© 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. 1 This paper was selected for publication in the AAA’s Anthropology News as part of the "Rethinking Race and Human Variation" special editions of February and March 2006. The special editions were sponsored by the Understanding Race and Human Variation project and funded by the Ford Foundation. The Understanding Race and Human Variation project is a multi -year public education effort funded by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. This paper represents the views of the author and not that of the AAA or the Understanding Race and Human Variation project. THE EMERGENCE OF A MONGOL RACE IN NEPAL Susan Hangen, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Anthropology Ramapo College Mahwah, NJ 07430 Introduction Race is a highly malleable framework of identity, and it should be understood in relation to particular times, places and processes. Usually race is imposed upon marginalized groups by powerful elites, rather than initiated by those groups. Although race has typically been mobilized to justify and uphold social inequality, recently in Nepal race was used in a political movement to oppose those in power. In Nepal, race was never used by the state to understand or classify citizens. This challenges many scholars’ assumptions that race is always hegemonic. The Nepalis who identified themselves as a race were rejecting rather than replicating the dominant ways in which they had been classified. This challenges the assumption that marginalized groups are required to speak in the language of the powerful to gain recognition and change their position in society. The Politics of Identity During the 1990s, some ethnic groups in Nepal—including Gurungs, Magars, Rais, Limbus and Sherpas —began asserting that they all belong to a Mongol race. Previously, each of these groups was primarily identified as belonging to a jati , a term that means both a caste and ethnic group. Their adoption of this racial identity was inspired by the platform of a small political party called the Mongol National Organization (MNO), which sought to unite and mobilize these social and ethnically diverse people, in part to make major political changes that would increase their social, economic and political power. The MNO argued that Nepal’s linguistically and culturally diverse population is composed of two racial groups, the Aryans, who are caste Hindus,