ABSTRACT
This chapter argues about mixed marriage in Nepal with reference to what preceded the author's own ‘mixed marriage’. Anthropological analyses are often full of double standards. A notion of romantic ‘love’, and an aesthetic of ‘Otherness’ was all that was needed to justify such attractions. Neo-functional descriptions of courtship and marriage continue to dominate the anthropological literature , and these allow no place for a simple attraction to the exotic Other. The absence of ‘love’ in anthropological description is partly due to a clear tendency for ethnographers to problematize social institutions like marriage especially intermarriage - to search for rules and meaningful patterns in social unions to the exclusion of all else. Tamaphok is considered by most residents to be the heartland of an ethnic group called ‘Yakha’, belonging to a larger cultural-linguistic group called the Kiranti, a people of Tibeto-Burmese origin. Many young Yakha women in Tamaphok commented on the beauty of the Limbu language.
