The Background of This Study

This book is based on a study of Bhaktapur, a Newar city in Nepal, during the years 1973 to 1976, and it is the first of two projected volumes. My central interest has been in the reciprocal relations of the public life of communities and the private worlds of their members. I began working in Bhaktapur after studies in two small Tahitian-speaking communities in the Society Islands of French Polynesia ("Piri" and "Roto") in the hope that the enormous contrasts between the ways of life of that Himalayan Hindu city and of the tiny Polynesian communities might be illuminating in some unforeseen way.

My intention at first was to report on Bhaktapur in much the same way that I had on the Society Islands communities. I would write a short section on the social and cultural context of people's lives and follow it with an extended description and discussion of some individuals' private experience and of their "mental worlds" as those small worlds were related to their larger contexts. I collected, as I had in Piri and Roto, information on the social and cultural context and, with the help of lengthy tape-recorded sets of interviews, information on private worlds. Instead of the forty pages that were required to introduce the relevant aspects of the Tahitian context, however, it has taken me this large volume to present the relevant Bhaktapurian context. That, in a way, is the central point of this study. For it is the weight and complexity of its culture and society that most evidently distinguishes public life

in Bhaktapur from public life in Piri and which, in turn, powerfully affects many aspects of private experience and personal mental organization of people in Bhaktapur in comparison with people in the Tahitian communities.

But what is the relevant context? Bhaktapur is a repository of much of the cultural and social history of South Asia. What was to be studied there, and what included in this volume?^[1] The decision, as always in ethnographic reports, has been somewhat uncertain and a compromise. Thus some of this book is devoted to the commonplaces of the tradition of ethnographic description—sketches of history, economy, and, more elaborately, social structure. Most of it is concerned with the elaborate "religious" life of the city, the system of symbols that helps organize the integrated life of the city so that it becomes a mesocosm , an organized meaningful world intermediate to the microcosmic worlds of individuals and the culturally conceived macrocosm, the universe, at whose center the city lies.

The religious organization of Bhaktapur is of central interest for the theoretical ambitions of this study. One of the most striking differences between Bhaktapur and Piri is the enormous comparative elaboration of a particular kind of symbolism (which we will call "marked symbolism") in Bhaktapur and its miniscule importance, even its suppression, in Piri. As I will propose in chapter 2, this elaboration is a crucial resource for organizing a certain type of community and society, a certain type of city—an "archaic city." Bhaktapur represents a Hindu community in its full development, a "climax community" of Hinduism, and Hinduism so viewed is a symbolic resource that once served, and still anachronistically serves in Bhaktapur, to organize many such cities.

A final reason for emphasizing Bhaktapur's symbolic organization is that the striking contrast between Piri's emphasis on what it takes to be the mundane and Bhaktapur's emphasis on the dramatic theatrics of marked symbolism is intimately and centrally connected with differences not only, as one might expect, in the intimate experience of people in the two places but also in aspects of their "mental organization." It was as an essay in comparative "mental organization" that I undertook the study, and it is here that this volume has a problem. The understanding that I began to have during the course of this study of various people's private lives, of their ways of thinking and feeling, of their consciences and their motives, often motivates and shapes the sociocultural description presented in this volume. The neurophysiologist and cybernetician Warren McCulloch once entitled a paper "What is a

Number, That a Man May Know It, and a Man, That He May Know a Number?" (1965). These intimately interdependent questions, transformed to "what is Bhaktapur that a Newar may know it, and a Newar that he or she may know Bhaktapur" serve admirably to indicate what I am mostly after, with the qualification that "know" is too limited, and would need to be expanded to "act in, be secure in, be sane in, be human in," as well as "resist, struggle against, reinterpret" or whatever words we may find for those aspects of Man (who is, of course, generic Man) that turn out to be dependent on the forms of the community in which an individual lives. However, the materials on the mind and experience of "the Newar," or, more modestly and accurately, of sample Newars, must be presented in detail elsewhere. In this volume I have had to introduce as assertions with no supporting data ideas about some of the most relevant psychological and personal "resonances" (a useful word for deferring considerations of cause and effect, of direction of the flow between individuals and community) of the symbolic order, ideas, for example, about "sophistication," symbol hunger, special qualities of "self" and "person," the implications and resonances of the "purity complex," and of the special personal force of blood sacrifice. The apologetic and hopeful phrase "We will treat this at length elsewhere" is often used in admission that the reader might be uncomfortable with one or another obiter dictum .

