupation with ethics is assumed to signify. See essays by
Buell, Guillord, and Fraser in Garber, Hanssen, and Walkowitz (2000).
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523
Holloways answer is that it is only by seeing objects as
discrete, self-identical objects that anyone can claim to own
them. Continuously transforming processes that connect ev-
eryone in the world to everyone else are, after all, not easy
to package for exchange. Thus, for Holloway, the logic of
property and the logic of identity are one and the same. It is
the separation of the doing from the done that reduces
infinite combinations of interwoven actions and the ever-
evolving relations they create to thingsstatic, contained, ap-
parently autonomous objects. It follows from this that true
revolutionary practice is necessarily the struggle against iden-
tity:
It is the fracturing of doing that, through definition and
classification, constitutes collective identities. . . . From the
perspective of doing, definition can be no more than an
evanescent positing of identity which is immediately tran-
scended. . . . It is only if one takes identity as ones stand-
point, only if one starts from the acceptance of the rupture
of doing, that labels such as black, Jewish, Irish, and
so on, take on the character of something fixed. The idea
of an identity politics which takes such labels as given
inevitably contributes to the fixation of identities . . . the
fracturing of doing, in short, the reinforcement of capital.
(Holloway 2002:6364)
The proletariat, Holloway argues, could be the revolution-
ary class in Marxs terms specifically because it could eman-
cipate itself only by no longer being a proletariat; likewise,
all other struggle for human freedom could only follow some
variation on that course.26
These insights led Holloway to two important conclusions
about changing the world in the neoliberal age. The first is
that revolutionaries need to abandon the notion of achieving
absolute (as opposed to critical) knowledge. Knowledge that
seeks mastery of the worldwhat he calls knowledge
aboutdenies its own entanglement with the object and the
26. This does not, he continues, imply that all identity struggles
are the same and without merit, because there are many situations in
which an apparently affirmative, identitarian statement carries a negative,
anti-identitarian charge. To say I am black in a society characterized by
discrimination against blacks is to challenge the society in a way in which
to say I am white in those same societies clearly does not: despite its
affirmative, identitarian form, it is a negative, anti-identitarian statement.
To say we are indigenous in a society that systematically denies the
dignity of the indigenous is a way of asserting dignity, of negating the
negation of dignity, of saying we are indigenous and more than that.
However, he notes, this is a delicate game, since in a different context,
the same statement can have very different and less savory implications,
as the history of anticolonial movements makes clear. Alternatively, of
course, the positive-negative tension may also explode in the opposite
direction, into an explicitly anti-identitarian movement, as is currently
the case of the Zapatista movement in Mexico (Holloway 2002:64). The
view that identity statements can be anti-identitarian in their ultimate
implications is daring and certainly contestable, but it makes sense within
Holloways own dialectical ontology that views what we see as objects
not as a fixed set of properties but at least in part in terms of what they
have the potential to produce. I am indebted to David Graeber for these
insights.
 524
processes that make it what it is and leads necessarily to the
logic of coercive power and the state. In contrast, the type of
knowledge appropriate to a project of human liberation con-
sists of a stripping away of the pretenses of identity to reveal
the processes of action underneath. His second (and most
controversial) proposal, then, is that revolutionaries must
abandon the notion of effecting transformation through seiz-
ing state power. The logic of the state-form, the commodity
form, and identity are mutually reinforcing, he says, because,
ultimately, they are one and the same.
If one takes Holloways ideas about knowing and doing in
the insurgent spirit that he intends, Buddhists such as Achar-
yaji may be more revolutionary than they would seem inas-
much as the Buddhas thoroughgoing antiessentialism bears
at least a family resemblance to the insights reflected in Hol-
loways argument. Indeed, the very idea of Enlightenment
that knowing the truth can and will prevent suffering
teaches that genuine knowledge is critical knowledge. Buddha
dharma assumes that conventional understandings of the
world are deceptive and that real wisdom consists of being
able to perceive the continuity of self or material objects over
time as an illusion that masks the deeper reality of insub-
stantiality and change. Because all conditioned phenomena
are impermanent (anicca), the Buddha taught, they lack self-
essence (anatta); thus, to believe that things are what they
seem and expect them to remain so is to necessarily condemn
oneself to suffering (dukkha) brought about by the inevita-
bility of change, emptiness, and loss.
Whats more, the Buddha revealed, is that everything is
interdependent (paticcasamuppada). Nothing comes into be-
ing without a mental or material cause that conditions its
arising and the shapes that it takes. All predicates becomes
the cause of new formations and events. Thus, everything is
ultimately related to everything else. To experience oneself as
an individual self possessed of a unique and continuous
identity is merely what happens when people are unable to
see that that perception itself is flawed.
Remembering that Acaryajis teacher, the meditation guru
S. N. Goenka, teaches that the literal meaning of vipassana
is to see things as they really are, it is perhaps not entirely
a coincidence that vipassana meditation exploded as a popular
practice in Nepal in the early 1990s, just as Nepals newly
opened markets were flooding urban homes, airways, and
imaginations, with new images, commodities, services, and
technologies imported from all over the world. When Dhar-
mashringa, the Goenka-led meditation center where Acaryaji
teaches, opened its doors in 1987, it consisted of just a few
small buildings on a wooded plot of land on a ridge over-
looking Kathmandu. In the intervening years, however, Dhar-
mashringa has grown in step with the fortunes of its wealthiest
practitioners. There are now multiple meditation halls, sep-
arate dining facilities for both men and women, multilevel
dormitories, hostel rooms with attached baths, solar hot-water
facilities, an 84-cell meditation pagoda, and more. At the
beginning, instructional courses were run only irregularly be-
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
cause of a lack of certified teachers as well as habitable space.
