A clear understanding of the female symbolism of mediation found in Tamang and Sherpa hospitality exchanges, and especially in these beer- offerings, has implications for our understanding of female symbolism in many other contexts. Conceptually, I find it useful to organize these implications into three general categories: first, to embed hospitality firmly within the specific view of exchange at play among Sherpa and Tamang; second, to approach the femaleness of hospitality and its benefits as culturally specific symbols; and finally, to explore the place of affect in these female symbols.
In Tamang and Sherpa society and belief, as we have seen, apparently familiar ideas18 about women, food and drink, hospitality, fertility, and prosperity, reveal upon closer inspection a very different array of associations. Sherpa and Tamang exchange pivots upon a balanced reciprocity, whether compassionate or coerced, between presumptive equals. This daily domestic hospitality also informs even the most sacred exchanges. As a result, I have cautioned against interpreting generous hostesses as “servile.” Instead, their actions perform culturally significant mediations between the mundane world of family life and the bounty of the divine domain. When exchange itself is wealth, when reciprocal obligation secures all that is desirable, and when even divine generosity can be motivated by the irresistibility of hospitality mediated by female symbols, offering—as imagery and as act—is extremely powerful.
Beer-offerings to divinity constitute a sacred hospitality, an effort to perpetuate bonds of reciprocal obligation between the human and divine worlds much as they serve to reinforce such ties in everyday reality as perceived by Tamang and Sherpa. It thus seems apparent, especially in the imagery surrounding beer-offerings, that female mediation is the avenue along which divine bounty might be cajoled back into human
life. Beer-offerings bring divine concern, beneficence, compassion, and quite specifically, extra riches, wealth, harvest, health, and prosperity, directly into human life.
The fertility that women’s ritual hospitality brings into their households must, however, be placed in its wider cultural context. It is not a simple biological fecundity; in fact, human reproduction and sexuality attract modest attention. Instead, the imagery of beer yeast, as well as beer-offering, emphasizes that the “fertility” gained by women’s sacred hospitality is best conceived as “increase,” a general multiplication of fortune, goods, and in this context children, harvests, and herds.
But there is more to the “tale of yeast” and the story of beer- offerings. The “femaleness” of these offerings draws our attention not only to the fundamental aspirations of the Tamang and Sherpa model of hospitality but also, and perhaps most importantly, to the central ambiguity within their theory of exchange. The question of whether Sherpa and Tamang exchange is a mutually satisfactory and predictable reciprocity, or a fundamentally precarious system of coercion (as if it could be either one or the other) is not one to be answered through ethnographic precision. Such a question in fact masks a crucial observation: mutuality and coercion, balance and bribery, affection and self-interest, all coexist at the very heart of Tamang and Sherpa exchange. In this context, female symbols revolve around fundamentally contradictory, but intimately interconnected, assertions (see also March 1980): that women are, and are not, themselves objects of exchange; that women are, and are not, giving expression to their own desires in exchanges of their own.
When these pairs of interlaced contradictions themselves interact—in the femaleness of sacred hospitality—they constitute the framework within which Sherpa and Tamang are moved both to consider the efficacy of their exchange model and to confront its weaknesses. Sahlins’s lengthy comparison of Mauss and Hobbes (1979, pp. 149–83) revolves around these two authors’ “similar appreciation of reciprocity as the primitive mode of peace” (p. 178). Reciprocity and exchange are seen as representing a generalized primitive means of reducing social conflict, if not precisely a social contract for community. But social disruption appears equally imminent to Hobbes, Mauss, Sahlins, Sherpa, and Tamang. All require a further explanation for the persistence of people’s commitment to sociality and exchange. Sherpa and Tamang ponder this paradox in the femaleness of exchange. Female symbols highlight the simultaneous desirability of guaranteed returns, including divine liberality, and its impossibility.
Two female religious figures, Gang Jyungmo among Tamang and Gelungma Palmo among Sherpa, are vital to this more intricate interpretation of the female symbolism of sacred hospitality. The stories of these two great ascetics are quite long and vary in many respects, but they share certain threads of interest to the argument of this article. Both are presumed to have been historical figures, women who wanted to pursue a religious life, and both underwent great trials in their efforts to achieve spiritual enlightenment and recognition.
Gelungma Palmo suffered disease, humiliation, and challenge—even from her own father, who accused her of having contracted venereal disease—before her spiritual worth was realized.19 There are several versions of her story; they diverge on at least one significant point. In some of the tellings, especially the more orthodox or monastic ones, Gelungma Palmo’s illnesses were cured when she finally learned to devote herself absolutely to Chenrezig (Avalokitesvara).20 In other renderings she accumulated the requisite power not only to cure herself but to cut off her own head, fly into the air to dance as a headless body, and then descend and reattach her head herself.
