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Sacrifice and Violence
- Reflections from an Ethnography in Nepal
- Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
- Coming soon
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- Expected online publication date:
- June 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2025
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Violence is at the heart of the sacrifice, despite its denial in the texts. For the participants and observers, it materialises in the exposure of everyone and everything to the 'fountains of blood'. The specificity of this public and holistic violence, orchestrated in Nepal by the highest dignitaries and aimed at the rejuvenation of the cosmic, political and social order, allows us to see sacrifice as the ultimate model of legitimate violence. At the same time, observation reveals its oxymoronic nature through the opposite effect its violence has on its participants. As such, sacrifice is not only the organiser of society, but also the revelator of its internal tensions and fault lines. The book explores the complex aspects of royal ceremonies, their contestation by different groups, and finally the contours of the new legitimacy that sacrifice found during the revolutionary period under its most extreme form of human sacrifice.
The of the Earth Goddess Among the Magar of Nepal
- Marie Lecomte-Tilouine
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The military conquest of the Magarant, the Magar land, took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Thakuri petty kings and their dependents (priests, artisans, soldiers) fled India to settle there. The Magar resistance appears to have been weak, due to their lack of unity and the alliances the conquerors formed with some of them. The Magar people quickly opted for assimilation into the royal caste of the Thakuri, adopting most of their cultural traits, notably their language and religion. Nevertheless they retained or developed particularisms in their relationship to the earth, as we can see in the rites they devote to Bhume. We should emphasize first and foremost that the name Bhume is itself Nepalese, derived from the sanskrit bhû, bhûmî. This goddess is neglected by the Hindi of high caste, whereas she is central to the Magar. This paradox has two possible sources: the Magar might have identified one of their principal goddesses with a minor Hindu deity by virtue of a common relation to the earth, conferring an unusual importance on the latter. Or they might have constructed a divine being on the basis of Hindu concepts, as the result of a new-found need to defend their rights to the earth in the face of the Hindu invaders. The second hypothesis seems more likely, since there is no trace of a Magar earth goddess before Bhume. Even in the regions where the Magar retained the use of their original language (such as in Palpa, Syangja, or in the Kham country) and where, consequently, some of the gods have Magar names, the earth goddess is called by Nepalese terms, such as Bhume, Bhuyar, or Bhayar. Furthermore, even if the Magar themselves once had an earth goddess of their own, the renaming of this deity would indicate a change of identity, given the importance of a divinity's name.
1 - The Royal Palace Massacre, Rumours and the Print Media in Nepal
- from Part I - Rumour
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- By Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, CNRS/Collège de France/EHESS Paris, France
- Edited by Michael Hutt, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Pratyoush Onta, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Book:
- Political Change and Public Culture in Post-1990 Nepal
- Published online:
- 23 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 28 October 2016, pp 15-38
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Summary
On the evening of 1 June 2001, shooting took place at a family dinner within the royal palace. The bullets killed King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, as well as several members of the family, and fatally wounded the heir, Crown Prince Dipendra, who passed away after spending two days in a coma. Gyanendra, the deceased king's younger brother, was absent from the palace. Gyanendra along with his wife and son survived the incident, even though the latter two had attended the dinner. With his elder brother and two nephews now dead, Gyanendra ascended the throne. The crown prince, whose fatally-wounded body was found at the scene, was identified as the gunman.
The palace massacre represented a ‘dividing line’ between a before and an after in Nepalese history, and brought about a ‘shift in intelligibility’, opening up a wide scope of possibilities. It transformed print media into what could be described as ‘written rumour’, with the information ascribed to the crowds and the information contained in’ (or possibly fabricated by) the press forming a continuum. All print media, to different degrees, gave visibility to rumours, if sometimes to condemn them. Yet, I propose not to differentiate between them, believing that despite their position and qualitative difference, dissemination and visibility matter more than the positive or negative connotation. This is also justified by the event chosen for this study, which generated such an immense need for information that the boundaries between various categories of media were blurred.
The chief uncertainties were around the causes, scenario and actors’ roles, not about the event itself: the brutal murder of the royal family. There was therefore an objective foundation for the rumours, which distinguishes them from ‘urban legends’ or rumours whose point of departure is unknown and which may not even be ‘factual.’ There remains the question as to why the press turned ‘rumouristic’: is it because in dealing with public figures, it adopted the ‘scandal’ style common for covering such topics? Was the event so transgressive that there was no other way to refer to it?