But by 2006, the center typically accommodated about 500
people a month in two 10-day courses that were almost always
fully subscribed and often had long waiting lists. To address
this demand, a Goenka-affiliated meditation center has been
established in Pokhara, and another full-time center is in
progress at Lumbini, besides which vipassana courses are reg-
ularly held in other parts of the Kathmandu Valley and
throughout the Tarai.
Might some of vipassanas remarkably broad appeal be in-
spired by the ways that it speaks to urban Nepali Buddhists
who find themselves at the center of a neoliberal state and a
newly commodified world that demands new forms of eco-
nomic rationality and interpolates them in new ways? Could
this be what my interlocutors meant when they praised Ther-
avada Buddhism, vipassana meditation, or both as uniquely
suited to the demands of the day? To be sure, I have never
heard anyone contrapose Buddha dharma to the identity-
based democratic-capitalist cosmology, and I have yet to meet
a Theravada Buddhist who introduces himself or herself as
an anticapitalist revolutionary.27 Yet, Holloways (2002) op-
positional understanding of the power of critical knowledge
and of doing is remarkably compatible with Buddhist un-
derstandings of the way the world works. There is certainly
no place for self-construction through commodities in a
knowledge-practice that a pamphlet distributed at Dhar-
mashringa describes in this way:
As one proceeds on this path [i.e., vipassana meditation],
ones awareness becomes sharper. One is no longer oblivious
to what is happening inside. One now observes sensations
in all parts of his body: heat, cold, throbbing, pulsation,
lightness, heaviness, itching, burning, pain, etc. One ob-
serves that these sensations arise and pass away. One un-
derstands their impermanent character, their ephemeral na-
ture, at the experiential level. A proper grasp of this natural
process is indeed a breakthrough. One observes these sen-
sations objectivity without an identification of I me or
mine. The student is just an observer of the constantly
changing mental and bodily phenomena. Continued and
proper practice of Vipassana brings about even the elimi-
nation of the concept of an observer. Only observation re-
mains. (Vipassana Research Institute 1996)
Clearly, this is a practice that has, at the very least, a powerful
potential to denaturalize ways of life and understandings of
self that are grounded in possessive individualist ontologies.
What I am suggesting here is that the same global appa-
ratusor, if you will, formationsthat have been responsible
for remaking the social, political, and economic landscapes
in Nepal may also be involved in the popularization of lay
vipassana meditation, especially given the prevalence of this
27. Although one Buddhist friend who visited me when he was in the
United States on a Fulbright picked my copy of Holloway off the shelf
and was so intrigued by it that I sent him another copy when he would
not take that one home.
Leve Identity
practice among the new urban middle class. That is, the neo-
liberal reorganization of Nepali public life and personal iden-
tity may also be giving rise to the opposite force, inspiring
contemporary Nepalis to cultivate a practical knowledge that
directly addresses but significantly undercuts the commo-
dified logic of self-identity and possessive freedom encouraged
by a neoliberal world order and its identity machine.
Nevertheless, political imperatives can push Theravada
Buddhists in exactly the opposite direction. In July of 2002,
I interviewed Bhakta Raj Shakya, a once-active member of a
Buddhist group that had been at the forefront of the fight
against the national Hindu identity in the early and mid-90s.
The organization was much less active then because the Mao-
ist rebellion had closed off much of the space for nonviolent
public critique of the state. But they had continued to organize
periodic Buddhist education camps for rural janajatis who
considered themselves to have been, historically, Buddhist.
Since the 90s, Bhaktas organization had been bringing mem-
bers of such communities to stay at monasteries in Kath-
mandu and providing tours of the airport and notable Bud-
dhist sites in the Valley but, mainly, putting them through a
tight schedule of classes on Buddhist history, practices, and
beliefs. The assumption was that after years of repression by
the Hindu state and forcible incorporation into the national
caste hierarchy, most of these groups had forgotten their
Buddhist identities. Many, he explained to me, had been in-
tentionally deprived of their own languages, literatures, and
historical traditions. The Nepali-speaking Hindu elites who
set up the system felt that you have to abolish other peoples
religions, cultures, literatures, and histories to make your own
state and government strong, he said. His organization aimed
to help groups regain what they had lost and overturn this.
If people have their own religions, literatures, and cultures,
he told me, theyll have a feeling of ownership, and theyll it is not and, most of all, to look for emergent types of cre-
resist the imposition of others.
Most people in Nepal would agree with this idea. None-
theless, packed into this one statement are almost all the
assumptions I have been describing under the rubric of the
identity machine. Social groups are assumed to be constituted
not primarily by their relations with one another but first and
foremost by their relation with their own history. This his-
toryculture in its material formis assumed to make
them what they are in the same way that an individual is
assumed to be constituted, as an individual, by his or her
own memory. This history/culture/identity is conceptualized
as something that these groups canindeed, shouldown
and control. To destroy that property is murder; to appro-
priate it is theft.28 These are the assumptions that structured
28. In fact, in an earlier interview, Bhakta had complained that the
Gorkhalis had stolen many of their cultural symbols, including the
Newar script, when Nepal joined the UN and registered the Newar al-
phabet as the national script rather than Devanagri, the script that Nepali
is actually written in, in an attempt to distinguish Nepal from India. This
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525
the Theravada Buddhist demand for secularism as a human
right and for official constitutional recognition as Bud-
dhistnot Hinducitizens (see Leve 2007b).
Anthropological Options
What Bhakta is voicing here, then, is the very vision of sub-
jective personhood that I have been discussing in this paper
an ontology that has been globalized as part of political and
economic liberalization in the shape of democratic policies,
institutions, and norms. When people represent themselves
as identity groups, they cast themselves as the owners of their
identities and histories. The process is mediated through what
can only be called an emerging global, neoliberal bureaucracy,
which has now come to include national bureaucracies (along
with NGOs, transnational corporations, and bodies such as
the UN, IMF, and WTO) as different levels within its own
administrative structure. Postero was right to say that this is
where the push from below meets incorporation from above,
but it is possible to go even further. The identity machine is
the point where the push from below begins to take on the
shape and logic of the administrative apparatus to which it
appeals. Social theory cannot be seen as something separate
from this processsomething that can simply observe it
because it is deeply implicated at every point in the process,
as the adoption of identity as a key term of social analysis
itself demonstrates.
