1The attention my essay on sacrifice and violence has received from four highly qualified readers has disrupted my daily routine. Accustomed to publishing my writings as if casting a message in a bottle into the sea, I welcomed their reactions wholeheartedly. Their discerning perspectives provide me with the opportunity to revisit the genesis of the book, the boundaries that define its scope and its aspirations.

2To begin with, I would like to clarify what Sacrifice et Violence does not claim to be. The book does not present itself as a synthesis or a survey. It does not aspire to provide a comprehensive overview of the themes of sacrifice and violence in Nepal and does not aim to be exhaustive. As its subtitle indicates, it draws its material for reflection from my ethnography. It is limited to what I was able to examine from a fresh perspective and that I gathered over four decades in the region of the 22 and 24 ancient kingdoms of present-day western Nepal. Therefore, it does not claim to cover the entire national territory and its diverse components. However, the two population groups residing in the region studied, the Khas Aryas (or Hindus of the mountains), and the indigenous Magar people, make up nearly 40% of the country's citizens. Furthermore, they have played a central role in the development of the state. That being said, I do not even claim to encompass the full wealth of the issues that concern them. Instead, I hope to offer a framework for reflection capable of shedding new light on these issues by connecting them to the forces at play in the realm of sacrifice.

3My ethnography in this book is revisited through the lens of the idea, itself born from this ethnography, that society in Nepal can be defined as a sacrificial society. This full circle immediately places this work in the tautological realm of sacrifice, which, like a Möbius strip, has no inner face, no outer face, no beginning and no end. Similarly, research related to this field is endless, demanding choices; and my own work, which includes over 30 publications on this theme, adds to this abundance. It testifies to the significance I have attached to sacrifice since my initial fieldwork in the 1980s, as well as to its actual prominence in Nepal. Sacrifice there takes on its most overt, bloody and public form, whereas in most other contexts, it only exists in derivative forms or belongs to the past. It is therefore no longer accessible except through the study of texts (often normative or critical but always partial, as René Girard would say) and archæology, with its inherent limitations.

4The observation of the royal buffalo sacrifice, as it is still performed in the 22 and 24 ancient kingdoms, allows for a more nuanced anthropological approach, focusing on the act of ultimate violence at the heart of the ritual. This is undeniably present, despite the denial asserted in texts, and materialises in the exposure of everyone and everything to the ‘fountains of blood’. By turning the rite into a matter of life and death, the specificities of this public and holistic violence, orchestrated by the highest dignitaries and aimed at rejuvenating cosmic, political and social order, enable us to view sacrifice as the ultimate model of legitimate violence. At the same time, observation of the sacrifice (even during the Panchayat era when identity claims were not generally openly aired) reveals its oxymoronic nature through the opposite effect its violence has on its participants. Some do not seem to perceive it or express joy, while others, conversely, suffer with the victim or identify with their plight. Through these effects, we come to understand that, however legitimate it may be, sacrificial violence is also divisive.

5I have strived to follow the thread of this sacrificial oxymoron and the various social elements it interconnects, highlighting the dual nature of sacrifice, which constitutes both the realisation of unity, founded on the expression of social violence (towards women, untouchables and indigenous peoples, that is all those excluded from or indirectly victimised by the sacrifice), and the expression of political violence, taking the form of a ‘warlike’ competition among those endowed with the right to exercise legitimate violence over the lives of others, the sovereign power of death.

6Concerning the places under scrutiny, the people interviewed and the references cited, I chose to let myself be guided by the uncertainties of fieldwork, chance encounters and the small things that stick in one's mind and trigger insights. This navigation by sight helped me to maintain an anthropological course through the ocean of the subject, where the overwhelming disciplines of Indology, history, religious studies and politics lie in ambush. This also helped me to carve out a space for reflection on a subject at the intersection of two fields that stretch into infinity, where one can easily become lost in the multitude of forms they assume. On the one hand, violence is omnipresent in words and actions and between all beings, human and non-human, and on all scales in terms of time and place, while having the ability to go unrecognised anywhere, especially during sacrifices. On the other hand, sacrifice is also everywhere and nowhere (to paraphrase the title of a beautiful article by Jean-Pierre Albert 1998), and all things borrow its semblance of existence in the Hindu world, as Sylvain Lévi poetically put it. In this context, creation arises from the sacrifice of the first being, and every human being departs from this world in a ‘final sacrifice’ when offered to the flames of their cremation. The expansive realm that sacrificial violence encompasses between the creation and dissolution of life prompted me to choose as guides authors who had reflected upon the broader questions it raises, especially Vladimir Jankélévitch, Charles Malamoud, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Gilles Deleuze. They represent indeed a French school of thought.

