Irish Journal of Anthropology Vol. 19(2) 2016 Autumn/Winter ARTICLE GOLDEN HAIR:ATRIBAL MYTH OF KINSHIP DETAILING A HINDU NARRATIVE IN THE NEPAL HIMALAYAS BY MARIE LECOMTE‐TILOUINE In the clustered society of Nepal, which includes more than a hundred 'tribes' and castes, collective identity has always taken on a vital dimension. 1 This is especially the case among the Tibeto‐Burman‐ speaking tribal groups, (today called Janajati in Nepali and indigenous peoples in English), which make up about a third of the total population of Nepal. These groups have been progressively placed under Hindu control, beginning in the 15th century, with the emergence of about 50 petty Hindu kingdoms in the region of the central Himalayas where the Janajatis were settled, which was to become the kingdom of Nepal. The Hindu stranglehold over the tribal populations intensified, following the unification campaign led by the Shah dynasty of Gorkha at the turn of the 18th century, which led to the creation of the kingdom of Nepal. The Janajatis were thereafter subjected to numerous royal decrees and harshly punished for Hindu‐specific crimes, such as the killing of cows. They were finally merged into the Hindu caste organisation by the 1854 Code of Law, and subjected to strict Hindu control of their daily life, notably regarding commensality, sexual relations, and kinship rules. Yet, some specificities in these matter were tolerated by the Hindu State, and were soon to form a symbol of identity, if not an area of resistance, among the indigenous peoples of Nepal. It is particularly the case regarding social organisation, which relies on distinct kinship rules, and which the Indigenous peoples of Nepal have retained until now despite Hindu coercion. It is therefore important to investigate the means at their disposal to perpetuate their own practices, and their motivation to do so. Due to the very low literacy rate and the lack of free media until the 1990s, assertion of collective tribal identity in Nepal has had few available means of expression until very recently. In this regard, oral narratives have represented a unique space of freedom and resistance for the dominated tribal groups of Nepal. Central as they were to the Janajati's own religious practices, which rests entirely on oral traditions, oral narratives offered these groups an opportunity to assert their own worldviews, and even to counter the orthodox Hindu norms imposed on them, notably by derailing important themes taken from Hindu narratives. Narrative appropriation has been particularly instrumental in asserting and perpetuating distinct kinship rules, as we will show by examining different versions of a popular story, that of Golden Hair, among the Magar Janajati group and their Hindu neighbours from western Nepal. 2 The Hindu orthodoxy that was imposed on the various populations of Nepal is no better illustrated than by the custom of 84