4 WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP OF SACRIFICE AND GIFT?

 

The relationships that exist between these contracts and exchanges among humans and those between men and the gods throw light on a whole aspect of the theory of sacrifice.  First, they are perfectly understood, particularly in those societies in which, although contractual and economic rituals are practised between men, these men are the masked incarnations, often Shaman priest-sorcerers, possessed by the spirit whose name they bear.  In reality, they merely act as representatives of the spirits, because these exchanges and contracts not only bear people and things along in their wake, but also the sacred beings that, to a greater or lesser extent, are associated with them. (Mauss, The Gift, p. 20)

This chapter examines the relationship between the phenomena of sacrifice and gift as this emerges in the ethnographic record itself and in discussions of the ethnographic record by non-theological disciplines such as history of religions and social anthropology.  (The theological treatment of these topics will be further investigated in Chapter 6).  Part I of this study demonstrates that non-sacrificial and sacrificial revisionist positions have heavily invested in anthropologies that make contrasting assumptions as to the relationship between ‘history of religions’ sacrifice and the practice of the gift (in both archaic socities and our own), the former insisting on an absolute distinction in the aetiology of these practices, the latter insisting, equally strongly, on an underlying continuity.  Our investigation in this chapter seeks to establish which of these positions makes better sense of the ethnographic evidence, and which more closely corresponds to current understandings of the relationship of sacrifice and gift to be found in the disciplines concerned with these phenomena as they arise outside the sphere of Christianity.

                The anthropologies underlying non-sacrificial theology can be shown to have their roots in traditional ways of conceptualizing sacrifice, gift and their relation that are common to theology and and wide range of academic disciplines, and are clearly traceable: on the one hand, to a succession of sacrificial theories that limit the application of sacrifice to religious rituals entailing the destruction of a victim; on the other, to a tradition of sociological thought originating with Mauss’s Essay around the gift as the dominant form of relationality in archaic societies.  Practices of sacrifice and gift have as a result generally been assigned to separate areas of sociological enquiry – the history of religions in the first case, and social anthropology in the second – and have often been pursued quite independently of each other.  So it is not surprising that the past results of investigations of these practices offers little ground on which to challenge the non-sacrificial revisionist understanding of sacrifice and gift as discrete, or opposed, phenomena. 

I shall give a brief account of these traditional ways of conceptualizing sacrifice and gift in what follows, before exploring more recent developments across a range of disciplines which challenge these conceptualizations.  In their combined impact, I shall argue that these more recent developments mark a radical shift in the conceptualization of sacrifice and gift, prompting us to re-consider the nature of their relationship.

 

Traditional anthropological perspectives on sacrifice and gift

1.Sacrifice

The last century and a half has witnessed a long succession of attempted theories of sacrifice, none of which appear to have achieved an undisputed ascendancy over its predecessors.  As a phenomenon common to many, if not all, religious cultures, sacrifice has long been of interest, not just to social anthropologists (whose field of study has tended to exclude larger-scale polities), but to theorists of religion and society from a range of disciplinary backgrounds.  If we eliminate from our consideration those theories that pre-date the emergence of an evidence-based approach to anthropology in the early 20^th century, we will observe that many of these theories share, first, a tendency to restrict their definition of sacrifice to rituals involving the destruction of a victim, and, second, a tendency to attribute significance to the violence of sacrificial destruction. 

The equation of sacrifice and blood offering is a feature of what has been described as the first systematic treatment of sacrifice as a generic phenomenon:  Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss [1898], Sacrifice: its Nature and Functions.  The influence of this theory may have had the effect of side-lining theories entertaining a potentially wider delimitation of the sacrificial phenomenon – notably, Sir Edward Tylor [1874], Primitive Culture and William Robertson Smith [1889], The Religion of the Semites.  As the anthropologist Jan van Baal has pointed out, Tylor’s earlier characterization of sacrifice as a contractual arrangement of do ut des – a concept that is as inadequate to archaic gift exchange as to sacrificial rites – may also have contributed to discrediting the idea of sacrifice as a form of gift.[1] 

In addition to sharing Hubert & Mauss’ definition of sacrifice, many of the best-known theories also associate sacrifice, in various ways, with the supposed violence of the sacred – notably: René Girard [1977], Violence and the Sacred; Walter Burkert [1986], Homo Necans; Nancy Jay [1992], Throughout Your Generations Forever; Maurice Bloch [1992], Prey into Hunter.  Implicit in such theories is a negative characterization of sacrificial ritual as something to which the modern spirit, whether in the shape of secularism, or a more humane Christianity, stands utterly opposed, and which, in consequence, acquires an exotic allure as the epitome of everything that we find most inscrutable about archaic religious behaviour.

The most frequent ethnographic references of these theories are to classic anthropological accounts of African societies by British social anthropologists: Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard [1940], The Nuer; Meyer Fortes [1945], The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi; John Middleton [1960], Lugbara Religion; Godfrey Lienhardt [1961], Divinity and Experience; Victor Turner [1962], Chihamba; Daryll Forde [1964], Yakö Studies.  The latter date from a period of social anthropology (the 40s and 50s) marked by the ascendancy of Descent Theory, and they concern corporateunilineal descent group societies (i.e. societies with clearly patrilineal or matrilineal kinship systems).  Descent Theory determines a primary focus in these ethnographies on kinship, and sees sacrificial rituals chiefly as an expression of kinship structures.  However, a number of the above-mentioned ethnographies (i.e. Evans-Pritchard, Lienhardt, Turner) demonstrate a specific interest in religion.  The religious practices of African unilineal descent group societies often centre on acts of sacrifice involving the destruction – not infrequently violent – of an animal victim.  They consequently seem amenable, by and large, to the kinds of theoretical explanations proposed by theorists like Jay and Girard.  Yet, as we shall see presently, much of this ethnographic territory has been revisited by the anthropologist Luc de Heusch [1985] in a magisterial synthesis of the African material (Sacrifice in Africa), which demonstrates the openness of some of this material to different interpretations.

                The study of Bloch, it is only fair to say, eschews essentialist definitions of sacrifice, and rests on an enormously wider range of ethnographic material.  Nevertheless, this study resembles the others cited above in that its author chooses to give primacy to the aspect of violence over that of gift (p. 30) (which Bloch develops in other contexts).[2]   It is significant from my own perspective that this choice is strongly in accord with the avowedly secularizing objectives of Bloch’s argument in this text.(p. 105)

2. The gift

With archaic reciprocal exchange, the relevant debate has a clear point of inception in Marcel Mauss’s Essay [1922), and a clear locus in the then nascent discipline of social anthropology.  In its Maussian sense, the gift evokes a characterization of archaic gift relationships in terms of a beneficent mutualityapparently unmotivated by economic rationality, which promotes social cohesion.  The motivation of the gift remains an enigma – certainly when seen from the perspective of economic rationality.  Mauss’s own answer to the question of why we give involves recourse to a quasi-religious law: that a thing, qua gift, is inhabited by a ‘spirit’ forcing it to return to its place of origin (pp. 13-16).  But this explanation has, on the whole, been less influential than the central place that Mauss’s enquiry accords to the phenomenon itself.  His installation of reciprocal exchange at the very heart of archaic sociality (as ‘total social fact’) marks a radical difference between archaic cultures and our own – an alternative way of ‘doing society’.  For however the gift is defined, it certainly differs fundamentally from the commodity exchange of modern Western societies in its prioritization of relationships over things, and status over wealth.            

Mauss’s gift has had, not a single, but a two-fold legacy: it has been both a springboard for a critique on the pretension of economics to hold the only rational account of human behaviour,[3] and an important point of departure for subsequent anthropological theory.  It is, if anything, in the former sphere that the Maussian voice continues to reverberate most strongly.  Recent theological readings of the gift (e.g.  Stephen H. Webb [1996], The Gifting God and Miroslav Volf [2005], Free of Charge) seem to emanate from the Maussian critique of economism such as we find developed in Godbout & Caillé.