The argument here is not that anthropologists must reject
what are presented to us as identity claims, let alone question
the authenticity of the social actors and movements that
make them. The rhetoric of authenticity, after all, is equally
rooted in the ontology of identity. Rather, I am proposing to
examine where that ontology is being appealed to and where
ativity that, if Buddhists such as Arcaryaji are in any way
correct, changing forms of life and diverse ontologies must
inevitably produce.
This is a call to take those engaged in such struggles se-
riously as interlocutors and not to simply relegate them
even if at times some of them seem to be relegating them-
selvesto an identitarian slot. Even as anthropologists have
come to appreciate the fact that cultural boundaries are rarely
coterminous with geographical or political space, we never-
theless localize the people we work with and the knowledge
they profess when we assume that they have identities. But,
culturally embedded as any actual instantiation may be, Ther-
avada Buddhism is emphatically not a localized system of
thought that applies only to or is owned by a particular people.
In its own terms, it is dharma, the objective truth of this and
all worlds. It is an unbounded theory of knowledge and prac-
tice that claims to hold at all times for all beings. Theravada
may also be part of what animates concern about the violence of rep-
resentation.
 526
Buddhists may represent themselves as an identity group to
make themselves legible to the liberal state. But for practi-
tioners like the ones I have been discussing, Buddhism is far
more than an identity. It is a practice that reveals the illusory
nature of the self and the impermanence of all things. The
truth that the Buddhist paradox expresses is that what we
have been calling identity is a kind of doing in Holloways
(2002) termsa doing conditioned by forms of recognition
and institutional action that reflect possessive individualist
ideologies and ontologies.
Needless to say, I am not alone in asking questions about
the ways that anthropological practice might reflector, al-
ternatively, reflect onthe political and economic orders in
which we live. But, of course, anthropology aims to produce
critical knowledge, too. Faced with the seemingly unstoppable
universalization of liberal democracy (Mouffe 1993:1 in
Greenhouse and Greenwood 1998:16) and the way that its
official discourses . . . singularize difference, Greenhouse
and Greenwood (1998:14) have expressed reservations about
multicultural democratic framework as a liberatory, as op-
posed to a regulatory, frame. In response, she proposes eth-
nography as an act of resistance, a means of identifying
spaces for dialogue and innovation where the public scripts
for daily life, even within academia, might otherwise foreclose
them (Greenhouse and Greenwood 1998:5). I wish to echo
this call for studies of identities that exceed the identitarian
frameworks of liberal pluralism, however well intentioned
but also to question whether it is really appropriate to frame
them as identities at all. To put it more precisely, I would
extend her call to include investigating ontologies that un-
derlie democraticand academicdiscourses and the forms
of doing they generate. If anthropologists wish to affirm hu-
man struggles against oppression, exploitation, and, where
appropriate, invisibility in all their forms, we must refuse to
allow our critical imaginations to be taken over by the identity
machine.
Committed vipassana meditators who play identity politics
challenge social observers and theorists to rethink essential-
ized categories such as difference and identity or at least to
recognize when they are being used in new ways, such as by
Ecuadorean activists who treat indigenous earth beings as
political actors in the context of social protest and insist that
PachamamaNatureis a being who deserves and must be
granted constitutional rights (see de Cadena 2010). As de
Cadena (2010) observes, such practices and the subjective
grammars on which they are based have the capacity to
significantly disrupt prevalent political formations, and re-
shuffle hegemonic antagonisms (336). By elevating iden-
tity, with its possessive individualist assumptions and its
ethno-ontology that reinforces neoliberal ideological hege-
mony and related public policies, anthropologists help to nat-
uralize a concept that itself demands explanation and even
risk misrecognizing what we may already see. In the situation
that exists now, one might even say that ethnographers face
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
a political choice: either to investigate the operations of the
identity machine or to become part of it.
Comments
David N. Gellner
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Uni-
versity of Oxford, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE,
United Kingdom (david.gellner@anthro.ox.ac.uk). 26 XI 10
Lauren Leves characteristically stimulating and trenchant ar-
ticle, weaving together ethnography, philosophy, and reflec-
tions on global neoliberalism, highlights two paradoxes: (1)
the Theravada Buddhists with whom she worked in Kath-
mandu oppose any form of self-identity in their teachings
and meditational practice but are willing nonetheless to par-
ticipate in contemporary identity discourses in order to claim
equal rights for Buddhism in the Nepalese public sphere that
opened up after the revolution of 1990 and (2) a global iden-
tity machine encourages people to articulate their demands
and rework their own selves in line with the assumptions of
possessive individualism, but this serves the interests of neo-
liberal capitalism rather than their own best interests; some-
times, however, people such as the meditation teacher she
simply calls Acharyaji (respected teacher) manage to subvert
these neoliberal assumptions, in his case by refusing to discuss
and take an interest in his own biography.
I agree emphatically with Leves concluding remark that
anthropologists should investigate [and not simply accept]
the operations of the identity machine. Challenged by the
most outspoken Nepali anthropologist and advocate of ethnic
rights, Professor Krishna Bhattachan, I have myself tried to
articulate for a Nepali audience how this should be done
(Gellner 2001b).
