Masakazu Tanaka, courtesy of ZlNBUN 1999 No. 34(1) 127-146 …… http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shakti/%20preSacrifice.html — Readers should atend to the date of publication. The article is re-presented here because this essay is not widely known. Note, too, that Tanaka is the author of Patrons, Devotees and Goddesses, Kyoto, Kyoto University Institute for Research in the Humanities, 1991.
We came, we saw, we were horrified, and intervened(1).
Notre societe n’est pas celled du spectacle, mais de la surveillance(2).
a goat sacrifice at ar Kamakhya temple
1. The underlying viewpoint in the colonial and the postcolonial
This article analyses how the colonial government and the post-independence state viewed and dealt with rituals involving violence that were rooted in the regional community(3). I refer to these rituals as “sacrifice” for the reasons that I will give below. These rituals, of which animal sacrifice is a typical example, have almost always been negatively characterized as “savage”, “brutal” , “violent”, “unhygienic” and “superstitious”. Here I will consider the cases of hook-swinging, fire walking and animal sacrifice in South India (the Madras Presidency) as a 19th century British colony and in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) shortly after independence. Continue reading
