Lynching, Religion, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Puebla

Focusing on medieval Nepal, in this chapter Yogesh Raj argues that existing sociohistorical accounts of lynching and other extreme forms of collective cruelty are inadequate for developing “a credible historical account” due to what he considers their “narratological bias.” Raj asserts that the problematic nature of the Event Catalogues, the main methodological innovation in these accounts composed by scholars of European rioting and American lynching, “call for a radically different approach to historiography.” Using Newari medieval records of lynching, Raj argues for “employing analogy, and not argumentation, to develop a deeper historical understanding of lynching in Nepal and across societies.”