I frame my comments in two parts: first, about Buddhism
and, second, much more briefly, about ethnicity in Nepal. On
Buddhism, there is a danger of overplaying the paradoxical
nature of the denial of personal selfhood. From Buddhisms
very outset, there was a tension between its strongly ethical
message (to change ones behavior, to help others to do the
samein other words, to engage with the world) and the
withdrawal implied by its meditative and deconstructionist
cognitive message (Collins 1982). Classic texts such as the
Bodhicaryavatara are shot through with this tension.
Contrary to what might be deduced from Leves article,
personal biographies of leading religious figures are an im-
portant part of the Buddhist imaginary in Theravada Buddhist
countries (Schober 1997) and are equally important for Ther-
avada Buddhism in Nepal (LeVine and Gellner 2005:78, 79).
Much Buddhist lay practice focuses on the biographies (plu-
ral) of the Buddha, that is, his numerous rebirths (Appleton
2010). In other words, it is perfectly possible to deny the self
Leve Identity
at the ultimate level while placing a high value on particular
biographical streams on the level of everyday worldly practice.
In the contemporary context, it would be wrong to imagine
that the nonself/identity tension is equally salient for all Ther-
avada Buddhists in Kathmandu. Those who are most com-
mitted to meditation are correspondingly less likely to be
involved in activist campaigning. Leve mentions (without
naming) Bhikkhu Ashwaghosh (2003), who became a mem-
ber of the upper house in 19911993, sponsored by the UML
(Communist Party of NepalUnified Marxist-Leninist, the
main parliamentary leftist party before the rise of the Mao-
ists), and Bhikkhu Ananda, who became a member of the
interim parliament of 20062008, sponsored by the Maoists.
These two are unusual, however. Most clerics, whether monks
or nuns, remain aloof from politics. (Conversely, clerics can-
not avoid duties toward kin and other lay people, as Ash-
waghosh [2003] bitterly complains in his little book The Life
of a Monk; see Gellner and LeVine 2007.)
Furthermore, many Buddhist activists do not support iden-
tity politics. The alliance between Buddhist activists and
Newar ethnic activists that existed from 1926 to 1951 fell apart
during the Panchayat period (19601990), when Buddhists
were allowed freedom of religious action, provided they re-
mained non-political (Gellner 1986:129137; LeVine and
Gellner 2005:100, 101). Buddhist and ethnic activists came
together again in 1990 in order to push for secularism (Leve
2007b), but it was not an alliance that lasted much beyond
that point. The reason Buddhist activists today are lukewarm
about ethnic identity politics derives mainly from the fact that
Theravada Buddhism is spreading beyond its Newar ethnic
base (Krauskopff 2009; Letizia 2005) and needs to appeal
more widely to all Nepalis.
On ethnic politics, it is strange to discuss the workings of
the ethnicity machine without mentioning those who are
actually working hardest to bring its assumptions to fruition
in Nepal. Right now, this is happening by means of the Con-
stituent Assembly, currently in its third year and due to agree
to a federal and republican constitution by mid-2011. The
driver for this in the 1990s was the Nepal Federation of In-
digenous Nationalities, and it remains a key player (Gellner
and Karki 2007, 2008). In the 2000s, it was the Maoists who
took up the ethnic issue, creating ethnically defined auton-
omous regions (Ogura 2008) and thereby pushing the issue
high up the political agenda (Hangen 2007).
In short, I am in sympathy with Leves attempt to under-
stand the philosophical underpinnings of what she calls the
identity machine; I would like to see her conceptualization
of it supported by richer ethnography and a bigger place for
Nepali actors than she has provided in this paper (I look
forward to this in her forthcoming book) and by an explicit
role for the international institutions that are pushing indi-
geneity (Merlan 2009). It is possible that rather than making
any deep philosophical point, Acharyaji was simply refusing
to play the interview language game, a form of teasing not
uncommon among Newars placed in authoritative religious
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527
positions when confronted by foreigners asking personal
questions.
Carol J. Greenhouse
Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Aaron
Burr Hall 116, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, U.S.A.
(cgreenho@princeton.edu). 23 XI 10
In her critique of the keyword identity, Lauren Leve sounds
a timely cautionary note. Identityin her sense of the
termbecame a keyword for sociocultural anthropology in
the 1980s (Rouse 1995), drawn into the discipline from rights-
based social movements, either directly as a discourse of
power, resistance, and recognition or indirectly as a core an-
alytic borrowed from new cultural studies disciplines then
emergent adjacent to anthropology. In the United States, it
became pervasive as rights movements suffered significant
political setbacks on the national scene through the 1980s and
1990s, as major elements of federal policy were turned into
wedge issues, culminating in a wave of reform under the
center-right coalition that dominated the Congress during the
first Bush and Clinton administrations. That coalition set new
limits on antidiscrimination rights, terminated key welfare
entitlements, and laced immigration law with strong crimin-
alization and deportation provisions. The mainstreaming of
neoliberalism in the United States was among the causes and
effects of debates that played prominently on a critique of
identity politics as reverse racism and a drag on enterprise
counter to the principles of liberty. Meanwhile, anthropol-
ogys embrace of the keyword identity resisted that critique,
turning it back against the naturalization of the mythical in-
dividual that was central to the moral economy of what Leve
calls the identity machine. Anthropologys keywordin the
context of the timewas broadly legible as an anti-anti-
politics machine (to play on Fergusons phrase; Ferguson
1990; see also Greenhouse 2003, 2009).
Leves critique of the identity machine is double-barreled
aimed first against the construction of the individual central
to the political discourse that popularized neoliberalism as an
electoral platform and also against the outcome of those po-
litical contests, amounting to a major political shift with ex-
tensive consequences. As late as the mid-1990sbut not since
thenrights and market principles shared the political stage.
If (as Leve seems to imply) the counterhegemonic implication
of identity has been lost within anthropology, this is perhaps
indicative of how the mainstreaming of neoliberalism has
restructured political agency andbeyond the discipline and
within itthe social imaginary over the span of a generation.
