“The goat that died for family”: Animal sacrifice and interspecies kinship in India's Central Himalayas

Abstract

Animal sacrifice can be productively theorized as a practice of kindred intimacy between human and nonhuman animal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India's Central Himalayas, I trace how the ritual sacrifice of goats in the region's mountain villages acquires power and meaning through its anchoring in a realm of interspecies kinship. This kinship between humans and animals is created and sustained through everyday practices of intercorporeal engagement and care. I contend, in fact, that animal sacrifice is itself constitutive of interspecies kin relations. The spectacular act of violence at the heart of sacrifice—the beheading of the sacrificial animal—is crucial to the constitution of kin solidarity between human sacrificer and animal victim. From this perspective, animal sacrifice creates a world rich with the possibility of mutual response and recognition between different beings entangled in intimate and complex ways. [sacrifice, human–animal, interspecies kinship, South Asia, relations of care, religion, Himalayas]

The Year 2015 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Material Life and Emergent Cultures

“…Anthropologists have long paid attention to people's interactions with animals; many anthropologists know well E. E. Evans‐Pritchard's classic ethnography of Nuer and their cattle (1940), cited by two authors here (Govindrajan ; Singer ). In 2015, this interest was reflected in increased attention to human–nonhuman interactions through interspecies and multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich ).…”

“…In India's central Himalayas, people believed that humans, nonhuman animals, and deities were all reflexive creatures who could share meaningful relations (Govindrajan ). Local deities may express displeasure and cause harm if they are not worshiped regularly, ideally by animal sacrifice.…”

“…The emphasis on the need to act is reflected in the number of pieces that mentioned labor and work: physical labor, emotional and social labor (Segal ), muddy labor (Watanabe ), institutional labor (Hartigan ), political work (Mathur ), and boundary work (Stavrianakis ). In addition, many authors talked about the importance of care, for example, the idea that people created kinship through care (Govindrajan ; Yates‐Doerr ). Approaches to materiality, which built on the actor network theory of Bruno Latour () and others, did, however, introduce two unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, contradictions.…”

“…The second tension is the view of humans as prime movers of the world versus the view that sees humans as influenced by complex environments that include nature, nonhuman living beings, and inanimate objects. The view of humans as prime movers is especially important for those who analyze the effects of human action on the environment, a view not well represented in this article, despite work that touched on how human behavior has led to changes in species identification and behavior (Fearnley ; Govindrajan ; Singer ). This perspective is well established in environmental anthropology, however, especially in work that shows how poverty induced by inequalities has led people to use the environment in ways that compromise its regeneration.…”

“…A recent iteration of humans as prime movers can be found in the debate about whether to label the present geological epoch the Anthropocene due to the primarily negative effects of human behavior on the planet, including mass extinctions, ocean pollution, and atmospheric alterations (Stromberg ). Although interest in the Anthropocene may be growing among archaeologists and biocultural anthropologists, only two authors reviewed here (Govindrajan ; Singer ) mentioned it. Sociocultural anthropologists in 2015 were more concerned about the effects of materiality upon people.…”