Yet within the sphere of social anthropology itself, Mauss’ theory of reciprocity has also had its influence.  Indeed it could be seen as extraordinarily prescient anticipation of the anthropological theories of the 1960s and 1970s which were to challenge the notion of kinship advocated by Descent Theory.[4]  In the context of the micro-polities of the New Guinea Highlands and its fringes (to which social anthropologists were increasingly gravitating) Descent Theory lacked the explanatory power it had had for the earlier generation of African ethnographers.  The more fluid social structures that confronted field workers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) lent themselves more readily to the interpretations of Structuralism and Alliance Theory which happened to be gaining ground at that time.  In studies of these communities, the most salient ritual practices were ceremonial exchanges.  These seemed not merely to express kinship structures (as Descent theory would have anticipated) but actually to produce and reproduce them.  From the new perspective of PNG and Structuralism, the traditional representation of kinship structures by Descent Theory as independent of – and pre-existing – their ritual expression, looked suspiciously like an essentialization of the theoretical categories which Descent Theorists wanted to apply to the object of their researches.

Lévy-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, and other assailants of anthropological orthodoxy saw Mauss’ monograph with its focus on exchange as a precursor of their own anthropological perspective.[5]  Yet, there is reason to doubt whether the Mauss of Lévi-Strauss’s Introduction to Mauss’s Essay is quite the Mauss of the Essay.  While Mauss’s monograph could be seen as the origin of a contemporary sociological approach that has tended to separate gift from sacrifice (if only by identifying it as an independent focus of anthropological enquiry), it is not certain that this reflects the intention of Mauss’s initial monograph.  In fact, under the rubric of the ‘fourth obligation’ (an obligation ‘to give to the gods’, which is additional to the three better known obligations: ‘to give’, ‘to accept’ and ‘to return’) Mauss includes sacrifice as a ‘mythological element’ of the gift.  The short passage that develops this theme eliminates all distinction between the gift to the gods and the gift to the men who are often their ‘masked incarnations’:

The relationships that exist between these contracts and exchanges among humans and those between men and the gods throw light on a whole aspect of the theory of sacrifice.  First, they are perfectly understood, particularly in those societies in which, although contractual and economic rituals are practised between men, these men are the masked incarnations, often Shaman priest-sorcerers, possessed by the spirit whose name they bear.  In reality, they merely act as representatives of the spirits, because these exchanges and contracts not only bear people and things along in their wake, but also the sacred beings that, to a greater or lesser extent, are associated with them. (p. 20)

Furthermore, in the brief Note on Alms that follows this account of the fourth obligation, practices of giving to the unknown other  – which seem as relevant to contemporary gift practices of our own culture as any of the practices described in the Essay[6]  – are said to derive from a transformed notion of sacrifice:

The gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth and happiness that has been offered to them and had been hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor and children. (p. 23)

Of course, the ‘mythological element’ of the gift is not the element that Mauss chooses to pursue in the remaining pages of the Essay – and this no doubt accounts for the neglect into which his remarks on sacrifice have since fallen.  Yet, it is nevertheless remarkable how complete that neglect has been among Maussians, who, from the time of Structuralism on, have pursued the enquiry which Mauss began, as though it concerned only the kind of relationships that humans entertain with each other, and as though they believed that Mauss, in rendering the gift properly sociological, had severed any connection it might have with the realm of the sacred and the gods.  As the Melanesiansts, Strathern and Stewart, have recently put it:  

 Since the 1960s […] these analyses gave an impression that exchange practices had a kind of secular rationale, from the point of view of the participants in them as well as from the analytical perspective of the anthropologists who wrote about them (see, however, Rappaport 1968, in which sacrifice is a basic motif).[7] 

Typical of the Structuralist inflection of the gift that has largely determined the subsequent direction of the Maussian enquiry are the attitudes of Lévi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins.  Lévi-Strauss disapproves heartily of Mauss’ ‘mystical’ explanations of anthropological phenomena, and associates his own improvement on the Maussian paradigm with their abandonment in favour of an uncompromisingly sociological mode of explanation.  Sahlins , for his part, is keen to centre his study of reciprocity on what he terms the ‘balanced’ or ‘horizontal’ type of reciprocal relations, which he distinguishes from the kind of ‘vertical’ (e.g. hierarchical) relations that are often associated with religious contexts.  What tends to emerge in the studies of reciprocity that have developed in the wake of such positions is an understanding of the world of the gift as a realm of social and economic relations between individuals and communities to which religious and the symbolic considerations are effectively peripheral.  The relationality of the gift tends to be primarily a socio-economic, and not a socio-religious affair. The tone of beneficent mutuality that is generally supposed to invest such practices – and marks both their commonality with the surviving gift practices of our own culture and their opposition to capitalist commodity exchange – goes along with the evacuation of the sacred.  It contrasts starkly with the tone of violence that instantly enters our accounts of the ritual practices of archaic cultures, when they leave the beneficent relationality of human individuals and groups in order to enter the maleficent and non-relational sphere of our relations with the gods.

The theological impact of traditional perspectives

At this point I propose to call a momentary halt in my history of the conceptualization of sacrifice and the gift.  My account thus far can help us to understand the anthropological notions of sacrifice, gift and their relation, and the way that they underpin the non-sacrificial understandings of Atonement found in revisionist theology (as well as popular and scholarly understandings of sacrifice and gift outside the theological sphere).  On the one hand, sacrifice – in its narrow definion as blood sacrifice – comes to exemplify religion as inherently violent.  On the other, gift emerges as the source of a beneficent and socially constructive relationality, to which religion is seen as irrelevant. 

When it comes to Christian theology, the two concepts have traditionally been seen as closely intertwined.   The understanding of grace as exemplified in an act of substitutionary sacrifice does not necessarily preclude the understanding of grace as a divine gift.  However, the bifurcated conceptualization of sacrifice and gift which we have found in the treatment of these concepts by adjacent disciplines appears to give some basis for the conceptualization of gift we find in anti-sacrificial theology as independent of sacrifice.  This allows the Christian salvation event, conceptualized as gift, to be placed in opposition to sacrifice as we find it exemplified both in non-Christian religions and in the distorted versions of the Christian salvation event proposed by traditionalist theology.  In other words, the demarcation of sacrifice and gift to be found in adjacent disciplines is consistent with the widespread revisionisttendency to oppose a ‘bad’ traditionalist theology of grace in the shape of sacrifice to a ‘good’ theology in the shape of the gift.  In certain cases, this consistency is the result of a direct influence of adjacent disciplines on theology, as we have seen.  More importantly, however, it is likely to be the product of certain common background assumptions that are equally operative in theology and in non-theological disciplines. 

Fresh perspectives on sacrifice, gift and their relationship

So much, then, for the traditional notions of sacrifice, gift and their relationship which underpin non-sacrificial revisionist theology.  The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to the examination of more recent approaches to these notions that challenge our understanding of them, and so bring into question the entire theological edifice that they support.  These approaches are found, from the 1960s onwards: on the one hand, in the history of civilizations literature that seems to have arisen in the wake of the work of the French Hellenists, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Détienne; on the other, in the ethnographic literature of mainstream social anthropology, much of it concerned with Melanesia.  The history of civilizations literature interests us because it places sacrifice at the heart of its understanding of society; the more recent anthropological literature does so equally because it develops the understanding of gift exchange in a religious and symbolic direction that recalls Mauss’s discussion of the fourth obligation, rather than the secularism of subsequent Maussian studies.  There has, in short, been something of a ‘religious turn’ in the recent development of adjacent disciplines, which is very interesting from a theological point of view.  No less so is the degree of convergence that has emerged across these disciplines in the understanding of symbolic exchange.  There now seems less basis for the familiar complaint amongst theologians that anthropological theories contradict each other.[8]  However, these developments also constitute a challenge – since the new inflexion which they give to our concepts of sacrifice and gift seems not to be compatible with the way those notions have traditionally been understood by theologians.  The very limited extent of their penetration of these ideas into theological studies hitherto is partly attributable to the reluctance of theologians to pursue their enquiries across disciplinary boundaries.  But it is also the result of a disinclination on the part of historians and anthropologists – partly, no doubt, in reaction to the grandiose theories of the past – to engage in comparative generalization around religious questions.  There is, on the one hand, an attitude of suspicion amongst domain specialists towards approaches that would iron out cultural difference: on the other, the absence from the field of adjacent disciplines of the kind of religious and theological concern that would motivate comparative generalization.  One unfortunate result of this is that where the topics of sacrifice and gift arise in the ethnographic literature they are rarely thematized in a way that would signal their relevance to interested theologians.

