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Sacrifice (Village)

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Hinduism and Tribal Religions

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Indian Religions ((EIR))

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At a conceptual level, village sacrificial rituals have been explained from three perspectives, irrespective of whether sacrifices are conducted at Adivasi shrines, Sufi dargahs, or at village shrines of Hindu deities. The first, Christian-missionary perspective characterizes rural sacrificial rituals [1, 2] as primitive, premodern, and aboriginal. They are projected as “cruel” and typified by animal sacrifices that produce village deities as “unworthy.” This missionary perspective of the sacrificial act is so macabre that it often blurs boundaries between human and animal sacrifices at villages, implying rural worshippers and village deities to be “cannibalistic.” The second perspective that describes village sacrifice is their association with tangible and concrete village spaces and temples/shrines. There is research on sacrifices based on vernacular textual analysis, anthropological analysis [3, 4], and village sacrifices associated with specific rural deities and their...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

    Deepra Dandekar

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  1. Deepra Dandekar
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Correspondence to Deepra Dandekar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Religion and Asian Studies, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, PA, USA

    Jeffery D. Long

  2. The Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Rita D. Sherma

  3. Department of Humanities & Languages, Philosophy & Religious Studies, The India Centre, FLAME University, Pune, India

    Pankaj Jain

  4. Centre for the Study of Comparative Religions and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

    Madhu Khanna

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Dandekar, D. (2022). Sacrifice (Village). In: Long, J.D., Sherma, R.D., Jain, P., Khanna, M. (eds) Hinduism and Tribal Religions. Encyclopedia of Indian Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1188-1_581

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