Time, Personhood and Sacrifice in the Ritual Pragmatics and Cosmological Dynamics of a Parbatiyā Village, Nepal.
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Date
2023
Authors
Michalski, Glen
Editors
Advisors
Gray, John
Dundon, Alison
Dundon, Alison
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Thesis
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Abstract
Based on archival material from the ethnography of a Parbatiyā village from the 1970s this thesis describes Hindu ritual dynamics through an experiment in grasping the ontological and existential potency of ritual by inventing concepts in response to it. The enduring force of ethnography allows archival material to generate novel conceptualisations. If ritual can be understood as an engagement with the ground of being it must be subject to context-sensitive theorisation in response to ethnographic variations in the ground of being. I thus perform a double-movement of establishing ritual and the cosmos in which it produces effects, which I argue can be understood as fundamentally temporal. In my exploration of the archive’s record of descriptions, statements and performances I am concerned with cosmogony, the body, sexual difference, human (householder) and non-human perspectives (ghosts, witches, sādhus), and the aesthetics and pragmatics of the household and ritual assemblages all of which refract aspects of the cosmos’ temporality. The chapters are both iterations of temporality’s manifestations and building blocks towards a conception of the major ritual forms: male initiation, marriage, and goddess worship during Dasaĩ. The thesis thus moves through time, cosmology and personhood, to ritual actions and contact with divinities, and culminates with the rituals themselves. Inspired by scholars in Asia and elsewhere I explore how Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism, developed in Amazonia, can be recast in light of the temporality and hierarchy of Hindu cosmologies. Existence is the product of individuation in temporal processes of cosmogonic unfolding. These processes situate persons in an entropic cosmos which distances them from deities. If, following accounts of Tantric ritual, ritual efficacy hinges on the identification of worshipper and worshipped I conceptualise this identification as a collapse of temporal differentiation. Temporal processes are intimately tied to sexual difference and sacrifice—often presented as cosmogonic events in mythic thought—both of which run throughout this thesis. Sacrifice marks the temporality of the cosmos; if in entropy the cosmos is encrusted, sacrifice’s act of destruction is also creative, melting the congealed world into its original, undifferentiated state and rejuvenating it. In the act of destruction, the ritualist through their offering returns themselves to the beginning of cosmogenesis and is identified with divinity. Sacrifice informs the logic of its variations in tapas, purification, dān, and pujā offerings and takes centre stage in hōm sacrifice during life-cycle rituals and Tantric sacrifice in Dasaĩ. In cosmogony, sexual difference is figured as the driving force of differentiation in the world’s proliferation; temporal logics operate as sexual difference; in this context, a pragmatics of time is also a pragmatics of sexual difference. The household as a passive synthesis of time can be understood as an arrangement of sexual difference (matrimonial encompassment); marriage rituals establish this arrangement which is threatened by witchcraft; Dasaĩ centres on male householders’ relationship to the Goddess in which they are identified with her through the sacrifice of a goat and enact a metaphysics where they are the appropriate wielders of forces of growth and destruction.
School/Discipline
Adelaide Law School
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences : Anthropology and Development Studies, 2023
Provenance
This thesis is currently under embargo and not available.