                I shall now give a summary overview of these developments – before exploring them in more detail in the remainder of the chapter.

1.Sacrifice in the history of civilizations literature

By ‘history of civilizations’ literature I mean a cluster of (mostly) French studies and collaborations on the history of civilizations beginning in the 60s and 70s, often of Structuralist inspiration, which bring an anthropological preoccupation with the social symbolism of ritual – accompanied, however, by a very un-Lévi-Straussian interest in sacrifice – to the centre stage of historical studies.  At the heart of these influences and collaborations I would place: the Hellenists, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Détienne, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; the Indianists, Charles Malamoud and Natalie Biardeau; the Structuralist anthropologist Luc de Heusch with his various Africanist collaborators.[9] These scholars tend to be disciplinary specialists, who remain within the confines of their subject specialism while sharing an anthropological orientation open to broader comparativist projects.  Among their achievements should be reckoned the dissemination of an approach to understanding the great civilizations of the past that does not marginalize religion, as well as a considerable body of ethnographic research that places sacrifice at the heart of culture.  I would place in the same general category the more recent work on Ancient Egypt (Bonhême and Forgeau), the Roman Empire (Richard Gordon), ancient Mesopotamia (Jean Bottéro), and the Siberian Buryat (Roberte Hamayon).[10]

The work of these scholars does not presuppose the definition of sacrifice as destructive violence.  While generally wary of comprehensive definitions in the manner of Girard and Jay, it favours wider delimitations of the sacrificial phenomenon than we find in the theory of sacrifice literature.  Practices of destructive violence have their place, but are not treated as representing the entirety of sacrifice, or foregrounded as its most essential expression. 

2.Gift exchange in recent anthropological literature

We have seen the tendency of much of the literature on Maussian gift exchange to stress the relational dimension of the phenomenon at the expense of the symbolic and religious aspect, thus giving the impression that gift exchange has a ‘secular rationale’.  This emphasis has changed decisively in anthropological studies since the early 1980s in a number of ways.[11]  First, gift transactions have increasingly come to be seen, not as individual events, but as participating over time in cycles.  Second, the things that circulate prove in numerous studies to have a symbolic content, and to define, over time, a cosmological totality.  Third, the participation in this circulation through the performance of complementary symbolic roles is less the expression of pre-existing persons and relationships, than a process by which persons and relationships are constituted and reconstituted.  Recent studies by anthropologists as diverse as Daniel de Coppet and Marilyn Strathern join in evoking a world where ‘persons’ turn out to be composed of instantiations of their relationships, and are successively de-composed and re-composed through long cosmic cycles.  Characteristic are the many ethnographic accounts of the opposed flows of male and female goods/prestations that occur in connection with marital alliance in many archaic communities.  Within Melanesia – so often the context of recent anthropological theorizing around gift exchange – the cosmological totality defined by ‘socially reproductive cycles of exchange’ frequently centres on the human body itself:

Papua new Guineans live in a gender-inflected universe in which polarities of male and female articulate cosmic forces thought to be located in the human body [such that] indigenous theories of human reproduction contain within them an implicit recipe for social reproduction.[12]

If this is what we now think of as reciprocity, then the least that can be said is that it will not be adequately understood in socio-economic or secular terms.  The attempt by Sahlins (‘Primitive Exchange’) and others to delimit the reciprocal gift as an area of social activity removed from symbolic and religious considerations seems a long way from recent concerns.  So what remains of the Mauss’s notion of the reciprocal gift in contemporary Melanesian ethnography?  Religion and symbolism seem to be back on the agenda – and it is the Mauss of the fourth obligation, rather than the Mauss of Structuralism who emerges as more prescient of recent developments.  Social anthropologists appear to be moving away from the idea of a purely relational sphere from which religion could be excluded – such as we see in Sahlin’s attempt to separate off a sphere of horizontal, exchange-orientated reciprocity characterizing the relations between groups, from a sphere of vertical, tributary giving characteristic of relations within the group.  As for Maussian beneficence, this has largely given way to the representation of the gift as the locus of power relations.  What remains of Maussian reciprocity turns out largely to consist in a sense of an interconnectedness and interdependence of socially symbolic transactions – what Marilyn Strathern refers to as ‘enchainment’.[13] 

Towards a new consensus on sacrifice?

This may be outlined as follows.  

1. Sacrificial giving is a human response to a state of indebtedness to the sacrificer’s source of life.  The latter is invariably identified with a mythologically conceived point of social origin.  This could, for example, be the loins of the ancestor, the maternal blood source in the person of a male affine, or the bloody self-sacrifice of a primordial creator god.  The manner of the response varies far more than has sometimes been recognized.  It may be a substantial repayment of the debt – or a mere token of acknowledgement in the face of a debt which one is powerless to repay.  In the former case, the avowed purpose of the payment is to avert the state of dependence arising from the indebtedness by an affirmation of independent social identity; in the latter, it is a tributary act of homage that recognizes and accepts that state of dependence.
2. Sacrifice (so defined) is indistinguishable from symbolic gift.  This is because the source of life often finds itself located in the human individual or group – for example, the wife-giver, or the recipient of compensation payments.  In such cases the state of cosmic indebtedness is experienced in relation to (a) person(s) whom we would not normally think of as spirits or gods, and the resulting prestations have tended to be classified as gifts.  Yet they are sacrificial according to the above definition, and have been recognized as such by some recent studies.  The association of living beings with the source of life and the consequent ambiguity of gift and sacrifice is not restricted to micro-polities, however.  It is also a feature of hierarchical ritual systems that are generally considered sacrificial, in which tributary gifts are not easily distinguished from sacrificial offerings, and beneficent superiors share the sacred aura of spiritual beings.
3. Sacrifice is a reciprocal exchange.  The range of the symbolic giving that we associate with sacrifice includes the gifts that flow downstream from the source of life to the dependent inferior, materializing the beneficence of the gods, as well as the counter-gift that flows upstream to the source of life.  The gifts of wife-givers to wife-takers, which, in many micro-polities, flow in the opposite direction to the gifts of wife-takers to their source of life, find their equivalent in the largesse that, in more hierarchical societies, materializes the beneficence of the gods and their mortal vice-regents.  Thus we associate sacrifice with a circulation gifts that includes the downward movement of gifts of beneficent superiors as well as the tributary offerings of pious dependents – in socio-economic terms, ‘pooling’ as we as ‘redistribution’ (Stone Age Economics, pp. 191-210).

The theological impact of fresh perspectives on the relationship of sacrifice and gift

That this kind of consensus can actually be found in our ethnographic sources, it will be the task of the remainder of this chapter to demonstrate.  If it can, then its importance for theology based on conventional notions of sacrifice, gift and their relation, cannot be underestimated.

                Of course, to put the case, as above, for an encompassing socio-symbolic concept that subsumes both sacrifice and gift, does not require us to overlook the no doubt very real differences that exist between rites that are conventionally spoken of as sacrifice and those that are not.  Another task of this chapter will be to seek an answer to the question of why socio-symbolic ritual takes a more recognizably ‘sacrificial’ form in certain religious systems (e.g. Christianity and Judaism) than in others.  Yet at all events – and whatever the outcome of our investigation of these differences – the new conceptualization, set out above, is, of itself, full of implications for the issue which, as we argued in the last chapter, underlies the divergence among theologians between the non-sacrificial and the sacrificial revisionist positions.  For to conceptualize sacrifice, gift and their relation in this new way tends to undermine the attempt by non-sacrificial theology to represent sacrifice and gift, either as two areas of human activity having nothing to do with each other, or as two kinds of transaction of opposed character.  Correspondingly, recent tendencies in non-theological conceptualization of sacrifice, gift and their relation strongly support the understanding of those concepts to be found in sacrificial revisionist theology.  Sacrificial revisionists have always rejected the narrow traditionalist equation of sacrifice and blood-sacrifice, and criticised the resulting over-emphasis on the propitiatory and expiatory elements of sacrifice as opposed to the elements of worship and thanksgiving.  Unfortunately, however, the movement in adjacent disciplines towards some degree of support for the presuppositions of a sacrificial revisionist position has scarcely been registered – for the simple reason that the sacrificial revisionist position is not widely represented in the current debate.  Indeed, the studies that have been most influenced by recent developments in non-theological disciplines – such as those of Milbank and Tanner – are commited to a non-sacrificial, rather than a sacrificial, revisionist position that, as we shall argue, their ethnography does not adequately support. 

