1In this rich and thought-provoking book, Marie Lecomte-Tilouine provides a detailed survey of sacrifice and violence in Nepal that brings together the results of many years of reflection, writing and extensive fieldwork in western Nepal, accompanied by beautiful photos. Lecomte-Tilouine particularly emphasises the violence of sacrifice, a violence that sacrificial texts tend to obscure or deny, and that anthropological theories have often ignored. But, as the author shows, this violence shapes sacrifice in Nepal on all sides: through coercion (the binding force of the commitment to sacrifice implying non-human retaliation when it is not honoured), through the actual killing of the animal, and through its stigmatising effects on certain categories of the population. The author sees sacrifice in the Hindu context of Nepal as the ultimate model of legitimate violence, the right to kill. Even though the equivalence between sacrifice and violence is mostly denied by sacrificial texts, sacrifice provides the framework for wider forms of collective violence outside the ritual context.
- 1 All translations from the French are mine.
2The author does not intend to provide a single model or definition: on the contrary, her ethnography shows that one of the constitutive characters of sacrifice is that different views of sacrifice correlate with social position, local history, and particular circumstances (p18). The perception of violence opposes groups according to the relationship that each of them has (1) with the animal, (2) with its representation, and (3) with the very act of killing (p56). She also points to the oxymoronic nature of sacrifice (‘a device which is both abstract and concrete, of the past and the present, carried out by human and divine actors, violent and non-violent’ (p52),1 which allows for different interpretations and changes of perspective and roles.
3The first two chapters of the book explore sacrificial violence as an analytical category and discuss the place of violence in classical anthropological approaches to sacrifice, while in the following four chapters the author guides the reader through her rich ethnographic data. In chapter 3, she shows how socio-sacrificial cosmogony is expressed in myth and how the vernacular epic of western Nepal can help to understand sacrificial violence; in chapter 4, she discusses how the rules governing sacrifice and sacrificial language organise and express the divisions within society, the interrelations of different groups and the resulting attributions (‘the responsibility of men, the exclusion of women, the distance from indigenous people, the ostracism of Dalits’, p147). Chapter 5 offers a comparative ethnography of the national Dasain festival in several ancient kingdoms of western Nepal, which shows how the festival takes different forms, depending on multiple factors: the specificity of each site’s history and style of governance; the ways violence is handled, distributed and perceived; the roles assigned to participants; and the ways in which the animals are killed. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the contestation of sacrifice through three examples: the political boycott of Dasain by indigenous people (as a means of combatting the policy of oppression and assimilation to which they were subjected), the increasingly pervasive trend of Dalits refusing to consume the impure leftovers of sacrifices, and the growing opposition to sacrifice by animal welfare and vegetarian activists from urban and educated backgrounds, who (among many other campaigns) initiated a legal dispute over mass sacrifice at the Gaḍhīmāī festival (Gaḍhīmāī Melā) held every five years in in Bariyarpur, southern Nepal. The seventh and final chapter is based on the notion of self-sacrifice in the Maoist revolution. Through the analysis of Maoist literature, interviews with members of the party and fieldwork in Maoist-controlled zones (including the village where she carried out her doctoral research in the 1980s), the author shows that Maoists also opposed animal sacrifice but without rejecting violence: instead, they appropriated the legitimacy of the royal sacrifice and transferred it to the new figure of the martyr. Maoist sacrificial mysticism used violence for its own purposes in order to reconfigure the entire organisation of Nepalese society.
4This is a rich and dense book, full of insights worth commenting and reflecting on. I cannot do justice here to the ethnographic density and nuances of Lecomte-Tilouine’s arguments, or to the complexity of her theoretical efforts to encompass the different forms of violence within the concept of sacrificial violence. However, I will make a few remarks on the contemporary discourses opposing buffalo sacrifices and on the legal challenges to it, since it is also the subject of my own recent research.
