Sacrifice and Violence

Marie Lecomte-Tilouine is a social anthropologist and Senior Researcher at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, CNRS/EHESS/Collège de France, Paris. Her research focuses on religious strategies, mental representations, ethno-history, and the Maoist movement in the Himalayan region. She has coordinated several collective programs of research in Nepal and the Western Himalayas and is presently heading, in collaboration with Anne de Sales, an ANR program on the modalities of 'presentification' (or production of presence) of invisible powers in the Himalaya. She has published several monographs on these research areas, including Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal, (ed.) Bards and Mediums: History, Culture and Politics in the Central Himalayan Kingdoms, (ed.) Nature, Culture and Religion at the Crossroads of Asia, and (ed.) Revolution in Nepal: An Anthropological and Historical Approach to the People's War.

List of map and figures; Note on transliteration; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. A violence that is not violence; 2. Theories of sacrifice, with or without violence; 3. Sacrificial violence in narrative forms; 4. Sacrificial practices and partitions; 5. The buffalo sacrifice; 6. Contestations of sacrifice: boycott and litigation; 7. Self-sacrifice versus sacrifice in the revolutionary struggle; Conclusion; References; Index.