Evidence for a new consensus

 

The idea of a state of cosmic indebtedness is claimed as the core meaning of sacrifice by those scholars, mentioned above, who have recently sought to explore sacrificial ritual from a comparative anthropological perspective – including Luc de Heusch, Maurice Godelier, and, latterly, Marcel Hénaff.[14]  All of these attest the influence of Charles Malamoud.  This constitutes a fair proportion of that small number of scholars who have devoted any attention to the subject of sacrifice.  In a rather different context, however, the idea of cosmic indebtedness emerges, quite independently, in contemporary anthropological explorations of gift exchange across a wide range of archaic cultures.  These practices may not always be explicitly referred to as sacrifice, and generally do not take the form of blood sacrifices addressed to anthropomorphic deities.  Yet they fit the broad definition of sacrifice advocated by Godelier and de Heusch.  Furthermore, a powerful argument for including them in the category of sacrifice has recently been developed in studies by Pamela Stewart & Andrew Strathern (S&S) and Knut Rio[15]. 

                This amounts, in the view of this study, to a remarkable degree of convergence, not as yet recognized by theologians, between the history of civilizations literature and recent social anthropology around the interpretation of socio-religious rituals as a response to cosmic indebtedness.  To recognize this convergence is not, I repeat, to ignore important distinctions, but it is to cast doubt on the characterization by theologians of the relationship between sacrifice and gift as one of separation or opposition.

                The remainder of this chapter will examine, in turn, each of the three points of consensus mentioned above.  I will explore (point 1) the notion of sacrifice to be found in Malamoud, de Heusch, and Godelier.  Next (point 2), I will investigate the fitness of this notion to practices in micro-polities that have been labelled gift exchange rather than sacrifice – especially practices of compensation in relation to affines and murder victims.  Because these practices may be unfamiliar to the theological reader, I will illustrate them with two short ethnographic examples.  Then – under Brief Excursus – I will give some attention to the small amount of theoretical discussion in the anthropological literature of the relationship between the concept of sacrifice, as defined under Point 1, and the concept of gift exchange described and illustrated under Point 2; various possible understandings for this relationship will be set out.  Finally (point 3), I will defend one of these understandings on the basis of an ethnography of sacrifice drawn from the scholars mentioned above.

Point 1: Sacrifice as a response to a state of cosmic indebtedness to the source of life

Malamoud

According to Malamoud, Indian sacrificial rites ‘fit into a general economy of debt and ransom which, in Brahminism, govern not only men’s individual lives, but also the whole organisation of the world’ (Biardeau and Malamoud, p. 194). Malamoud reads Vedic and Hindu sacrificial ritual in the light of cosmological myth.  The debt is created through the origination of the cosmos in the sacrifice of the Cosmic Man (Purusa or Prajapati).  The ransom takes place through:

[…] the rites carried out by the gods and, later, by man (especially the construction of an altar of fire) . […]  (These are) intended to reconstitute the body of Purusa-Prajapati, which is scattered throughout his creation.[16]

The cosmos includes the social order.  The repayment of cosmic debt, therefore, involves the reproduction of caste: from the head of the Purusha emerge the priestly class of Brahmins; from the arms the royal and military class; from the thighs the agricultural and commercial classes; from the feet the serving classes.  Sacrifice involves social reproduction.

De Heusch

De Heusch argues against the presumption that sacrificial ritual must have a single origin.  He carefully distinguishes the kind of sacrifice that involves one’s whole being (être), from the sacrifice in which one substitutes one’s property (avoir), and the sacrifice that is properly ‘cosmological’ from the sacrifice that is ‘domestic’.  Yet, in the course of the concluding chapter, these ‘dualities’ are seen to disclose an underlying unity of idea that evokes Malamoud’s formulation (on de Heusch’s own admission).  However, de Heusch is anxious that this conclusion should have emerged out of the African material itself, rather than being imposed on it by a theoretical construction of sacrifice, or a construction based on non-African practice, or the generalization of one particular instance of African practice.  Regarding the distinction between the sacrifice of ‘being’ of and the sacrifice of ‘having’, de Heusch claims that the ‘most perfect’ form of sacrifice is that of ‘being’ ‘which a man must pay with his blood in order to continue to exist’ (p. 202).  At the same time, there are sacrifices of ‘having’, which ‘disguise’ this ‘truth’ through the offering of animal substitutes.  ‘The flow of the dogs’ blood, shed upon Nya’s altars’, is thus ‘a hidden debt of human blood debited from the ‘having’ account’ (p. 204):

Human sacrifice represents the outer limit which many rites – in which the sacrifier is seen to project himself into the animal victim, losing a part of his ‘having’ in order to preserve the essential – strive to reach.(p. 215)

Similarly, in regard to the second distinction – between cosmological and domestic sacrifice – sacrifices that involve a properly ‘cosmological’ enactment, such as the Vedic and Hindu rituals, mark an ‘outer limit’ to which ‘domestic’ sacrifice does not attain.  Concerning an example of ‘domestic’ sacrifice that falls short of the full cosmological enactment, he observes: 

The Zulu domestic sacrifice does not re-enact the birth of the universe; it no more cooks it than cools it.  We are thus justified in distinguishing two sacrificial spheres.  (p. 215)

Yet, tellingly, and as if to counteract the impression that these ‘two sacrificial spheres’ – the cosmological and the domestic – exist independently of each other, he adds in what is his closest approach to the formulation of Malamoud:

However, it is always a matter of establishing a locus, near or distant – in space or time – where a debt of life is to be paid.

Overall, two things emerge, almost despite the author’s express intention, from this would-be Structuralist reading of African sacrifice.  First, a concept of cosmic debt repayment, remarkably close to Malamoud‘s, appears to persist beneath the complex typology of de Heusch’s reading.  Second, the Structuralist language of ‘dualities’ turns out to express less an opposition of discrete types than a gradation of levels at which the ‘truth’ of sacrifice is realized in its various local manifestations.

Godelier

Godelier (Enigma) makes use of a similar notion of cosmic indebtedness in order to characterize sacrificial transactions over and against the transactions of gift exchange.  In the second half of a book devoted largely to Melanesian material and the anthropological debate around Maussian theory he turns to the topic of sacrifice in hierarchical societies with the case of Pharaonic Egypt uppermost in his mind.