The identity machine took hold in the United States as a
discursive displacement of rights by markets, but neoliber-
alism was not everywhere preceded by liberalism, nor is it
monolithic in other respects. Still, from the double vantage
point of knowledge practices and institutional pragmatics,
 528
Nepal (where Leves insights are honed by 2 decades of as-
sociation and ethnographic research) is and is not distant
from Washington, D.C. Some such connections are threaded
through the essay; others are just below the surface, in the-
oretical sources that date from or are about the transitional
period of the 1990s. These show the identity machinepro-
ducing identities and consuming themto be at once a com-
plex welter of powers, agencies, and political subjectivities and
a multidisciplinary project (a machine that is not one, to
borrow from Irigaray [1985 (1977)]). As Leve suggests, the
point is to make moreespecially more ethnography and
historyout of the machines operations, functions, and lim-
its, as well as the contests through which owners and stake-
holders provisionally establish their relations or not.
These relations are not to be found just anywhere. The
machine that concerns Leve runs especially in interzones pro-
duced by the ever-shifting tectonics of what is sometimes
called the public/private divide (which is also a national/trans-
national divide) and the way these are pegged centrally but
indeterminately to collective status asymmetries, hence the
paradox she observes among Theravada Buddhists in Nepal,
who reject the individuality of religious experience but em-
brace their right to practice their religion. This paradox echoes
the conundrum famously set out by Durkheim (1933:37),
regarding the contingent relation of the individual to the so-
cial. Thus, the implications of Leves essay are far-reaching as
a set of observations about how neoliberal capitalism and
governmentality are drawn into our ethnographic practices
through discourse, seemingly without alternatives. The illu-
sion of inevitability can be credited not only to the identity
machine but also to the disparate social fields where signs of
identity are keyed to specific political forms and functions.
Leve, in effect, cautions against misreading the past in the
present, since the pervasiveness of the keyword neither vin-
dicates a global liberalism nor guarantees its political efficacy,
yetas she demonstratesits relational and critical forces are
not exhausted.
Susan Hangen
Anthropology and International Studies, B207, Ramapo
College, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah, New Jersey
07430, U.S.A. (shangen@ramapo.edu). 20 XII 10
Lauren Leves article on identity provides provocative answers
to the question of why identity politics so often escalate with
the implementation of democracy and neoliberal economic
policies. A global identity machine is at work, she argues,
and produces particular ways of being that facilitate the glob-
alization of neoliberal democracy.
The parallels between the model of selfhood underscored
in both identity politics and in neoliberal economies are evi-
dent, as is the authors claim that the proliferation of identity-
based politics facilitates governance in these types of states.
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
But Leve also suggests that democratization and neoliberalism
play a primary role in producing and establishing these iden-
tities. While the identity machine may facilitate or en-
courage the central role of identity in politics, it is less clear
that it establishes identity as a category of being. This argu-
ment underestimates the role of the state in creating identity
as criteria of belonging to the state or, in other words, of
citizenship.
While identity politics became a central force in Nepals
political landscape after 1990, these movements did not
emerge suddenly at that moment. Rather, identity politics
have longer roots, as some of the organizations that played
a key role in ethnic politics post-1990 were established in the
1950s. What was new in the post-1990 era was that these
identity movements invoked international discourses and
UN conventions, as Leve recognizes. These global connec-
tions influenced the way that these actors articulate their iden-
tities, as is most evident in the adoption of the discourse of
indigeneity by ethnic minority groups. Yet the assertion of
identity or the mobilization of identity as the basis for political
claims did not commence with these connections.
When examining the historical path of the rise of ethnic
politics in Nepal, it is not clear that neoliberal forces are the
prime generators of identity politics. The ideology of nation-
alism and the states grammar of identity in the period prior
to the 1990s have also established the ontology of identity
there and played a role in the origins of ethnic politics in
Nepal. During the Panchayat era, the state politicized religion
and linked it to a national identity, proclaiming Nepal a Hindu
state. In the census, religion and language were the major
categories of difference that were tabulated, while ethnicity
was eschewed. Thus, the idea of membership in a religious
community as the basis of belonging in the state was estab-
lished by the state, prior to 1990. Even while the Theravada
Buddhists eschew the notion of a unified self or personal
identity, their mobilization as Buddhists within the Nepali
state was influenced by the states classificatory framework.
If identity politics are produced by neoliberalism, this oc-
curs as an unintended consequence of these economic
changes. States and international observers have often decried
ethnic politics as destabilizing democracies. While the Nepali
state was implementing neoliberal reforms after 1990, the state
and its affiliated elites were reluctant to recognize identity
claims as a legitimate part of the political discourse. Only with
the rise of Maoists, who engaged in a decade-long armed
conflict with the state, did the state begin to accept identity
claims.
As Leve explains, the popular narrative of the rise ethnic
politics after 1990 holds that the establishment of democracy
in 1990 made it possible for oppressed minorities to articulate
their discontent. She critiques this narrative, suggesting that
it implies that all people naturally have identities and that
recognizing and protecting them is a defining feature of the
democratic state. However, we can still accept the idea that
democratization made it possible for people to use identities
Leve Identity
as basis of political claims without accepting the idea that
identities are ancient and natural. Democratic institutions did
create greater space for popular political participation. The
re-creation of collective identities and the mobilization of
these identities for political purposes were a response to the
institutions of democracy and to the nationalist ideologies
that the state had forwarded during the previous decades.
Leve explores Rees (1992) theory of internationality, a sociated with high esoteric practice for millennia, in fact his-
global logic that leads to the proliferation of nationalist ide-
ologies, as a model for her concept of the identity machine.