5Even though animal sacrifice is a widespread way of dealing with deities and spirits, it can no longer be taken for granted in contemporary Nepal. Practitioners are increasingly put in a position where they have to provide explanations, demonstrate some reflexivity and sometimes put together a legal defence, such as during the court case against sacrifices at Gaḍhīmāī Melā. The contestation of a practice is an ethnographic opportunity: when challenged, the logics of sacrifice are discussed, made explicit and justified. For example, what comes to mind is Radhika Govindrajan’s fieldwork in Kumaon, where the criticism of a sacrifice of goats as ‘barbaric’ by an American nephew allows the elder to make explicit both to her family and to the ethnographer the myth and logic behind the sacrifice (Govindrajan 2015: 509–510). Furthermore, contestation allows for different views to be articulated: this calls to mind David Gellner and Krishna Adhikari (2016) describing the intense discussions in a Bahun village where it had suddenly been decided that the forthcoming lineage deity worship would be the last time that animal sacrifice would be allowed. And finally, as sacrifice becomes the object of legal controversy, those wanting to continue to perform sacrifices are called upon to frame their arguments within forms of juridical reasoning and to transpose sacrificial language into legal and reformist terms (Letizia and Ripert 2023).
6Lecomte-Tilouine outlines in an illuminating way how sacrificial violence, central to the establishment and renewal of the social and political order and to the resulting social exclusions, targets not only the animal but equally, though indirectly, stigmatised populations, such as indigenous groups and Dalits. The author explains how the public execution of the buffalo at the royal Dasain festival – an actualisation of Durgā’s killing of the buffalo demon Mahiṣāsura and a festival that was forced upon populations of all castes and religions by the newly formed Nepali state in the eighteenth century – staged, established and reordered caste society. This rite consecrates the rank of each member of society and the rules of collective existence: ‘the rule of the king, the power of great men, the dominance of the pater familias, that of the pure over the impure, of the Aryas over the indigenous peoples, of men over women’ (p193). And Lecomte-Tilouine brilliantly puts her finger on the rite's inherent violence, both structural and physical: ‘This foregrounding of these oppositions and separations demonstrates how sacrifice is a key moment for the stress-testing of social organisation, because it unmasks the violence at its core – and that violence, likewise required by the gods, is just as legitimate as the violence meted out on animals’ (ibid).
7It seems that the structuring nature of sacrifice makes it a suitable site for questioning social organisation, because it contains within itself the possibility of its rejection: legitimate violence can become illegitimate, groups or individuals can refuse their role and attribution in the sacrificial system, and the myth of reference for this organisation can be reappropriated. The condition for this to happen in Nepal was the political and social changes that started with the promulgation of the 1990 constitution. The questioning of the sacrificial organisation of society was a ‘sign of the times’ (Shneiderman 2015: 244) and a symptom of the progressive weakening of the socio-political order of Hindu divine kingship and the ritual idiom of state power.
8Lecomte-Tilouine remarks that the first organised contestation of sacrifice came from groups that felt directly targeted by the killing of the victim and by the tasks assigned to them during the ritual, or who were stigmatised by the manner in which the meat from the sacrificed animal was distributed. The movement to boycott Dasain, studied by Susan Hangen (2005), in east Nepal in the 1990s targeted Dasain sacrifices as expressions of Hindu high-caste domination and saw them as a commemoration of the ‘Aryan victory’ over their own ancestors. Lecomte-Tilouine remarks that, while high castes see the buffalo as a demon, indigenous groups see themselves in the beheaded buffalo. I vividly remember one particular issue of a local magazine I was shown by a Magar activist during a conversation on ‘Brahmanocracy’ in Gulmi District in 2002: a drawing on the cover depicted a buffalo-headed man with earrings and indigenous clothing victoriously crushing a Brahman with his underfoot. This was an explicit reference to, and reversal of, the myth of Durgā killing the buffalo demon Mahiṣāsura who is identified with the buffalo sacrificed at Dasain.
9Astrid Zotter has observed that these counter-narratives can be compared to the Mahiṣāsur Memorial Day movement in contemporary India (Zotter 2021: 213). Since 2011, activists belonging to indigenous and oppressed-caste communities all over India have been publicly celebrating the martyrdom of the demon Mahiṣāsur as a way to resist Hindu nationalism and caste-based oppression (Sen 2023: 107). According to Moumita Sen (2023: 112), a subversive narrative about the hero Mahiṣāsur resisting the Aryan invasion circulated in Bihar in the 1990s. This narrative may well have influenced the indigenous groups of Nepal at that time.
10Lecomte-Tilouine affirms that sacrifice could be described as ‘a setting where the violent tension inherent to the organisation of the group is revealed through the public execution of a living being’ (p292). However, it could also be said that it is the contestation of sacrifice that reveals and makes more visible, while denouncing and rejecting it, the double action of a sacrificial mechanism that denies the violence against the animal and naturalises the violence of social hierarchy. As Lecomte-Tilouine brilliantly shows, if animal-welfare activists denounce the violence against the animal, indigenous claims denounce the violence done to them through its execution. As she shows, the Magars started to see their forced participation in this rite as a particularly perverse act of Hindu power, forcing them to celebrate their own defeat (Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Ben Campbell, David Holmberg and Kathryn March have shown the same for the Tamangs).