7Likewise, the regional anthropology I associate myself with can certainly be characterised as a French school, as noted by David Gellner. My journey in the Himalayan field owes much to Philippe Sagant, my first mentor, who combined ethnographic excellence with thought-provoking ideas about the dynamics of encounters between indigenous people and Hindus, as well as the dual power of Limbu leaders. Those seeking a deeper understanding of sacrifice in the eastern region, among the indigenous ‘Kirant’ peoples, should turn to his work, along with more recent contributions by Martin Gaenszle, Susan Hangen and Davide Torri, as well as the works of Andras Höfer, Joanna Pfaff, David Holmberg on the Tamangs, Stanley Royal Mumford on the Gurungs and Axel Michaels on the Newars, to name just a few.

8I am also indebted to Marc Gaborieau for training me in the anthropology of Nepal and for encouraging me to read and use Nepali sources, as he himself did. Thanks to his guidance, I delved into the wealth of indigenous publications as they emerged in the 1990s and then into the world of Maoist literary productions. The references cited in my essay bear witness to my ongoing use of these vernacular written sources, which are still rarely employed by anthropologists, despite their great value.

9I am particularly grateful to Corneille Jest. Armed with his unpublished field notes he generously shared, I went to observe the royal sacrifices in Isma in 1991, five yearsadvoc after him. It was then at his suggestion that I embarked on my first collaborative work on the subject. For those interested in the relationship that religious minorities in Nepal (Buddhists and Muslims) have with buffalo sacrifice, I recommend his work, as well as that of Marc Gaborieau. I eventually co-edited this first collective work on royal sacrifice with Gisèle Krauskopff, learning from her the attention to style that characterises her writing. Thanks to Pascale Dollfus, who encouraged me to apply, I received my first programme funding to build a team capable of transcending the boundaries hindering research in the Himalayan region and to investigate the politico-religious configurations of the central Himalaya, on both sides of the Indo-Nepal border (western Nepal, Uttarakhand, Spiti, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh). Anthropologists in the field, especially in the area of western Nepal most affected by the People's War, became quite scarce during those years.

10Having read Philippe Ramirez’s writings with interest, which proposed a religious analysis of the movement, I initially chose to approach it from a different angle, focusing on the paradoxical relationship with history that the Maoist movement displayed, simultaneously borrowing, confiscating and diverting royal prerogatives to serve an unprecedented reform of the hierarchical society, of which the king was the guarantor. Sacrifice was the most important of these prerogatives. I continued the exploration of borrowing and diversion in Maoist iconography in collaboration with Philippe Ramirez (see Lecomte-Tilouine and Ramirez 2006), before delving into the apocalyptic poetry of the revolutionaries, a subject that had not been studied before. Here, I measured the significance of self-sacrifice and the legitimacy of this new human sacrifice, while these same revolutionaries banned the ritual slaughter of animals. At around the same time, the village that had been the focus of my thesis was turning into a Maoist stronghold. It seemed that I was then in a position to coordinate a programme on the revolutionary movement straddling history and ethnographic fieldwork. The funds for this ANR programme allowed me to finance and supervise the remarkable doctoral theses of Pustak Ghimire and Benoit Cailmail, to encourage Satya Shrestha-Schipper (whose excellent doctoral work on the Matwali of Jumla I had supervised) to return to the field, and to establish connections with Barbara Berardi, who will soon be publishing her outstanding thesis with the Société d’ethnologie, Nanterre. Since then, the influx of ideas from younger scholars has never ceased to enrich my work.