However, it seems that internationality itself goes a long way
toward explaining the production of identities that she at-
tributes to the identity machine. Internationality is tied to
broader political and economic formations of capitalism,
whereas Leve seeks to link the identity machine to specifically
neoliberal formations. Thus, internationality can explain the
emergence of identity categories as the basis of political be-
longing over a longer period of time.
Mark Liechty
Department of Anthropology (m/c 027), 2102 Behavioral
Sciences Building, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1007
West Harrison Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7139, U.S.A.
(liechty@uic.edu). 8 XI 10
Lauren Leves essay is a courageous and helpful foray into a
confusing set of terms and processes. Her idea of the identity
machine usefully brings together a range of works, theories,
and arguments into a focused set of claims about identity as
an increasingly globalized form of governmentality. Her eth-
nographic focus is on the encounter between two grand on-
tologies: a Western materialist understanding of self as object,
possession, and property and an antimaterialist ontology
rooted in South Asian madhyamaka philosophy.
Although I enthusiastically support Leves larger argument,
there are dangers in the way it is presented. On the one hand
is the risk of reinscribing the old East/West, spiritual/material,
tradition/modernity dichotomies onto the current global con-
dition. On the other hand is the risk of essentializing Buddhist
ontology, which is presented here in its most esoteric form,
one that it shares with most of the other great religious
traditions in South Asia. The problem is that South Asian
religious motivations have been much more diverse than this
esoteric ontology would suggest. From various kinds of folk
propitiations, to bhakti devotionalism, to a range of meri-
torious practices, South Asian religious life is about a lot more
than self-negation. The ontologies that underlie this range of
practices are not (only) the esoteric, antimaterialist logics that
underpin, in this case, vipassana practice. Of course, Leve
knows all of this and much more. Yet I would like to question
her characterization of Buddhist meditation as a potential
challenge to Western neoliberal understandings of the self.
Leve did not have time to go into either the history of
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529
Buddhism in Nepal or the origins of vipassana meditation.
Yet the specific history of Theravada Buddhism (a form rein-
troduced by Newar nationalists in the twentieth century and
distinct from earlier syncretic practices as well as Tibetan
forms that were common) has everything to do with the very
identity machine that she describes. Meditation also has a
curious place in South Asian religion. While it has been as-
torically meditation has been rare for lay people (and even
for many monastics and other renouncers), who instead fo-
cused on accumulating merit in hopes of achieving a higher
rebirth.
Arguably, it was only in the mid-twentieth century that
meditation was plucked from an array of religious pursuits
and promoted as the liberatory practice par excellence. This
took place in the context of the postcolonial encounter and
especially the self-conscious rediscovery of Eastern spiri-
tuality for South Asians and its export to the West. S. N.
Goenka, the founder of the modern vipassana movement, is
only one of many to peddle meditation to eager middle-class
subjects in South Asia and abroad. For me, what is most
notable about the huge modern middle-class turn to medi-
tation is not the esoteric, antiself, antimaterialist ontology that
ostensibly underlies it but the opposite: its embrace as a qua-
sitherapeutic self-help technique.
Here Peter Morans (2004) work on Western students of
Tibetan Buddhism in Kathmandu is very revealing. Although
they come idolizing Tibetans as innately spiritual beings, these
students soon grow disillusioned, even disgusted, with most
lay (and even monastic) Tibetan practitioners for whom med-
itation is the domain of rare religious virtuosi (Moran 2004:
99). Whereas Tibetans focus on the necessity of kindness or
compassion towards others, and honesty in ones everyday
life (Moran 2004:163), Westerners insist that if you dont
meditate, youre not a Buddhist! (158). According to Moran,
current Western fascination with Buddhism as meditation
derives partly from modern discourses, especially following
Freud, concerning techniques of self-recuperation and im-
provement (164). Arguably, the modern turn to meditation
is more about the powerfully felt imperative to recover, ac-
cumulate, and therapeutically transform the self than it is
about transcending it. The modern focus on intensive med-
itation may make more sense within a materialist (and, not
coincidentally, Judeo-Christian) ontology of self, physical
(eternal) damnation, and personal salvation (or the per-
sonal, entrepreneurial responsibility for self-salvation) than it
does in the cyclical worldview of karmic reincarnation.
What I am suggesting is that for the tens of thousands of
Nepalis and foreigners who flock to meditation courses in
Kathmandu every year, meditation may be as much or more
a Foucauldian technology of the self (Martin, Gutman, and
Hutton 1988) than a means of self-negation. Far from chal-
lenging Leves basic arguments about the identity machine,
my suggestion is that the twentieth-century explosion in in-
terest in meditation may not be an opposite force . . . [that]
 530
undercuts the commodified logic of self-identity and posses-
sive freedom encouraged by a neoliberal world order and its
identity machine but another example of that machines in-
sidious workings.
Lawrence Rosen
Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Prince-
ton, New Jersey 08544, U.S.A. (lrosen@princeton.edu). 3 XI
10
A few years ago, I mentioned to colleagues in a Bedouin
studies program in the Middle East that I thought the proper
comparison between their situation was not to the tribes of
North Africa among whom I had worked but to the situation
of Native Americans. The latter, I continued, are part of a
larger movement concerned with the rights of indigenous
peoples. Indigenous people? they replied. Thats who we
are! They cheerfully began organizing a conference on the
Bedouin as an indigenous people.
Some time later, I returned to one of my favorite works of
ethnography, Alice in Wonderland, and came across the pas-
sage in which the Duchess says to Alice: I quite agree with
you, said the Duchess; and the moral of that isBe what
you would seem to beor if youd like it put more simply
Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it
might appear to others that what you were or might have
been was not otherwise than what you had been would have
appeared to them to be otherwise (Carroll 1992 [1865]:
72).
