Being Vigilant about Sacred Cows: On Belief and Violence in India

The recent rise in “cow vigilantism” in India, wherein anyone accused of eating beef or of killing a cow faces real risk to their lives, has made it necessary for a public engagement of anthropological scholarship on the “sacred cow belief” (SCB). This paper first sets up the public issue for anthropological engagement. It then revisits the “sacred cow controversy” (from the 1960s and 1970s) in anthropological scholarship to remind us that doubt and skepticism were part of the dominant scholarly approaches to understanding the SCB. Here I touch on reification tendencies even within some anthropological scholarship. The paper then explicates current understandings of belief by cognitive anthropologists as a concept to show how the SCB as it appears in popular discourse can be viewed without reification. Using Ortner’s notion of “key symbols” and Sperber’s notion of “reflective beliefs,” it makes a case to view the SCB as a political claim that demands continual social affirmation by actors and as a reflective belief that always requires validation through external context (e.g., authoritative sources) rather than being an established “fact” of an inner state of mind of Hindus.