Centreing Women, Countering Killing: Women Sacrificing, Sacralising Maternity and Substantiating Intimacy with a Tamil Hindu Goddess

Abstract

ABSTRACT Some sacrifices are cosmogonic acts. Along with (re)creating the world, they create male social bonds by ritually appropriating and transcending women’s corporeal reproductive powers. Departing from these androcentric representations, this paper considers when, why and how (differently) women sacrifice. I compare an exclusively female domestic worship to the mother/midwife goddess Periyacci in Singapore from which men are forbidden with a male-centric sacrifice to tutelary deities by a patrilineage in rural Tamil Nadu, India. Focusing on women as active ritual sponsors and sacrificers, rather than as is usual, ritually prohibited and symbolically denigrated objects, I scrutinise sacrifice’s avowed theological, ritual and ethical claims regarding reproduction. Women’s native fertility, customarily denigrated to counterintuitively locate reproduction in the sacrificial covenant between men and their tutelaries, is centred in Periyacci’s worship. Dwelling on the body and its frailties, failures and infertility, women-led sacrifice demonstrates that life is only possible through women. Women’s actual sacrifice of their own bodies and labours to organically generate and nurture life negates the need for the dramatic symbolic sacrifice of animal surrogates. Entangling body and mind, sacrifice and subsistence, ritual and the routine, Periyacci’s worship offers alternative ways of thinking about sacrifice and its creative imperatives. Sacrifice need not be spectacular event but can also be an everyday sacrament.