In all accounts she is associated with the establishment of the foremost ritual of self-sacrifice, atonement, and meritorious giving practiced in Sherpa regions, the ritual of Ngyunge. According to most lay informants, the ritual is addressed to Gelungma Palmo, who “discovered” the texts and rites that today constitute the event; according to more literate specialists,
Chenrezig is the primary object of attention in Ngyunge and Gelungma Palmo was exemplary in his worship. In both lay and learned exegesis, however, the contradictory objective of Ngyunge is to achieve perfect detachment from all worldly ties while convincing Chenrezig/ Gelungma Palmo to provide protection and blessings. The fasting, prostrations, and prayers explicitly attempt to get people to recognize the futility of, and loose themselves from, the entire network of reciprocal obligations that constitutes normal domestic life.21 But many, if not all, participants in Ngyunge also seek material benefit and physical well- being through the intercessionary compassion of Chenrezig/Gelungma Palmo, a compassion they presume that their self-effacing generosity will necessitate.
Some of Gang Jyungmo’s story among the Tamang parallels that of Gelungma Palmo among the Sherpa. Gang Jyungmo, too, studied and worked to become an ascetic and monastic. Her efforts, too, led her into circumstances that brought her religious devotion into question and, temporarily at least, brought her near to ignominy. In her case,
however, it was not venereal illness but pregnancy that caused scandal. She claimed to have become pregnant by swallowing a hailstone, but no one would believe her; she was turned out of the monastery and reviled. She is thought eventually to have redeemed herself; today she is regarded by western Tamang both as the founder of Boudha, one of the largest pilgrimage places in Nepal, and as the originator of the practice of fermenting and offering beer in both social and ritual exchanges of hospitality. She is now considered an incarnation of Chenrezig, specifically embodying his compassionate generosity.
Both Gelungma Palmo and Gang Jyungmo are considered models of selflessness, whose generosity and tolerance for adversity surpassed even the most demanding Tamang and Sherpa social models. They are credited with teaching people not only how to imitate the detachment of divine compassion (embodied, in more orthodox interpretations, in Chenrezig) but also how to oblige that divine compassion to remember human vulnerability to illness, hunger, and abandonment. In myth, song, and ritual the full returns of reciprocity (whether compassionate or coerced) emerge as Gelungma Palmo and Gang Jyungmo are considered. For this analysis of the femaleness of hospitality, however, the special difficulties that the two female ascetics faced in getting recognition for their true spiritual worth are particularly important. Both female figures developed within what can only be termed religious crisis. Gelungma Palmo could not convince people that her various illnesses were signs of spiritual trial, not impurity or vile living; Gang Jyungmo’s claim that her pregnancy was supernaturally caused was similarly doubted. Presumably, both Gelungma Palmo and Gang Jyungmo had their own doubts at times (or at least so informants say in telling their stories). At the very least, it is certain that these two female figures and the ritual complexes that originate with them provide a crucial context for Sherpa and Tamang to confront the possibility that reciprocal exchange, especially with divinity, cannot be guaranteed.
The problem is less a matter of determining whether divinities or people are compassionate or self-centered, or whether exchange is freely given or coerced, than the more unsettling consideration that hospitality does not work to bind people (and divinities) together at all. Offerings cannot acquire any will, intention, or desire of their own if the exchange is to proceed without complication. If hospitality offerings are not guileless markers that simply connect the elements in a superordinate system of exchange but instead are themselves considered elements capable of intentions, then the essential reliability of exchange, as Sherpa and Tamang conceive of it, is called into question.
Here the special femaleness of Tamang and Sherpa offerings comes into play. The exchange that female symbols engender is only hypothetically unmotivated. Ideas about women, hospitality, and exchange are embedded in the much wider framework of women and marriage. In that framework the question for the Sherpa and Tamang, as for many contemporary anthropologists, is precisely whether women can be considered simple objects of exchange or whether they might not have desires of their own (Baal 1975). The possibility that women and symbols of femaleness might be motivated in part by purposes of their own threatens the transparency of exchange. The analogous debate within anthropology generally tries either to defend the superordinate nature of exchange—thus objectifying women—or to demonstrate that women maneuver their socially defined egos with the same fundamental self-awareness of men. The female symbolism of Tamang and Sherpa exchange underscores both facets in all human relations. The offerings one proffers to induce a return are female, but femaleness is ambiguous: its nature is both to connect and to rupture.