Sacrifice as pervasive metaphor and creative principle: on Marie Lecomte-Tilouine’s Sacrifice et Violence

In a sense this is the book Marie Lecomte-Tilouine has been waiting all her career to write. Invited as an honoured guest on her very first visit to Nepal to see the bloody sacrifices of Dasain, confronted with sacrificial practices everywhere she went over the following decades of field research, it is a subject she has written on in many contexts already (as well as co-editing the important comparative collection, Clbrer le pouvoir: Dasain, une fte royale au Npal, 1996). As one would expect from such a prolific anthropologist with so many years of experience, the new book is rich in ideas and ethnographic examples. In the first place, it is a detailed exposition and analysis of sacrifice, both as practice and as idea, going all the way from domestic and village-level goat and buffalo sacrifices through state-organised Dasain celebrations to the selfconscious (and, to a degree, instrumental) use of the idea and ideology of sacrifice by Maoist revolutionaries. At the same time, Sacrifice et Violence is shot through with detailed consideration of, as well as arguments with, the anthropological and Indological classics: Hubert and Mauss, of course, but also Biardeau, Malamoud, Staal, Girard, and de Heusch. We meet also the rather less well-known figure of Franois-Philippe Msenguy, abbot of Beauvais in the 18th century, who wrote an analysis of sacrifice in the Catholic tradition.