Among Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, calendrical food practices form the basis of religious life. This paper investigates their "religious food practices" by exploring the complex relationships between fasting and feasting, and between feast days and their daily lives. Because fasting is an important part of Ethiopian Orthodox life, anthropology studies have focused on the cyclical contrasts of fasting (= abstinence) and feasting (= abundance, fertility). They have demonstrated that this liturgical cycle of consumption and bodily experience structures the fundamental rhythms of Christian life. However, by focusing on saints' days, some of which are outwardly identical to workdays, this paper reveals that there are other important aspects of day-to-day "religious food practices" for the laity. It also notes that people do not always view fasting and feasting as opposites or antithetical. By placing saints' days in the Ethiopian church calendar and examining differences between them and other annual feast days, I emphasize the importance of capturing people's "religious life" with an eye toward their mundane, everyday lives.

This paper focuses on the treatment of horses in the rituals in eastern Sumba, Indonesia and determines the ambiguity of horses as goods. In the context of the exchange of goods between kin, horses are treated as impersonalized goods even if they are personalized by their masters. While it is desirable to sacrifice a horse that is personalized for the deceased, it is also possible to sacrifice one that is impersonalized if such a horse is not available.

Drawing on "the model of fixture and flow" presented by Strathern and Stewart (2002), this study examines the treatment of horses and demonstrates that people treat them as both personalized and impersonalized goods, that is, they use horses in exchange and sacrifices as ambiguous goods. This study highlights that paying attention to the process of personalization and impersonalization of persons and goods reveals the constitution of a multi-layered society.

This special issue, "Practice of Folk Knowledge to Slaughter Animals: Comparative Ethnographies of Slaughter," focuses on how folk knowledge of slaughtering animals constructs the life world while reexamining the traditional customs of slaughtering animals in terms of the practice of "folk knowledge," demonstrating adaptability, resilience, and creativity. Additionally, this issue describes case studies of ethnic and religious minorities in China, Nepal, and Indonesia—minorities who are relegated to the periphery of nation-states where the traditional customs of slaughtering animals are placed under control in their daily lives. Minorities frequently find themselves unable to avoid adapting to the majority societies. Therefore, this special issue examines how traditional practices of slaughtering animals have been sustained and transformed by political and social changes in the modern and contemporary era, focusing on the "folk knowledge" that people have created and maintained in their daily lives.

This study examined the implications of the practices people use to legitimize animal sacrifice and slaughter.

In Nepal, hygiene concepts and animal welfare discourses are penetrating. Moreover, the government is leading the modernization of the meat sector, such as by urging the conversion of local abattoirs into huge slaughterhouses. The Khadgis, who have traditionally been engaged in slaughter and blood sacrifice as their caste-based roles, have adapted to these social shifts. However, the Khadgis are also enthusiastic about keeping their ritual practices. They legitimize their caste-based roles of cutting the necks of animals through ritualistic practices by reinterpreting their roles as "self-devotional service for deities."

Previous research has elucidated that through modernization, people engaged in slaughtering are marginalized and rendered invisible outsiders. Contrarily, this study identified people's practices of remaining in alliance with related actors by legitimizing "the reason they cut" and reconstructing folk knowledge of slaughter.

This article examines why Islamic reformists pursue "Orthodox Islam" through sacrifice in the People's Republic of China. In China, the Islamic reformist movement started in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China. Even after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Islamic reformists have continuously pursued their ideal of "Orthodox Islam" in daily life. Although the Chinese government has gradually tightened restrictions on religious activities since the 2010s and ordered that Hui Muslims change their location of sacrifice in 2014, Islamic reformists have attempted to perform their sacrifice on their own in their local communities to advocate its "orthodoxy." By approaching sacrifice from a critical perspective on violence, this article clarifies the meaning of the sacrifices performed by Islamic reformists as part of "Orthodox Islam" in a socialist state.

This article examines the relationship between folk knowledge of subsistence and the reformist Buddhism movement, focusing on unique suffocation method of slaughtering for the purpose of self-consumption among Tibetan pastoralists in Amdo. In the suffocation method, the animal selected for slaughter is tied to a rope and one end of the rope is then pulled toward the head and tied around the muzzle, and the animal is suffocated for 10 to 20 min. People describe meat from animals slaughtered in this way as rich in blood, tasty, and nourishing. However, reformist lamas, who follow vegetarianism, have been concerned about the violence of this method, and have been campaigning for a fundamental change in the pastoralists' livestock management and diet system. By approaching this controversial issue of "the proper treatment of animals," this article depicts a condition in which the holistic nature of subsistence folk knowledge that has been formed to survive the harsh highland environment is being undermined.

This article describes the contemporary practice of slaughter and sacrifice of livestock at a village in Pesisir Selatan Regency, West Sumatra, Indonesia, where meat market expansion has initiated the commoditization of livestock. Especially focusing on the continuities and discontinuities of the discourses, and the way livestock were treated and slaughtered in two rituals of sacrifice, how folk knowledges of sacrifice are generated through practice is described. In contemporary Indonesia, economic development has intensified meat consumption. This is especially evident in the village of Minangkabau people in West Sumatra, where the rising price of gambier extract (the commodity that is produced in the area), a natural ingredient taken together with the chewed betel (Piper betle L.) leaf, has also contributed to increased meat consumption. In general, modern meat production is also becoming popular. This article describes the effect of these changes on the practice of sacrifice and discusses the generation of folk knowledges in the changing meat industry. The relationship between the "countable" and "uncountable" value in these sacrifices takes special focus thereof.

This paper focuses on a group of Mongolians, who have shifted from a nomadic way of life to a sedentary way, in the Eastern region of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Province in China, and examines how the introduction of pig breeding did or did not change their slaughtering methods and meat consumption patterns.

The influx of a large number of Han Chinese farmers to the region and the new policies of promoting agriculture by the Chinese Communist Party forced many nomadic Mongolians into sedentary agriculture life that combined farming and pig breeding. A new method was introduced for slaughtering pigs, which was completely different from the ones used to slaughter conventional livestock such as sheep and cattle. However, many aspects of the folk classification, nomenclature, and cooking methods of sheep and cattle were applied to pigs.

This paper will illuminate how conventional Mongolian folk knowledge and its practices around slaughtering and meat consumption are maintained, changed, and re-created by those who settled and adopted agrarian life.