11This programme also marked the beginning of a collaboration with Anne de Sales whose writings on the Maoist base region, where she had previously undertaken her doctoral fieldwork, were promptly acknowledged. We continued our collaboration through joint publications and a jointly directed programme aimed at revisiting the anthropological approach to possession and shamanism (from which emerged the volume Encounters with the Invisible, forthcoming, Routledge). Several key figures are missing here: I am thinking of Denis Blamont whose mind buzzed with intelligence and Gregory Maskarinec with whom I had so many discussions during his stays in France. Both sadly left us last year. This picture also lacks the broader community with whom I have been in contact over the years: in the UK, around David Gellner and Michael Hutt; in Germany, around Axel Michaels, William Sax and Astrid Zotter; in Canada, around John Leavitt and Chiara Letizia, in Israël around Arik Moran; and in Nepal, around Prayag Raj Sharma, Nirmal Tuladhar, Krishna Hachhethu, Mahes Raj Pant, Pratyoush Onta and Seira Tamang. The last two gave me the opportunity to present my ideas on sacrificial society to Nepalese intellectuals whose reactions I was apprehensive about. Their positive response encouraged me to pursue the path I had chosen.

12These clarifications address many points raised by the reviewers to whom I now wish to respond individually, at least on some of the main issues they raise.

13David Gellner raises an important question for the anthropology of Nepal, starting from the case of the Brahmins and their freedom in the face of ancestral norms that define their group. He emphasises the disparity between Platonic ideas and the reality of practices, citing the example of a movement that emerged among the Brahmins of central Nepal a few decades ago, advocating their using the plough. Besides the fact that Brahmins do not form a monolithic bloc, this phenomenon of expressive distance from social roles, as referred to by interactionist sociology, is a subject of importance in Nepal, one that has been rarely studied. Concerning ‘Khas Arya’ Brahmins, this distance is first expressed in their internal interactions, as they are divided into two subcategories with different statuses, prerogatives and duties: so-called ‘full-status’ Brahmins, upadhyaya, and degraded jaisi Brahmins. Historically, only the former had the right to perform rituals and were subjected to numerous restrictions, while the latter did not have access to Brahmanic priesthood and, consequently, enjoyed more freedom. Today, it is common to see the latter ploughing their fields but not the former. However, it is also worth noting that these jaisi Brahmins have been reproved throughout history for behaving like full-status Brahmins, possibly because the group did not have this degraded status in the western part of the country before unification, or simply because it has long sought to conform to the ideal of a Brahmin regarding privileges while retaining freedom in practices.

14During a field trip with a jaisi Brahmin a few years ago, this discrepancy became clear. He had taken part in a grand fire sacrifice organised by yogi Naraharinath in his region – without the feeling that his status was a hindrance to performing this role, to which he was theoretically not entitled. However, he questioned me to ensure that, as a woman, I was not in a state of impurity before he consented to let me enter a sanctuary. Beyond this personal compromise with regards Hindu norms, which is observed in all groups but is more pronounced among the higher echelons, I am aware that the place of Brahmins in the sacrificial society I describe and their relationship with violence would deserve more investigation. While preparing an article on dharma for a forthcoming collective volume edited by Axel Michaels, I was struck by the fact that some Brahmins could consider the daily practices they are obligated to perform, such as prayers and ablutions before sunrise, as a form of violence. This was exemplified by the case of a young Maoist Brahmin, expressing his aversion to his father's treatment of women and untouchables from a very young age. His father tried by various means to steer him in the right direction, but to no avail. He eventually decided to hold the boy’s initiation, vratabandha, ‘fastening fast’, well before the scheduled time in order to ‘bind’ him to his duties and thereby oblige him to act as a good Brahmin. The young man complied, but only ‘mechanically’, as the text notes. Thus, we see him adopting Brahmin practices but not the Platonic idea of what a Brahmin should be. The complexity of relationships with the norms in a context where they have long been upheld as law but have subsequently been largely criticised would indeed call for a separate study.

