It’s a Bloody Mess! Newar Buddhist Sacrifice in Nepal

A sacrificial arena, initially tidy with carefully arranged paraphernalia in straight lines, is now a bloody mess. The body of a goat to one side, blood splattered everywhere, and rigor mortis slowly setting in to the quivering sheep’s body. Parallelly, ask any ethnographer to tell you stories from their research period and you will elicit a stream of tales regarding the mess of it all. However, in academia, the tendency to write out the messy dynamics of these processes remains. In thinking intersubjectively about ethnographic data related to the performance of the sacrificial ritual to the Buddhist goddess Hāratī called chāhāyekegu, this paper argues that mess is an everyday reality not something out of the ordinary. Mess is an integral part of social research that seeks to portray more accurately and sensitively the everyday.