Abstract
Abstract Animal release is often understood as the practice of freeing an animal from human consumption or the burden of labour. Typically associated with various Buddhist or Daoist cosmologies in which liberating an animal is a merit-making act, animal release tends to be conceptualised in altruistic terms. Yet the diverse forms that sacrifice and animal release take across Inner Asia suggest that the focus of analysis sometimes shifts from a concern with freeing animals to protecting the human imperative to live. Introducing new ethnography on the ethical underpinnings of sacrifice among Buryats in northeast Mongolia and the Nuosu of southwest China, I propose that animal release can be an act of restrained violence that evokes the mythopoetic contours of human–animal relations, animal sentience and human self-preservation. Offering case studies on scapegoats, deferred sacrifice, and contingent forms of slaughter, I show how Buryats and Nuosu manage the ethical tensions posed by sacrifice.
Highlights
Introducing new ethnography on the ethical underpinnings of sacrifice among Buryats in northeast Mongolia and the Nuosu of southwest China, I propose that animal release can be an act of restrained violence that evokes the mythopoetic contours of human–animal relations, animal sentience and human self-preservation
Sacrifice is always something of a paradox in that it has more than one ethical underpinning to it and yet tends to prioritise human well-being and the imperative to live
The ethical tension between the pursuit and restraint of violence is often overshadowed by the focus on death
Summary
Buryats sacrifice animals according to Mongolian conventions for slaughter. Sheep are the typical sacrificial animal, but occasionally goats, cattle, or horses are sacrificed too. As I observed several times during my first fieldwork (in 1999–2000) in Bayandun, this ceremony involves freeing a live goat, sheep, or horse in order to protect a specific person, his or her household, and the places where the protected person may travel While this ceremony is unusual, it is well established within the wider Buryat shamanic repertoire and involves summoning shamanic spirits, but the Buddhist spirit of the waters (lus), to whom effigies are burnt in lieu of a blood sacrifice. Manjilai is instead a spirit associated with the black (khar), or autochthonous, side of Buryat shamanic practices and is envisioned as riding bareback on one or sometimes two ‘fallow’ horses that (like Mongolian horses in general) are released to overwinter in the wild (Balogh 2011: 84–5, see 210) Both of the ceremonies that Yaruu held involved transferring grass person effigies to the Buddhist spirit of the waters and his kingdom that is replete with watery animals. As I will show, the penchant for offloading violence in a roundabout way onto an animal pervades Nuosu animistic rituals, which prioritise the human imperative to live by drawing upon some rather different ethical and mythopoetic wellsprings
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