2 - Theories of sacrifice, with or without violence

Summary

The milestones of the anthropological approach to sacrifice have drawn a dead-end trajectory. Initially inspired by a desire to construct a unique and universal model of sacrifice through the identification of its scheme, to which Hubert and Mauss attached themselves, within a matter of decades the idea that the infinite variation of sacrifice eluded any attempts to conclusively define it imposed itself. It even led to the term ‘sacrifice’ being denounced entirely, on the grounds that it would artificially unify an enormous diversity of practices across the globe, as well as being too connected to a Christian heritage. Such a definitive denunciation of sacrifice was formulated by Marcel Detienne (1979: 34–35):

[T]he notion of ‘sacrifice’ is indeed a category of yesterday's thought, conceived as arbitrarily as that of totemism – once denounced by Lévi-Strauss – both to gather elements taken here and there in the symbolic fabric of societies to form an artificial template, and to confess the astonishing empire that an all-encompassing Christianity has never ceased to exert secretly on the thinking of all those historians and sociologists who were persuaded that they were inventing a new science.

A few decades later, it appears that, unlike the notion of totemism, which effectively fell into disuse after its deconstruction by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), sacrifice is far from weakened by these remarks, nor has it even ceased to be used as a category of analysis by its author and those working in the field. Briefly put, the political history of the last three decades in particular has dramatically reintroduced sacrifice to modern anthropological thought.

As Ivan Strenski (2003) points out, the science of religions was initially uninterested in sacrifice, which was seen as an amoral and primitive practice. Following the first works of the English school, an essay on sacrifice by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss appeared in 1899, when its two authors were both 27 years old. The former was a history graduate, the second a philosophy graduate, and both shared a passion for ancient languages, notably Hebrew and Sanskrit, as well as for religious trivia.