Composing Assemblages and Engaging Time in Hindu Ritual: Ritual Aesthetics in Nepal

This article is concerned with elaborating a novel theoretical account of Hindu ritual in Nepal which takes as its starting point the ethnographic and theoretical work of Vivienne Kondos. It does so by (re)contextualising her account through an array of new concepts, drawing, most notably, from the ontological turn, Handelman and Kapferer’s ritual aesthetics, Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatics, and comparative perspectives on Hindu cosmology. Hindu cosmology conceptualises the world as an entropic flux generated through processes of creative fragmentation. To contact divinity in ritual (for whatever purpose) one must move through temporal processes of cosmic death and rebirth. This is achieved through the composition of ritual assemblages. Such assemblages engage invention (sensu Wagner) and elucidating their composition requires a conceptualisation of time, transgression, sacrifice and personhood. With these theoretical tools and ethnographic context, anthropological accounts of power and performativity in ritual can be pushed towards more generative lines of analysis.