I approached Bhaktapur from Tahiti with a different set of questions and with a different kind of competence and ignorance from those of an Indologist or Himalayan expert. I must ask the Indologist's indulgence for my errors and amateurism and the use of secondary sources and translations for South Asian history and for Hindu texts. The Indologist and the anthropologist working in South Asia need much mutual forbearance on the one hand and dialogue on the other.

My choice of Nepal, the Newars, and Bhaktapur for study was originally motivated by a growing conviction that the kinds of psychological forms that I had seen and reported on in Piri and Roto (Levy, Tahitians , 1973) were something more than the simple consequence of an historically derived "cultural tradition." The personal experience and psychological characteristics of individuals in Piri and Roto turned out to be in many ways similar to those reported elsewhere throughout Polynesia and Micronesia. This raised questions (Levy 1969, 48):

To what degree are the similarities artifacts of shared emphases of the common intellectual subculture of Micronesian and Polynesian specialists? To what degree are they simply a negative category, a lack of some peculiarly

modern urban trait, turned into a pseudopositive form? To what degree are these necessary structural psychological responses of all people who live on islands, or who have semisubsistence economies based on horticulture and fishing, or who live in traditional "simple" societies of any kind? To what degree are they universal responses to encounter with vastly more powerful societies, or to prolonged colonial experience? And finally, to what degree are the reported areal psychological sumlarities part of a shared and historically transmitted cultural tradition, in which personality can be viewed as an historical product?

With such questions in mind and with considerable curiosity about experience in different kinds of places that were exotic to me, I looked for a community that was as different from a Tahitian village as I could find, while still being "non-Western." I chose, finally, the Newar city of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley. Piri, the Tahitian village that was the principal site of my previous study, was small (some 284 people living in fifty-four households), on a small island, with comparatively little differentiation of social and sexual roles, based on a fishing and horticulture economy, traditionally nonliterate, a variant of Polynesian culture and society, and, since the late eighteenth century, under increasing Western colonial influence. Bhaktapur was a very large community by anthropological standards, some 40,000 people living in extraordinary density in an area of less than one-half square mile; situated in a high mountain valley in the interior of a large continental area; socially highly differentiated into a hierarchical caste structure, with markedly differentiated gender roles; with an economy based on farming, crafts, and trading; traditionally highly literate, in fact, a traditional center of Himalayan and South Asian High Culture; and although under the political control of the Gorkhalisnce the late eighteenth century, almost untouched by Western influences until the early 1950s. It would be difficult to find two non-Western communities that were more different from each other. The usual strategy in comparative studies is to compare two communities that differ from each other in as few dimensions as possible and to try to trace the influence of those few dimensions. A strategy of maximal contrast is a different matter. One learns something from comparing a mouse and an elephant, something about mammalian universals and about the possibilities and limits of variation, and, concurrently, about gross differences in adaptation.

In this book the comparison between Bhaktapur and Piri (and of both with "the West") is sometimes overt, but for long stretches it becomes covert, informing the point of view and the emphasis given to the possible significance of certain phenomena.

In the description of the relatively simple life of an isolated village it is possible to achieve a considerable degree of accuracy. Whenever possible, many variants of an event can be observed, many informants can be queried, small but possibly significant details can be explored, contradictions can be exploited. Bhaktapur, in contrast to such villages, is not only large in size and population—full of events, crammed with symbolic forms, and highly socially differentiated—but also has a literate tradition that many of its inhabitants know, and that in itself complexities reports and interpretations as to what goes on. But what its inhabitants think Bhaktapur is and what this study claims it, in fact, to be in large part is a unified sociocultural system. If one is concerned with the organization of this system and its implications for those who live in it, it has to be approached in long focus, trying to keep in view the multitude of forms and events that are visible to all in the city's public urban space and time. This requires the gathering of masses of material—often necessarily based on one viewing or sometimes one glimpse, and/or on the reports of limited numbers of informants, all under pressures that often make it impossible to adequately check reliability, details, and mistakes. In short, there are undoubtedly more errors of detail in this book than would be seemly in the study of a small community.