The divine essence of Pharaoh confronts us with two fundamental facts. On the one hand, it becomes understandable that those who owe everything, even their very existence and that of their progeny, to such a power willingly consent to its authority.  […]  And the second basic fact, which also sheds light on the first, is that this consent was the expression of a primordial debt that humans owed the gods and in particular the god who dwelled among them, Pharaoh, a debt which all the counter-gifts of their labor, their harvest, and even their person could not counterbalance, and even less obliterate if Pharaoh were to demand their life. (p. 193)

We recognize, once again, the language of Malamoud.  (Godelier makes no secret of the debt).  However, the concept here undergoes – or appears to undergo – a subtle modification.  While Malamoud and de Heusch are happy to speak of sacrifice as a ‘repayment’ of cosmic debt, Godelier stresses that the gift of life cannot properly be ‘repaid’, and that the sacrificial counter-gift is, in reality, a token only, serving to acknowledge the debt.  Knut Rio has recently said something similar in connection with the ‘gifts of life’ (blood, mother’s milk etc.) which nourish the child on Ambrym, Vanuatu: ‘People cannot give back “life”’ (Rio, ‘Denying the Gift’, p.457).  ‘Contrary to what many think and to what I myself have written’, declares Godelier, referring to earlier chapters on gift exchange:

There is something in this relationship between a god-king and his subjects which goes beyond the logic of exchange. For in response to the gifts made by the great gods, the powers of the invisible world – and Afek (of the Telefolmin) was one such power – there can be no true counter-gift. Nothing equivalent can be given and, of course, no better counter-gift; there can be no potlatch because the great gods are masters of every kind of wealth. (193)

Godelier’s emphasis here is consistent with the fact that the study in which it occurs primarily concerns gift exchange, which he tends to see in terms of symmetry and balance.  Godelier wishes, as we have already remarked, to characterize the sacrifice over and against the transactions that have occupied his earlier chapters.  So, naturally, what strikes him about sacrifice is the asymmetry and imbalance between what is given and what is received.  Leaving aside, for now, the question of whether asymmetry is necessarily any the less a feature of gift exchanges (which more recent ethnography might lead us to doubt), we can understand that Godelier’s conviction of a greater balance in the latter form of transaction leads him to see the non-equivalence (indeed utter incommensurability) of the sacrificial gift in terms of asymmetry and imbalance.  In their own way, however, de Heusch and Malamoud also emphasize the non-equivalence of the sacrificial relation – even if they do not share the kind of Maussian perspective that would lead them to understand non-equivalence in terms of the impossibility of a return.  For example, de Heusch states, of the Minyanka dog sacrifice (cited above), that ‘to see it(the sacrifice) asmerely as a kind of offering, that is, as a simple exchange between man and the gods concerned, would be to miss the essential point’.

The flow of dogs’ blood, shed upon Nya’s altars, is a hidden debt of human blood debited from the ‘having’ account (i.e. a debt paid out of a man’s possessions rather than his “being”).  (p. 204)

In the above example, the incommensurability of the gift and its return, which Godelier evokes with the idea that the gift is unpayable, finds expression in the ritual concealment of the non-equivalence of human and dog’s blood. We are reminded of the NT portrayal of the ritual of the Jewish High Priest, who enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own (Hebrews 9.12).  The attempted deception brings us back to the purely symbolic nature of the exchange, which is no less apparent in de Heusch’s account of the Minyanka dog sacrifice than in Godelier’s description of Pharaonic religion. 

Point 2: Location of the source of life in the human addressee  

 

The notion of a symbolic response to a state of indebtedness to one‘s source of life, which we find exhibited by the sacrifices described by Godelier, de Heusch and Malamoud happens also – as we shall presently show – to be a notion strongly associated with rituals which social anthropologists are accustomed to consider forms of gift exchange.  To describe sacrifice in these terms, therefore, is to raise the question of where to draw the line – if at all – between sacrifice and gift exchange.  Conventional approaches would make the distinction on grounds of the divinity, or otherwise, of the addressee.  The concept of the source of life, however, confounds this distinction.  Even the tributary offering to Pharaoh of his subjects’ ‘labour, harvest and person’ suggests an offering to a god (Pharaoh) who is also a human being – hence a sacrifice which is also a kind of gift or counter-gift.  Far from being (as Godelier himself claims) an exceptional feature of a uniquely hierarchical system, this confusion of human and divine, sacrifice and gift, becomes, as we shall show, more, rather than less, frequent, as we enter the micro-political world of Maussian exchange, in which ‘exchanges and contracts not only bear people and things along in their wake, but also the sacred beings that, to a greater or lesser extent, are associated with them’ (Mauss, p. 20).  In short, Godelier’s approach encourages us to pursue the exploration of ‘cosmic debt’ into areas of ritual to which the term sacrifice has not – or only intermittently – been applied.  The important question of what real differences underlie the conventional terminological distinction of sacrifice and gift exchange is one to which this chapter will return.  First, it remains to demonstrate the applicability of the notion of cosmic indebtedness to ritual exchange in which addressees may not belong exclusively to the realm of gods and spirits.

                Recent ethnography of micro-polities corroborates the impression we get from Mauss’s comments on the fourth obligation of a mythological dimension pervading the world of gift exchange.  There are two crucial aspects of this picture.  First, the parties to these gift exchanges are dominated by ‘masked incarnations’, ‘possessed by the spirit whose name they bear’.  Second, the transactions that implicate these ‘masked incarnations’ simultaneously engage the spheres of sacrifice and gift – since what is given has a religious as well as a social and economic importance.

                On the first point, there are numerous accounts of ceremonies – most obviously those of initiation – in which participants encounter what Erich Schwimmer, an ethnographer of the Orokaiva (PNG), terms the ‘dual identities of men’.[17]  Just as Pharaoh was simultaneously god and man, so, amongst the Orokaiva, ‘the everyday people one sees about the village’ are transformed through the donning of a particular disguise into ‘the beings of primal time’.  Nor is this identification necessarily a temporary one such as one might don or doff with one’s war-paint.  Simon Harrison observes of the Avatip that, as people age, their spirits gradually ‘assimilate or fuse with the ghosts of their ancestors and, in the case of men, with the spirit-beings associated with the male cult’.  Very old people are regarded ‘almost as sacred objects’.[18]  But, where the physical incarnation dies, the spirit lives on.  For – rather as, in Ancient Egypt, each living Pharaoh successively played the filial role of Horus to his dead father’s Osiris, only to become Osiris in his turn – so also among Harrison’s Avatip the same cast of divine simulacra are inherited successively by each generation, so that the spiritual identities ‘transcend the individual men who bear them’ (p. 113). 

                On the second point, Mauss is corroborated by more recent ethnography in the implication of his text that the exchanges that involve such ‘masked incarnations’ acquire a ‘mythological’ dimension that makes them hard to distinguish from sacrifice. This is evident, for example, in the case of forms of compensatory exchange that take place in the context of ongoing relations with wife-givers/receivers and with the kinsmen of murder victims.  So far as the first category is concerned, the ethnographic literature contains numerous instances of societies where the dominant forms of spiritual power within the group are inseparable from the spiritual precedence exercised over wife-takers by their wife-givers.  The transactions associated with such relationships have every claim to be considered sacrificial, if sacrifice is understood in Godelier’s sense of a response to a state of cosmic indebtedness to a source of life – since the living persons of the wife-givers are considered to be that source of life, and exercise the religious power that belongs to it.  In practice, transactions engaging the living can be indistinguishable from the cult of ancestors or spirits.  The duad-nit of Tanebar-Evav (Eastern Indonesia), for example, are a class of beings associated with a wife-giving group, which receives offerings from wife-taker groups, yet confounds our conventional distinction of human and divine.

Indeed, to name the nit the villagers often associate two adjectives mamatan-vavan,

 ‘dead-living’, incorporating in the same category both the dead of the ‘wife-givers’

house and the ‘wife-givers’ themselves.  […] A similar expression, itaten mamatan-

vavan, ‘the dead and living elders’, is used in the same fashion to refer to those who

exercise authority in the village. (Cécile Barraud, p.66)

The case of the neighbouring Tanimbar Islands offers an intriguing instance of how such wife-giver/wife-taker relationships may take on the more permanent aspect of a hierarchy of noble (named) and commoner (unnamed) houses, materialized on the religious level by an altar (tavu).[19]  Yet there are numerous cases both in Eastern Indonesia and Melanesia, where the wife-giving relationship is perceived as a ‘flow of life’, and is expressed in ceremonial giving to the source of life, without the kind of permanent and hierarchical cultic instantiations that McKinnon describes for the the Tanimbar.[20]

                Another context for the kind of compensatory gift exchange associated in indigenous mythological discourses with the response to cosmic indebtedness to social origin is that of compensation for a death.  On this form of sacrificial exchange I shall give further detail below.  Suffice it to say, for now, that a payment made in lieu of a life taken may become the basis of an ongoing relationship of exchange (including, of course, exchange of women).  At the same time, because this compensation is an act of appeasement having spiritual as well as social addressees, it serves, as Steward and Strathern explain, as a sacrificial do ut abeas:

                The whole of the allied group which has lost a member is described as ‘the dead man’

(kui wuö) in relation to those described as el pukl wuö, ‘the root man of the fight’.  A

payment/gift to ‘the dead man’ is thus both a compensation and an appeasement of a

spirit: again, both a gift and a sacrifice. (p. 233)

My hitherto rather summary statement of the case for regarding compensatory exchanges as sacrificial has so far left aside the question of what is meant by source of life, and why, in this respect, such offerings to ‘masked incarnations’ should be considered comparable to Vedic, African or Ancient Egyptian sacrifice.  Indigenous perceptions of the character of these transactions can really only be demonstrated by giving some ethnographic examples.  The following paragraphs will offer two, illustrating ‘sacrificial’ exchanges in relation, respectively, to affinal relations and to compensation for death.