11The case of the Dalits is telling. The author describes very clearly the asymmetry of the buffalo sacrifice: those who sacrifice buffaloes (the warrior elite) do not consume the meat of the sacrificed buffaloes, which is impure from a high-caste perspective, but offer it instead to members of the so-called ‘impure’ castes. The distribution of buffalo meat thus reinforces Hindu notions of ritual impurity and affirms the homology between untouchable castes and the impure animal. However, the injunction to consume impurity is usually hidden during the buffalo sacrifice, so much so that Dalits may even be presented as the main beneficiaries of the ritual (p210). The violence of the system clearly emerged when some Dalits started boycotting the consumption of the degrading remains of the sacrifice and could even be beaten to death for this, as was the case at the temple of Nĩgālā Sāinī (p215). However, in other cases, the threat of refusal to participate in the ritual may ensure that the group maintains control over the ritual’s efficacy (Shneiderman 2015: 242).
12Lecomte-Tilouine rightly points out that because Dalits are largely dependent on their patrons for subsistence, it is much more difficult for them to withdraw from sacrifice and to publicly air their grievances (p211–212). Thus, the boycott movement comes from educated Dalits living in urban areas, where anonymity and the lack of client-patron relationships allow them to improve their status.
13Sacrifice is embedded in local social networks and hierarchical relationships, both human (eg meat is expected from guests attending the ritual, the rulers expect to discharge impurity) and non-human (spirits and gods harm people who do not appease them and who do not keep their promise to perform a sacrifice). Relative freedom from the web of relationships makes it easier to challenge sacrifice. In the court case against sacrifice at the Gaḍhīmāī festival, for example, none of the petitioners against sacrifice were locals. I cannot help thinking of the remark the Thangmi naris made to Sara Shneiderman when commenting on why they had stopped taking part in Devikot-Khadga Jatra (during which they drank the blood of a sacrificial buffalo): ‘We don’t need them so much anymore’, they said, referring to the Dolakha Newars who, historically, controlled the ritual as the local proxies for royal rule (Shneiderman 2015:245–246).
14Lecomte-Tilouine remarks that the arguments put forward by indigenous groups when boycotting Dasain and by Dalits when refusing to accept buffalo meat omit religion and, in particular, any reference to the goddess. This raises interesting questions: why is this important and what conclusions can we draw from it? Does the author mean that contestation of sacrifice does not necessarily question or target the non-human element of the sacrificial relationship?
15Indeed, during my fieldwork, I found that the role of the goddess was also taken into account by the parties who were against sacrifice. The lawyer for the petitioner mentioned in our interview the widespread fear that the goddess would become angry. The judge affirmed that the goddess, as the mother of all life, could not be happy with the sacrifice of her beloved children. Animal-welfare activists during their campaign in nearby villages suggested that the goddess prefers sweets to the lives of animals. In campaign posters for a ‘bloodless Gadhimai’ during the mela of 2019, they depicted a compassionate and benevolent version of the goddess that tenderly hugs a baby buffalo. The already quoted work of Gellner and Adhikari shows that the arguments made locally against animal sacrifice stemmed from different premises, none of which was a straightforward appeal to secular modernity. It also shows that there was real concern about not offending the lineage deities with changes not agreed by them, and that at one point the lineage deity possessed a young man in order to express its disapproval of the decision to stop blood sacrifice (Gellner and Adhikari 2016: 249–250). Sara Shneiderman shows that the end of the Thangmi naris’ participation in Devikot-Khadga Jatra did not mean the end of their relationship with the goddess: they continue to be possessed by her, reframing the ritual within an exclusively Thangmi context (Shneiderman 2015: 248).
16I conclude with a few remarks on the legal contestation of sacrifice at Gaḍhīmāī Melā, on which I did some research in 2017–2019 both alone and with Blandine Ripert (Letizia 2019; Letizia and Ripert 2023). Our work focused on the judicialisation of the debate on sacrifice and analysed both court documents and the discourse of the animal-welfare activists who filed petitions against the sacrifices at the melā.
