ABSTRACT
Changes in the political culture of Nepal set in motion by the events of 1990 have enabled the rise of new associations of political alignment, some of which draw on ethnic and religious identifications. Assumptions of correspondence between shared ethnonym, culture, socio-economic condition, and political consciousness, might seem inherently problematic given the geographical spread of a population as large as the Tamang. In this paper I will none the less argue that the people of the Tamang-speaking heartland have carried a particular historical and continuing burden in their relationship to the mercantile economy of Kathmandu, the power structure of unified Nepal, and access to the fruits of national development. The effects of this relationship on the production of identities will be examined in the context of Rasuwa district, north-central Nepal, where social group categories and relations have operated in a distinctly peripheral environment to mainstream Nepali society. But it is a periphery that has been hiistorically constituted in economic and cultural relationships with the state.