Now, on the well-established proposition that for an an-
thropologist one example is an anecdote and two is a theory,
there arises from these instances a clear theoretical model,
namely, not that identity is a matter of prescription or as-
cription alone but that it can never be without both elements
simultaneously. Wewhether the unit is a group or individ-
uals thinking of themselves in the royal pronounexist as
relational entities, and like the cards in a poker game, what
each of us holds is as much a function of others holdings as
of any absolute we might imagine applies to ourselves alone.
Small wonder, then, that as anthropologists return to studies
of identityand not infrequently reinvent the wheel when
they imagine themselves, jargon ablaze, to have discovered
matters anewthey should sometimes occupy the role of
Kiplings (1940:802) devil who limps up to explain it all over
again.
This is not to say that circumstances have remained un-
changed for various cultures or that there is nothing new
under the anthropological sun. Quite the contrary. Lauren
Leves analysis of the Nepalese Buddhists reconfiguration of
their identity is itself demonstrative of a vital addition to our
way of thinking through these matters. She not only starts us
off with the wonderful paradox of a people who, at least in
theory, submerge personal concepts of the self practically to
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
the null pointand thus confront us with the irony of a case
in which identity seems to fade as an issue altogetheronly
to place this very situation in a context of interaction with
others such that the strains of this world and its relationships
are largely thrust back on even the most idealistic of relig-
ionists. She goes further, demonstrating that the terms
through which we might analyze this complex recasting of
identity may be best explored through pressures brought to
bear on the Nepalese that are both foreign in origin and not
fully amalgamated to the Nepalese sense of order.
But the two prongs of identity remainthe prescriptive,
which partakes of the blinkered vision of others who pro-
nounce on ones place in the scheme of things, and the as-
criptive, which incorporates elements of the claim made on
oneself and by others of a set of origins that, however much
they seem to emanate from within, further triangulate ones
position among ones fellows. For the Nepalese Buddhists, it
would seem, the relational is no more escapable than for those
who do not see the self as divorced from a world of involve-
ment: it is as if each time one withdraws into the cosmos,
the cosmos drags one back to the imbrications of the mun-
daneonly now in a world whose terms and conditions (if
hardly for the first time but perhaps more widely and swiftly
than in the past) place a drain on the control that was pre-
viously imagined to have been ones own. Leve brings out
both the confrontations and the pathos of this inescapable
dilemma and in the process calls anthropologists back to a
deeply contextualized vision of the Nepalese world.
The Duchess may have been right, then, when she told
Alice: If everybody minded their own business . . . the world
would go round a deal faster than it does (Carroll 1992
[1865], chap. 6). But, nowadays, people do not mind their
own business, and our identitiescontingent, contested, and
constrainedbecome ever more each others, with the per-
haps unavoidable result that our world is spinning so rapidly
we may feel somewhat less ourselves.
Reply
When I first began fieldwork in the early 1990s, I was intrigued
by two graphic images I found at Theravada Buddhist viharas.
The first was the international Buddhist flag, an iconic symbol
of Buddhist presence and pride designed in Sri Lanka in 1880
by an American Buddhist crusader. The second was a drawing
that showed a young woman agingher skin sagging, her
eyes clouding, and her black hair turning white until in the
end there was only a wrinkled old woman with none but a
temporal resemblance to her youthful former self. Both ob-
jects expressed concerns for members of Nepals Theravada
Buddhist community at that time. The flag was an emblem
of Buddhist identity; the picture reminded viewers of the core
Buddhist teachings that everything is necessarily always in
Leve Identity
flux (anicca), such that the person you are today will inevitably
be gone tomorrow, leaving a continuity of form and con-
sciousness but not a metaphysically existential, enduring per-
sonal self (anatta). The tensions and complementarities that
the two images express suggest the seemingly contradictory
but, obviously, embodiablereality within which Nepali Bud-
dhists (and others) struggle to determine what is, what mat-
ters, and how to live today. I argue in this paper that the
choices that they make under these conditionsand, in so
doing, the lives that they createparticipate in the ideological
and institutional conditions of neoliberal modernity and per-
haps also redirect these forces in unexpected ways that may
illuminate hidden neoliberal trends within current anthro-
pological studies of identity.
There is, indeed, as Rosen notes, a Wonderland-like quality
to trying to make sense of what the Nepali Buddhists I discuss
do and think in a context that is at once global and local,
historically shaped and of the moment. But a true paradox
is a contradiction that, in fact, reveals a greater truth. The
problem here is not primarily the ways that people and things
keep appearing, disappearing, and changing shape. It is,
rather, or perhaps also, that I am not the only Aliceit is
the shared disorientation of anthropologists and informants
that brings Buddhist theory into dialogue with anthropology
via neoliberal identity. Rosens observation that identity can
never be a matter of ascription or prescription alone but
depends on both elements simultaneously points both to my
argument and to the challenge of finding a language and
analytical framework to describe it. Greenhouses history of
identity sounds a similarly cautionary tale. How did a dis-
course that entered U.S. politics and anthropology as an anti-
anti-politics machine become a naturalized tool in the neo-
liberal tool kit in Nepal? How to navigate an unstableat
bestpublic/private divide that, she points out, is also a na-
tional/transnational one? Especially, how to do this when the
very language one would use is itself so fraught andas Gell-
ner so mischievously suggestsone can never be sure who is
playing what kind of a game (although I am not sure why
teasing and telling a truth cannot be the same)?
It is gratifying to read that I mostly succeeded at this task,
but the commentaries also suggest that some clarification may
be helpful to fully make sense of my ethnography. To be clear,
I am not arguing that neoliberalism caused identity politics
in Nepal or elsewhere, nor would I agree that there is a nec-
essary conflict between pursuing Buddhist insight through
meditation and trying to improve ones sociopolitical or ma-
terial situation (i.e., daily life) such that meditators cannot
do both.