 Daribi (PNG Southern Highlands)

Roy Wagner’s monograph on the Daribi is a relatively early – but seminal – example of the importance of cosmic indebtedness in the kind of anthropological literature to which we have been referring.[21]

                Payments by wife-takers to wife-givers extend over generations; but the cycle can be thought of as commencing with marriage.  This opens a debt on the part of the wife-taking husband (supported by his brothers) to the wife-giving group, of whom the person first and foremost concerned is the wife’s brother, or baze (brother-in-law).  With the arrival of children, payments continue to be made – and to the same man, but now in his capacity of mother’s brother (awa).  While the children are small, the father pays on his children’s behalf; but, when the children have grown up, they (or the boys at least) take on responsibility for their own relationship with the mother’s people.  Payments continue to the mother’s brother, but some of the money passes through him to other members of the wife-giving clan – especially the mother’s brother’s child (hai).

                What is the underlying explanation for these payments?  It is, ultimately, cosmological – and summed up by the indigenous term: page.  The term expresses very much what we mean by source of life: ‘the cause or origin of something by analogy with the base of a plant or tree, both in the sense that this is the point of origin for the plant and in the sense that the base supports and sustains the foliage’ (p. 46).  It is applied most often to the wife-giving group – above all, to the mother’s brother – because that group is regarded as the origin, and consequently, the ‘rightful owner’ of the sister’s child.  But the context in which that dependency relationship is most frequently evoked recalls a second, and more sinister, reference.  For the term page also denotes a cause of sickness, ‘some malign spiritual influence, the root of the matter’ (p. 46), which threatens to steal the victim’s soul.  In practice, these meanings converge, because the relationship of dependency to the mother’s kin is always experienced negatively as the ever present threat – if not the reality – of a spiritual attack from this quarter.  The mother’s brother is thus compared by Wagner to an exuvial sorcerer, ‘living at some distant place, who possesses a permanent and inexhaustible supply of sorcery material’:

The pagebidi can be seen quite literally as the ‘cause’ of a person, both in the sense that he gave his sister in marriage, and in the more basic sense that he exerts a continual influence over his sister’s children and, to put it negatively, is the ‘cause’ of their not dying through his curse.(p.66)

So dominant over Daribi life is this influence of the wife-giver that the word awa (mother’s brother) can be used in place of page to denote the cause of something.

                The chief reason for hostility and spiritual attack on the part of the mother’s-brother’s people is non-fulfilment of one’s obligations to them.  This gives ritual payments to the wife-giver a strongly propitiatory character.  The child owes everything – including himself – to his pagebidi; only the material recognition of this ongoing debt can save him from sickness and death.  How does this resemble sacrifice?  Consider Godelier’s formulation of the relationship between Pharaoh’s subjects and their god/king as a debt ‘which all the counter-gifts of labour […] could not counter-balance, and even less obliterate, were he to demand their life’.  Things are not so different in relation to the Daribi pagebidi.   A mother’s brother, as the source of life for his sister’s son, effectively owns him –  to the extent that he may ‘simply take any of his possessions without so much as asking […] for he may demand whatever he wishes as a substitute for his sister’s child’ (p. 69).  In the words of Mauss, here cited by Wagner:

One gives because one is forced to do so, because the recipient has a sort of proprietary right over everything which belongs to the donor. (Wagner, p.69, citing Mauss, p. 17).

Mount Hagen, Central Highlands, PNG

For a case of compensatory exchange in regard to the murder victim I shall return to Stewart and Strathern’s recent account of the Mount Hagen peoples of PNG.  This speaks of compensation payments, made by members of one clan/tribe to those of another, in the event of a death believed to have been accomplished by sorcery, in order to avert an escalation of retaliatory violence.  These payments are a propitiatory ‘sacrifice’ – a do ut abeas – because they avert malign spiritual influence, emanating from the ancestral spirit of the murder victim.  If not propitiated, the spirit will become ‘attached to the body parts of his fellow clansmen in a re-embodiment’ (p. 233).  The spirit ‘goes at the nose’ of the warriors, and is present ‘at their elbow’ when spears are thrown.  The compensation payment made to the victim’s clan in order to pre-empt such an attack is thought of as addressed to the dead man’s spirit as well as to the living relatives – which is why, according to Strathern, it constitutes a propitiatory sacrifice.  ‘The gift and the sacrifice are in this case one and the same’.

To illustrate this Strathern gives the example of a story told by a tribesman named Ongka.  The account goes as follows (pp. 233-4).  A clansman is suspected of having died through sorcery; his body is entrusted to a guardian; a spirit house is erected for the dead man’s spirit.  Thereupon, the kinsfolk sacrifice a pig to the spirit, and give its head to the guardian to eat.  The purpose of the offering is to seek the dead man’s assistance.  ‘A gift to a spirit’, remarks Strathern, ‘is a sacrifice asking for help in taking revenge’ (p. 234).  If, in due course, the alleged murderer decides to make peace by offering compensation, the kinsfolk once again make sacrifice to the spirit, explaining the situation to it.  Otherwise, they kill the murderer (if they can), and then make sacrifice.  The spirit house is finally burnt.  That is Ongka’s account. The term sacrifice, as employed here, covers the death of a substitute victim (in compensation for the murder victim to whose spirit sacrifice is being made) or the compensation payment made by relatives in lieu of such a death, and the ritual killing of pigs before the dead man’s shrine.  Sacrifice is at once a compensation payment (in blood or material goods) intended to appease the dead man’s spirit, and the means of invoking the dead man’s spiritual support in obtaining such a compensation payment.  The story demonstrates the way in which a certain form of negative reciprocity tends to become sacrificial in a belief system that posits the unity of human and divine persons.

Excursus: Theoretical discussion of the relationship of sacrifice and gift

I have completed the first two stages of the argument, and have outlined two relevant propositions that bring together in relation to sacrifice and reciprocal exchange certain areas of consensus that emerge in the ethnographic literature of anthropology and the history of religions.  But are there any contexts in which this ethnography has impacted on the theoretical discussion of sacrifice and reciprocal exchange among anthropologists and scholars of religion? 

To my knowledge, such discussions are limited.  Yet there are two contexts known to me in which the question of the relationship of sacrifice to reciprocal exchange receives some attention.  The first consists in the third and fourth chapters of Maurice Godelier’s The Enigma of the Gift [1996]; the second comprises recent anthropological discussion around hierarchy, which has implications for sacrifice that challenge Godelier’s understanding of relationship of gift and sacrifice.  Particularly relevant to this study are two recent volumes that bring together the work of French and anglophone anthropology, inspired by the theory of Louis Dumont:  Rio & Olav Smedal [2009], and Stewart and Strathern [2008] (S&S).  None of this work signals its concern with sacrifice to the casual reader.  Godelier’s treatment of the relation of sacrifice and gift constitutes a hypertrophied appendix to a re-assessment of Maussian reciprocity; while Rio and Smedal touch on sacrifice chiefly in relation to a hierarchical reading of ceremonial exchange, with the emphasis very much placed on the validation of Dumont’s model of hierarchy.  However, both discussions deal incidentally with sacrifice from the perspective of exchange, even if sacrifice is not the primary concern.

