"Blood, Death and Love?: Animal sacrifice and the politics of cultural difference in India’s Central Himalayas" talk by Ms. Radhika Govindrajan at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 20th July 2012

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Details : The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to The Seminar on‘Blood, Death and Love?: Animal sacrifice and the politics of cultural difference in India’s Central Himalayas’ by Ms. Radhika Govindrajan, Doctoral Candidate, Yale University, USA.

Abstract:
The practice of animal sacrifice, an important element of Hindu religious ceremonies in India’s Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, has, of late, come under attack by a coalition of certain animal rights activists and a religious orthodoxy, who see the practice as ‘barbaric’, an expression of the animality that lurks within humans. The bloody violence of sacrifice is seen as a marker of cultural, religious, and regional backwardness, to be obliterated by a politics that exhorts humans to rise above their inner ‘animal’ selves. However, for those who continue to offer goats to local gods and goddesses, sacrifice constitutes a unique space for re-imagining the human-animal relationship in a way that disturbs carefully constructed boundaries between humans and animals. Goats meant for sacrifice are raised with special care and attention for years, creating the special bond characteristic of co-domestication. They are inducted into the family lineage group before death, and their flesh is then shared as prasad, divine food blessed by Gods and eaten in their name.
As a process that engenders an extremely corporeal interaction between human and non-human animal bodies, from the intimacy that arises from raising and caring for sacrificial animals
to the kinship that is established between sacrificer and sacrificed in the moment of death, sacrifice allows for moments of closeness and companionship between humans and animals. In this paper, I examine how the human-animal intimacies created during sacrifice challenge the cultural politics of difference that constructs a ‘natural’ and ‘notional’ boundary between species in its exercise of power and domination over a ‘backward other’.

Speaker :
Ms. Radhika Govindrajan is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, USA. She is interested in human-animal studies, agrarian history, ritual studies and
environmental anthropology, and studies human-animal interactions in India’s Central Himalayas.

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