Tamang Conversions: Culture, Politics, and the Christian Conversion Narrative in Nepal

Abstract

In 1990 the Buddhist people of Timling, on Nepal's northern borderland, converted en masse to evangelical Christianity and later to Roman Catholicism. While the process implies a profound cultural rupture, in this talk I consider the logic of conversion itself. From the converts you'll hear a common story about the healing efficacy of Christian prayer -- about its cheapness compared to the once necessary offerings to afflicting spirits. Yet, this conversion finds parallels in past "conversions" into intensified religious practice. Enshrined in story and myth, all conversions follow a plot structure involving the correcting of a dharma gone astray. Their elements, embedded in a common ethos of exchange, include the cyclic decline and renewal of virtue, the role of political strongmen, the vice of greed, and the search for holy men. This talk is based on fieldwork since 1981 with the most recent period specifically devoted to Christian conversion narratives. Timling became Christian in 1990. That same year Nepal's "partyless panchayat " government fell in response to street action and social disruption. The subsequent democratic experiment in Nepal, marred by civil war, is still fragile. I want to suggest that the shared timing is more than accident.