Godelier on sacrifice and exchange

As suggested by its title, The Enigma of the Gift returns to the issue of Maussian reciprocity – but with the benefit of the twenty-five years of Melanesian ethnography since the classic treatments of Sahlins and Strathern (Kinship).  Godelier’s study is critical of Structuralism, yet not entirely dismissive of it.  His position can perhaps best be described as an attempt to salvage a Structuralist understanding of Maussian reciprocity by supplementing it with a fresh emphasis on the sacred.  On the one hand, Godelier is concerned to correct an over-emphasis in earlier comparative anthropological studies on the ceremonial exchange of New Guinea Highlands societies (‘big man’ societies) as against the ritually-based social systems prevailing among the Highland fringe societies where he conducted his own ethnographic work (‘great man’ societies).  This predisposes him to favour a re-evaluation of the role of religion and ritual in the Melanesian context.[22]  An equally important influence, however, is the work of Annette Weiner, based on her fieldwork among Malinowski’s Trobriand islanders of Kiriwina, which contextualizes reciprocity in relation to the existence of objects which are ‘kept’ and not given.[23]  Godelier enthusiastically takes up the idea that the sacred status of certain objects is reflected in the fact that they stay where they are, rather than, like other objects, circulating through gift exchange, and that these supremely valuable and stationary objects function as a collateral for the objects in exchange – rather as, in the West, the accumulation of bullion in bank vaults could be said to guarantee the value of the money supply.  The shared interest of Weiner and Godelier in sacred objects leads them both to push their enquiries beyond the sphere of Melanesian societies, where the possibilities of accumulation are restricted both by the limited development of hierarchy and the perishability of value objects such as yams and leaf bundles, to far more strongly hierarchical societies where sacred objects abound, such as those of Hawaii and Ancient Egypt.

                However, Godelier develops Weiner’s concept of the sacred in a fresh direction when, in his final two chapters, we find the sacred epitomized in Godelier’s understanding of sacrifice as the sacred transaction par excellence.  Whereas Weiner expresses the relation of profane and sacred through an opposition between mobility and immobility, Godelier does so through an opposition between two different kinds of movement.  The to-and-fro mobility of gift exchange is opposed to the unilateral movement of the sacrificial transaction.  This understanding of the sacred may owe something to Malamoud, whose understanding of the sacrifice as a response to the state of indebtedness to source of life it evidently shares.  For Godelier, the absolute indebtedness of the sacrificer to the source of life requires the sacrificial transaction to take on a unilateral character:

Contrary to what many think and to what I myself have written, there is something in this relationship between a god-king and his subjects which goes beyond the logic of exchange. For in response to the gifts made by the great gods, the powers of the invisible world – and Afek (of the Telefolmin) was one such power – there can be no true counter-gift. Nothing equivalent can be given and, of course, no better counter-gift; there can be no potlatch because the great gods are masters of every kind of wealth. (p. 193)

Such unilateralism is key to Godelier’s understanding of sacrifice.  Sacrifice does not, and cannot, in reality, reciprocate the gift of life.  It follows that what appears to be a ‘counter-gift’ is hardly a counter-gift at all – but merely a token acknowledging the existence of the relationship.  Rather, both the gift of life and the sacrificial gift persist without reciprocal relation with each other in a sacred sphere somehow outside relationships and sociality.  Thus sacrifice is not, properly speaking, reciprocity at all, but a kind of a-reciprocity betokening an absolute degree of divine superiority with regard to the human dependent.  For Godelier, it is ultimately this unilaterality that defines the essence of the sacrificial transaction – and not the supernatural character of the addressee.  As we indicated earlier, Godelier shares the perception of other anthropologists that the sacrificial addressee may in fact be a human individual/group: indeed, it is just this potential for the identification of human and divine to which Godelier attributes hierarchical status:

The castes and classes of antiquity could not have emerged had not these groups and these men appeared to have advanced further than other men into the space which from the outset separates man from the gods.  But perhaps setting oneself apart from the rest of humanity, which then becomes a mass of ‘common men’, approaching the gods and winning their ear are but two aspects of the process by which societies are divided and rebuilt upon real inequalities which it then becomes necessary to repress. (p. 194)

 Godelier thus redefines sacrifice by characterizing it in opposition to the gift of exchange.  Sacrifice and reciprocity constitute alternate modalities of the gift, corresponding to the identification or non-identification of the addressee to the sacrificer’s source of life: where the addressee is identified with that power, the gift is unilateral and sacrificial; elsewhere, it is reciprocal and just an ordinary gift.  Not only does Godelier use this opposition to typologize particular transactions, he employs it to typologize whole belief systems in terms of their characteristic transaction modality.  A series of societies – the Telefolmin of central New Guinea, the Meto of south-west Timor, and finally Pharaonic Egypt – are represented as exhibiting incremental degrees of domination on the part of the sacred with its characteristically sacrificial and hierarchical transactions (pp. 179-94).

Strathern and Rio on sacrifice and exchange

Godelier’s definition of generic notions of sacrifice and gift is very much part and parcel of a more general attempt to conceptualize human sociality.  This conceptualization receives an interesting critique in the work of the anthropologist Knut Rio, who engages with it in the course of developing an alternative conceptualization based on a version of Louis Dumont’s hierarchy against the background of recent work by both anglophone and Dumontian anthropologists.  Rio also broaches the theme of sacrifice, quite independently of his engagement with Godelier (yet in a manner consistent with the views he expresses in that connection), in a paper on ritual among the North Ambrym people who were the subject of his fieldwork (Denying the Gift, pp. 447-490).  

As regards Rio’s expressed views on sacrifice itself, they are close to those we find developed by S&S.  Both studies arise specifically from an engagement with Dumontian theorists of hierarchy such as de Coppet, Itéanu and Tcherkézoff, who apply the insights of Dumont in an Oceanian context.  The result is very much a restoration of sacrifice to the sphere of reciprocal exchange, as a sub-category of the latter – though one clearly set off against other sub-categories.  Not even the possibility of the merging of the two categories of sacrifice and reciprocity seems definitively excluded.  This suggests a move at odds with Godelier’s theory, which assigns sacrifice and gift exchange, as unilateral and reciprocal operations, to distinct and opposed spheres of human behaviour. 

The differences between Rio/S&S and Godelier on the issue of the relation of gift and sacrifice are of a piece with their divergent conceptualizations of sociality. Rio’s taking to task of Godelier is indicative of the difficulties posed for Godelier’s theory by an important, if not dominant, strand of contemporary anthropological thinking around sociality and transactions.

‘Thirdness’ and the critique of Godelier

Rio’s thesis on sociality is summed up in his anthropological extension of Charles Peirce’s notion of ‘thirdness’.  He uses the term to suggest a potential origin for human sociality in indigenous reifications that parallel (though by no means always replicate) the reifications of Western anthropological discourse (Power, pp. 28-31).  Thirdness is a totalizing perspective that manifests itself within native ritual transactions themselves, somehow transcending the individual perspectives of the parties engaged in these transactions.  It is a perspective from which the social meanings of a transaction become visible.  It is often implied in the presence of a ‘third party’, e.g. a crowd that watches without participation, or a leader capable of understanding.  Rio claims that the subjects of his study recognize the power of these third parties to constitute the social world by ‘always giving (them) credit […] for “seeing” the real constitution of things’ (p. 27). 

Thirdness gives Rio a standpoint from which to critique conceptualizations of society based on traditional ‘dyadic’ understandings of Maussian reciprocity – i.e. reciprocity understood as implicating just a donor and recipient.   According to Rio, such outdated paradigms, which he associates with Radcliffe-Brown and British anthropology, flatten society to ‘an observable network of relations “on the ground”, fitting into the observable scheme of social pragmatism, and leaving aside aspects of religion and morality as secondary phenomena’ (pp.19-31).