16I am grateful to Marine Carrin for encouraging me to delve further into the warrior culture of Rajasthan, the presumed cradle of the Nepalese Thakuris, to whom we owe the observable forms of buffalo sacrifices in Nepal’s ancient royal capitals. The absence of politics that she observes in my text should be understood in terms of a partisan organisation, which indeed had a particularly difficult time establishing itself in Nepal. After a very brief existence in the 1950s, the abolition of political parties by the king and the ban on them during the three decades from 1960 to 1990 left in place old power structures while modifying top-down the logic of power. It is particularly in the conservative realm of ritual that these ancient structures were kept in a highly visible way, allowing us to view through its lens the condensed history of a principality, as in Musikot where a tribal ‘king’ who likely ruled there around the 15th or 16th century co-officiates with a Thakuri ‘king’ whose reign ended in the late 18th century. Such a public display of a defunct power, which persists in the ritual under the gaze of the elected officials, is indeed more closely related to the functioning of the group and the living history that maintains its internal relations vivid than to modern politics.

18Whether in sacrifice or in the oxymoron specific to mystical language, a connection brings two distinct planes together. Like singularities in mathematics, the essence of the object matters less than its qualities and properties that may change with their different associations. Some of these qualities are assertive, shaping our understanding of sacrifice by framing it as either an act of selflessness for the greater good of the world or, at the other extreme, as a brutal act of taking innocent lives. Similarly, they frame in an irreconcilable multiplicity the way sacrifice impacts on individuals, whether it opens a path to heavenly rewards, emboldens individuals to commit heroic acts or transforms them into ruthless beings. The full spectrum of these qualities, whether comparative or metaphorical, converges to make sacrifice the focal point of a vast oxymoronic landscape.

19I have sought to demonstrate that the oxymoronic nature of sacrifice is also woven into the fabric of the group through an anthropological analysis. By juxtaposing the mythical narrative describing sacrifice as recounted by ritual participants with the practices, attitudes and comments of those engaged in these rituals, I suggest that, while sacrifice is indeed the organiser of society, it is also the revealer of its internal tensions and fault-lines. They represent as many junctures where sacrifice can either undergo transformation or disintegration, giving rise to various communal practices. In certain cases, such as the People's War led by the Maoists, sacrifice can evolve into a vast counter-sacrificial and self-sacrificial system, explicitly targeting the sacrificial structures of the monarchy and the caste society in order to dismantle them. In light of this, I have described sacrifice as the place where the inherent legitimate violence of social organisation is represented – the violence of the group upon itself and, more precisely, the violence that characterises the asymmetrical relationships between its constituent subgroups, which are normally concealed. The violence of this exposition does not create catharsis but rather a test of allegiance, explaining its capacity to therefore move beyond this realm through war. In Nepal, following the royal sacrifice, the unified group of sacrificers engaged in an equally violent and sacrificial enterprise but directed towards an external entity, the neighbouring kingdom. The stability ensured by this dual movement, one containing the idiom and structure of the other, has persisted in Nepal beyond the historical existence of a caste system enshrined in law (which ended in 1963) and the existence of fragmented political entities (unified at the end of the 18th century), highlighting its ritual nature and the enduring framework of thought that it offers for social and political relations. For instance, the origin myth of many ‘impure’ groups recounts the sacrifice of an ‘impure’ animal that their ancestor was compelled to perform on his brothers’ order, leading to his loss of social status. Similarly, the revolutionaries invoked a sacrificial model hitherto limited to the individual, the sacrifice of the self, which they promoted on a collective scale while becoming victims in the so-called sacrificial ceremony led by the king to combat them. In this way, the movement diverted the logic of sacrificial violence by assuming an active role of victim, thereby depriving the royal camp of positive sacrificial agency. The two models of sacrifice finally resolved into their circumscribed forms, specific to limited ritual times, particular places and mediated or symbolic forms of life-giving. This resolution, however, kept intact the sacrifice’s capacity for expansion and metaphorical application across the entire social domain.

20My portrayal of Nepal as a sacrificial society has its roots in the regional context and the singular cultural history of the Khas Aryas and their Magar neighbours, but may have implications for a broader understanding. Ultimately, my aim was to use Nepal as a unique site of observation from which to extract a broader comprehension of the complex interplay of violence and sacrifice as an inherently oxymoronic phenomenon that informs human society on multiple levels, uniting and dividing individuals and communities in a constant dialectical struggle.

21Finally, I am pleased to announce here that the English translation of the book will soon be published by Cambridge University Press.