Marohang Yakthung Limbu, professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, has been awarded Humanities and Arts Research Program large-scale development funding for his project “Documenting Matrilineal Civilizations and Ancient Himalayan Yakthung Histories: A Study Through Mundhums and Film.”

HARP is one of MSU’s largest internal grants, providing funding to support faculty conducting important research projects or activities in the arts and humanities. Limbu’s ongoing research focuses on Himalayan cultural rhetorics, ancient Mundhum (oral) traditions, pedagogies and matriarchal/matrilineal customary traditions.

Limbu’s Himalayan cultural rhetorics research is multidimensional, decolonial and explores Yakthung Mundhum epistemologies and Indigenous knowledge systems. Being an indigenous Yakthung scholar, he is committed to foregrounding community-based ways of knowing.

Limbu explores how oral traditions, cosmological narratives and ritual practices — particularly those expressed in the Mundhum — operate as epistemological, ontological and axiological frameworks that shape Yakthung indigenous identity, ecological ethics and communal life. His current research builds upon his previous work by focusing specifically on Yakthung oral traditions and how they shape the identity of the Yakthung people.

Project inspiration

One of the main research inspirations for Limbu is the lack of information on his own Yakthung identity. He has two bachelor’s degrees, two master’s degrees, and one Ph.D., but across his higher-education experience, he neither encountered nor learned anything about his culture, traditions, history or customary practices.

During his undergraduate and graduate courses (in Nepal and the United States), the theories and methodologies he was taught did not line up with his lived experiences. His experiences growing up were in Himalayan indigenous rhetoric traditions. Yakthung rhetorical traditions do not view humans as dominant figures; instead nature, humans and nonhumans are seen as equal beings.

Limbu’s higher-education experiences were, rather, shaped by a Western hierarchy that places humans above nature, inspiring Limbu’s research into Himalayan cultural rhetorical traditions. One significant milestone in his work came in 2021 when he received the Bishnudatta-Saraswati Academic Award for his critically acclaimed monograph, "Delinking, Relinking, and Linking Writing and Rhetorics: Inventions and Interventions of the Sirijanga Syllabary."

New findings

Limbu’s current research has uncovered a new way of looking at Yakthung oral traditions: Mundhum oral traditions act as an operational structure for Yakthung across the local, regional and global levels.

Yakthungs live in Nepal, India, Bhutan, Burma, Thailand and the United Kingdom. Even as Yakthungs move across the globe, Mundhum oral traditions incorporate physiological concepts of epistemology, ontology and anxiology and create a unified Yakthung culture across regions.

The oral traditions operate as an ancestral architecture of knowledge with epistemology, provide insight into identity and a sense of being with ontology, and create rules and values with axiology, combining to form a constitution, including laws and governance, with and for the Yakthung people.

Mundhum also operates as what Limbu has termed “a living pedagogy” — an organic education system that teaches Yakthungs to perform in certain manners. Mundhum shapes the communal activities performed and upholds matriarchal/matrilineal customary traditions.

In Mundhum oral traditions, most of the authority figures are female mentors. During 11 years of research, Limbu interviewed oral experts known as Phedangma, and he has yet to come across a man who fulfills the role of mentor for his children, wife or other people. These matriarchal traditions come from an epistemology framework in Mundhum oral traditions where female rulers and goddesses were viewed as more trustworthy figures in Yakthung culture.

Future research objectives

As Limbu engages his HARP-funded work and continues to research, document and disseminate Himalayan oral cultural traditions, he has two major objectives: The first is to teach global citizens that the pedagogical practices of Himalayan indigenous communities are applicable in a global context. Second, he strives to preserve Himalayan oral traditions.

Due to globalization, young Yakthungs often grow up with disdain for their culture. Limbu understands this sentiment; he, too, grew up overlooking and underappreciating his Yakthung culture. As he matured, he reconnected with his culture and its potential global influences.

“I want to show my future generations that your culture is not inferior,” Limbu said. “Your culture is just like any other mainstream culture. You have to embrace it, protect it, preserve it and hand it down to your future descendants.”

In his travels to Yakthung communities and as he has documented daily practices, Limbu has noticed that youth have been encouraged to preserve their culture and he encourages this preservation by drawing on the theory he built in his 2021 book, encouraging people to delink the ways in which they have been taught their culture is inferior, relink with their culture and study it, and link their culture in our contemporary global context.

This story originally appeared on the College of Arts and Letters website.