First, identity politics: when I say that the neoliberal identity
machine has helped produce and shape an explosion of so-
ciopolitical identities in Nepal, I do not mean that the reli-
gious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities who are demanding
recognition (and, now, political and territorial autonomy) did
not exist before the 1990s. My interest is in the ways that
prevailing identities take on new meaning under the insti-
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531
tutional conditions of liberal and neoliberal democracy and
the ways that this reflects and advances possessive individualist
experiences of personhood. Hangen goes directly to the point
when she notes that the democratic claims of the 90s were
articulated in the name of castes and ethnicities that had
themselves been created by the state. But if the first and sub-
sequent countrywide legal codes (Muluki Ain) drew onand,
in the process, transformedlocalized caste and kinship
norms that determined such intimate details as what people
wore, whom they married, what and with whom they ate,
and so on, to create Nepals ethnic communities as far back
as 1854, the global (neo)liberal identity assemblage is building
on and again transforming the meanings of these identities.
Thus, in addition to mandating that you marry within the
prescribed group and requiring you to draw water from one
well versus another (although such discriminatory practices
are now illegal), your caste, ethnic, or religious identity now
demands that you appear in the street to decry national Hin-
duism. That there have been cases of ethnic mobilization in
the past should not be a surprise, given that identity has long
been a category of colonial knowledge and a governmental
strategy. But this is not to say that peoples relationships to
their collective selves have not experienced change over time
and, for my purposes, in the 90s. Far from creating or im-
posing something entirely new, the identity machine is chang-
ing the meaning of older forms of political and social sub-
jectivity and thus transforming peoples relationships to
themselves in the public domain (and, perhaps, also some
private ones).
The neoliberal identity shifts I discuss in this paper began
with the dismantling of Panchayat-era ideologies that linked
national identity to subject status vis-a`-vis the Hindu king.
They continued with a constitution that promised equal rights
to all citizens, regardless of ethnic identity or mother tongue
which, of course, demanded that citizens organize and present
themselves in these very terms. They have reached a zenith
in the current effort to establish a federal state comprising
multiple ethnically defined territoriesthe delineation of
which provoked all sorts of contention. All of these changes
are based on and encourage an expectation of self-ownership
and equality of contract between owners. In Nepal and else-
where, these expectations have proven to be powerful weapons
against the structural and spectacular violence enforced by
illiberal majorities and undemocratic states. In an age of global
neoliberal governance, however, they may also help to channel
urgent demands for justice into organizational forms that help
to support other inequalities that are not socially organized
but economic and that are generating other kinds of suffering
for those who find themselves playing the game of life (in-
cluding identity politics) in dramatically reorganized eco-
nomic terrains.
Which brings me to matters of meditation. In this (political
and economic) climate, the shifts in self-understanding that
meditators attribute to vipassana meditation offer an alternate
way of experiencing self-identity that challenges the natural-
 532
ized possessive individualism that liberal (and particularly
neoliberal) policies promote. However, to see it this way re-
quires abandoning much of what we believe we know about
Buddhismparticularly, the presumptions that real Bud-
dhist meditators will adopt an otherworldly attitude (or mo-
nastic lifestyle) and transcend self-ish concerns, pre- applies to Nepali Buddhists and, of course, to anthropologists,
sumptions that reflect Judeo-Christian assumptions about a
mind/body dichotomy and about religion (specifically that it
is an abstract, privatized domain of experience concerned with
spiritual transcendence and figural transformation after this
life rather than an embodied shift in perspective within it)
and that have little to do with the concrete and powerfully
embodied ways that the Theravada Buddhist meditators I
worked with understood and experienced Buddhist insight.
It is true that I might have been more careful situating my
claims. I do not mean to imply that all Theravada Buddhists
in Kathmandu meditate, nor is it true that all of those who
do are equally interested in Buddhist scholasticism. If I failed
to make it clear that Buddhists (and especially meditators)
may embrace the core insight of not-self without articu-
lating it as suchfor example, by reflecting on the body and
its susceptibility to change, as one does in meditation or in
the picture I mentioned aboveit remains the case that one
does not need a doctrinal understanding of anatta to appre-
ciate the effects of a practice that can at once coexist with
but also deconstruct the imperative toand experience of
performing possessive individualism across public domains.
At least, this is what I took from my friends and informants
regular insistence that they found vipassana meditation help-
ful for governing and meeting the pressures of their ordinary
daily lives.
Leichty is absolutely correct, then, to see the modern vi-
passana movement as a kind of self-help strategy for the in-
ternational middle class. Where we disagree is in his as-
sumption that this is a problem, that meditators must adhere
to either a materialist . . . ontology of self . . . [and] entre-
preneurial responsibility or a cyclical worldview of karmic
reincarnation. In my experience, they hold to both, and they
do not necessarily see these as incommensurable, as the com-
mon assertion that the Buddha was the firstand greatest
physical scientist suggests. Likewise, they do not acknowledge
an existential conflict between Buddhist meditation and West-
ern, neoliberal thought. (I, too, have tried to indicate that
these are all mutually constitutive institutions, the historical
products of continuous exchange.)
On the one hand, then, the neoliberal identity machine is
changing the meaning of preexisting identities and trans-
forming peoples relationships to their public, collective selves.
On the other, a modernized, middle-class vipassana medi-
tation movement is helping people to regard their experiences
(desires, frustrations, irritations, and other physical and emo-
tional sensations) as just thatembodied experiencesand
to see themselves as the contingent product of innumerable,
ongoing karmic processes, all of which are subject to the laws
of cause and effect. In fact, these transformations are not
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Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4, August 2011
contradictorythey are connected by the political and eco-
nomic realities of neoliberal life that organize worlds as if
people actually are possessive individuals and, in so doing,
invite us to occupy and embody this subjective reality, be-
coming both subjects and agents of this neoliberal order. This
too.
Lauren Leve
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