17If the contestation of sacrifice in the case of indigenous people and Dalits could be read as a way of questioning (or evading) the power of the dominant group to impose Hindu norms, the judgement on sacrifice at Gaḍhīmāī Melā imposed a normative and reformist vision of Hinduism, which limits Hinduism to texts (such as the Vedas and Upanishads) that are deemed authoritative for all the major denominations of Hinduism. At the same time, the judgement labels as superstitious a local practice that promotes blood sacrifice for the acquisition of divine power.
18The Nepali judge’s discourse on sacrifice in terms of superstition, social evil and un-dharma-like behaviour echoes many themes of Indian jurisprudence. First, there is the distinction that post-colonial courts made between religion and superstition, influenced by nineteenth-century Hindu reformist movements such as the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj that wanted to ‘purify’ Hinduism of what they called ‘evil practices’. Second, there is the distinction between the essential part of religion – which enjoys constitutional protection and for which the principle of non-interference, in line with the 2015 constitution, has been reaffirmed – and the non-essential part, which extends to superstitious practices, which may be abrogated in the name of social progress (Tarabout 2018).
19However, this Supreme Court judgment did not limit itself to the Hindu reformist discourse, as found in Indian jurisprudence with a distinctive Brahmanical approach, where violence towards the animal is minimised in favour of what it represents, in this case a ‘social evil’. The judgement was in keeping with important global developments in the fields of environmental protection and the protection of animal rights. Many of its arguments are in line with modern sensibilities, as well as with the aspirations and agenda of animal-welfare activists. It seems that Brahmanical values, judicial activism and animal welfare activism often go hand in hand in the contestation of sacrifice, both in Nepal and in India.
20Finally, during fieldwork at Gaḍhīmāī Melā in 2019, a question occurred to me: why did the graphic pictures shared by the media and the activists only focus on the buffaloes sacrificed in the arena? Why was there not a single photograph of the thousands of goats and other smaller animals also sacrificed the following day on the temple’s sacred territory? One possible answer is that buffalo sacrifice is a grander spectacle than the sacrifice of goats and is the climax of the festival, because of the close connection between the goddess and the buffalo incarnating the demon Mahiṣāsura. The activists I interviewed told me that they targeted the institutional buffalo sacrifice organised by the festival committee rather than the sacrifice of animals brought by individual devotees. As the pūjārīs and members of the temple administration told me, the temple may stop receiving buffalos and may stop coordinating sacrifices. However, it cannot stop the crowd of devotees who come with their own animals.
21Lecomte-Tilouine’s meaningful remarks on page 111 on the different roles of these two sacrificial animals, buffalo and goat, suggest that more thought needs to be given to this question: on the one hand the impure buffalo, which embodies all the attributes of alterity (the demon, the indigenous, the untouchable), is killed as an enemy; on the other hand, the billy-goat, a docile animal pampered like a child, whose death is mourned and whose pure flesh is eaten by those who raised it, is truly a substitute for the self. Lecomte-Tilouine’s text, as well as Govindrajan’s remarks on sacrifice as rooted in the complex relationships between humans and animals characterised by entanglements of care, relatedness, mutuality and violence (2018), suggest that we need to think not just about ‘animal sacrifice’ as a blanket term but to focus more on the identity of the animal subjects involved in the sacrificial relation and to see the ritual performance of their death as a phase in their ‘social life’ (Zotter 2021).
22To conclude, my only regret with this excellent book is that I would have liked the author to have discussed some of the publications cited above: Michaels (2016) on blood sacrifice in Nepal (this author was, to my knowledge, the first to mention the court case against the sacrifices at Gaḍhīmāī Melā); Adhikari and Gellner (2016), who describe the different arguments made in a Bahun village for and against animal sacrifice to the lineage deity; and the final chapter of Shneiderman’s book (2015) that describes how two Thangmi shamanic priests (the naris) withdrew from the Devikot-Khadga Jatra. The last example seems particularly relevant to Lecomte-Tilouine’s discussion, even if the reference to sacrifice is not explicit. However, these omissions do not in any way detract from the contribution made by this volume, which is as dense and complex as it is rich and erudite. This inspiring book – and in particular its section on the contestation of sacrifice – would be an excellent basis for comparative work and dialogue with researchers on the challenges to buffalo sacrifice in India (Halperin 2019 amongst others), on the reassessment of sacrifice in Nepal and the Himalayas under the influence of Tibetan Buddhism (Torri 2016, Erschbamer 2019, Miyamoto et al 2021) and on the nexus between caste, animal sacrifice and the sale of meat in the Newar context (Nakagawa 2016, 2018).
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