ABSTRACT

Heidegger’s discussion on animals is sensitive to the varieties of animals that form a part of human experience. Heidegger, as Mulhall points out, is interested in the ways in which animals appear as both within and without human modes of accessibility. The iconic story that recounts the human propensity to forget their mortality is one of the questions asked by Yaksha to Yudhishthira, the protagonist hero of the great epic Mahabharata. Wendy Doniger gives a very nice account of sacrifice in the period of the Brahmanas, when explanations about rules of sacrifice as well as folk stories around animals and humans begin to make their way into the texts. Several scholars have noted that the sacrifice of the animal, in some ways, anticipates the idea of death itself as a form of sacrifice. In his famous formulation on animal symbolism in totemism, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963, 1969) formulated his famous proposition that ‘animals are good to think with.’.