The result of this turn in Britain has been a whole range of studies that were directed at describing marriage, kinship and ceremony as merely being about reciprocity and balance between groups and the processual maintainance of stability in dyadic forms.(p. 21)

The rejection of theories that relegate religion and morality to secondary phenomena echoes Strathern’s recent criticism of the assumption that exchange practices have a ‘secular rationale’.  Against such approaches, Rio aligns himself with trends in the recent anthropological literature, and their tendency to shift the focus from reciprocity in a purely relational sense to notions of ‘reproduction’, ‘circulation’ and ‘transformation’.[24]  At the same time, Rio’s thirdness is an attempt at theoretical reconstruction in the space opened by recent methodological demolitions.  Concerned, above all, to resurrect a suitably revamped notion of ‘society’, he distances himself from the extreme anti-abstractionism of ‘the followers of (Marilyn) Strathern’, which ‘lead us into a transactionalist abyss where we fail to see sociality beyond the transactions of persons’ (p.27).

Godelier’s Enigma enters the picture with that crux of the reciprocity debate – the much debated text of informant Ranaipiri on the Maori hau (‘spirit’) which constitutes the ethnographic point of departure for Mauss’s notion of the spirit of the gift.  For Rio, as for Andrew Strathern, the involvement of three parties, an obscuring feature for Mauss, is indicative of the religious, and probably sacrificial, aspect of the transaction Ranaipiri describes.  Sahlins himself, following Firth, recognises the triadic nature of the relationship, but offers a characteristically materialistic explanation, by translating hau as ‘profit’ (Enigma, p. 53).  The earlier chapters of Enigma focus on the same text, taking Mauss’ side against Firth and Sahlins, and arguing that the transaction is indeed rightly interpreted as dyadic, and constitutes a helpful paradigm for Maussian reciprocity (p. 54).  From Rio’s point of view, this typifies Godelier as a proponent of the outdated dyadic understanding of traditional reciprocity theory.  It is an understanding that, as Rio sees it, seriously distorts our view of socially reproductive transactions, which are more appropriately explored in religious and symbolic terms (Power, pp. 22-3).

                Just how fair is Rio’s criticism of Godelier?  The issue is a complex one.  It is probably the case that Godelier has a strong conviction of the reality of social entities, which Rio, along with many contemporary anthropologists would regard as ‘essentializing’.  From Godelier’s perspective, Mauss’s notion of the ‘spirit of the gift’ falls into the trap of confusing these social realities with indigenous mystifications.  Godelier’s own explanation of the obligation to return the gift is contained in the inalienable character of the gift – which, because it is never properly given away, but bears the donor with it, is able to exercise a continued influence on the donor.  Such an explanation, he claims, is based, not on indigenous mystification, but on a principle of law (i.e. the inalienability of the gift) (pp. 42-9).  Naturally, this appears secularizing to Rio.  Other passages of Godelier’s study, however, strongly suggest the imbrication of the legal principle of inalienability with spiritual realities (at least for the indigenous participants in exchange):

We have also observed that in all these societies inalienability is based on or legitimized by the belief that there is present in the object a power, a spirit, a spiritual reality that binds it to the giver, and which accompanies the object wherever it goes.  It seems to me that this presence is nothing other than the form taken by the inalienability of things in a world where men believe that visible realities are inhabited and controlled by invisible forces, beings who are greater than humans but who resemble them.(p.100)

This is scarcely secularizing.  At the same time, the passage certainly attests an extreme wariness of indigenous mystification.  Godelier’s unwillingness even to consider the implications of Firth’s interpretation of the Maori taonga as genuinely sacrificial suggests a weakness in his argument. The meaning of the Ranaipiri text will no doubt continue to defy all attempts at a definitive interpretation.  But Firth’s interpretation is at the least a plausible one.  Godelier’s refusal to take it seriously is of a piece with his determination to formulate a theory of reciprocal exchange that largely excludes the sacred, and, consequently, with his formulation of the sacred as somehow beyond the sphere of reciprocal exchange.  

If we accept Rio’s critique of dyadic conceptualizations of sociality, this poses a considerable problem for Godelier’s understanding of the sacrifice.  It will be remembered that Godelier defines sacrifice in opposition to reciprocity as a unilateral transaction with the ‘great powers’ – and a transaction which therefore lies beyond the bounds of reciprocity:

For in response to the gifts made by the great gods, the powers of the invisible world – there can be no true counter-gift. (p.194)

Now if the category of the reciprocal transaction is itself constituted, as Rio claims, ‘by leaving aside aspects of religion and morality as secondary phenomena’ (Power, p.31), then the distinction that Godelier goes on to draw in chapter 3 of Enigma between the sacred and the reciprocal, sacrifice and exchange, is already presupposed in the very category of reciprocity and exchange, as developed earlier in the book.  If reciprocal exchange, as understood by Godelier, is a category created by the evacuation of the sacred, what credence can be attached to a notion of the sacred as a category of transaction that exceeds reciprocal exchange?  Having presupposed reciprocity as a category exclusive of the sacred, Godelier proceeds to define the sacred in terms of what reciprocity excludes.  Such an argument is self-evidently circular.  It is plausible only because of deeply ingrained presuppositions around the secular nature of reciprocal exchange, which it has taken much ethnography and anthropological argument to begin to dislodge.

Point 3:  The sacrificial gift is reciprocal

 

I come now to the third and final stage of this argument.  To recapitulate.  I have demonstrated the recent importance of the idea that socio-symbolic acts are a response to a state of indebtedness to the source of life, first, in context of ethnographically grounded theories of sacrifice, second, in the context of socio-symbolic acts in micro-polities which have not traditionally been labelled sacrifice, but are certainly a response to a state of indebtedness to the source of life, and have, on such grounds, sometimes been described as sacrificial in recent ethnography.  I have also discussed two broad theoretical positions regarding the relation of gift exchange and sacrifice.  Godelier understands the relation as one of opposition and complementarity; Rio and S&S, more in line with contemporary ethnographic accounts of micro-polities, label the transaction sacrificial insofar as it has a religious – or, as Mauss would say, ‘mythological’ – dimension.  The issue here is essentially the following: whether the transactions conventionally considered sacrificial (and recognized to be so by Godelier) exist in a non-relational sphere beyond reciprocity, as Godelier argues, or whether they constitute a form of reciprocity, as Rio and S&S would imply. The recent ethnography of gift exchange in micro-polities cited above appears already to weigh against Godelier’s position in that it suggests the applicability of the notion of a response to cosmic indebtedness to a source of life (which Godelier wants to identify with sacrifice) to a range of socio-symbolic acts that Godelier would classify as gift exchange.  The real test, however, lies in the nature of those transactions that have traditionally been labelled sacrificial.  Are they unilateral transactions outside the realm of relationality and exchange, or are they properly reciprocal in some sense?  The Melanesian ethnography attests transactions which are conventionally labelled exchange, but have something sacrificial about them.  Might not unambiguously sacrificial transactions turn out to share the reciprocal and exchangeist character of the transactions of Melanesian micro-polities? 

                Of course, to argue contra Godelier that sacrifice is reciprocal begs the question whether it is reciprocal in the same sense as, say, the transactions of the Mount Hagen moka.   Perhaps, the sacrificial transactions that Godelier describes – in which the upward movement, not only of offerings to the gods, but of the tribute of countless peasants, arises in response to a state of indebtedness entailed by the ongoing downward flow of life from god to man – are reciprocal, but in a special sense.

If we turn for an answer to the anthropological sources that inform Godelier’s position on gift exchange – and those of Rio and S&S – we discover an absence of strongly centralized and hierarchical states.  Indeed, to bring sacrifice into his transactional typology at all, Godelier leaves the familiar terrain of (relatively) contemporary PNG, and enters the very different worlds of the Pharaonic state or Vedic and Christian scripture.  The reciprocity of Melanesian ethnography (which has dominated contemporary gift studies) is the kind exemplified by the pagebidi payments of Wagner’s Daribi and the moka transactions of Strathern’s Mount Hageners.  The gift of life is perceived above all as a threat to be warded off – or ‘bought off’ (Wagner, pp. 84-5) – by the recipient through a sacrificial counter-gift.  The ability to make an appropriate return is often a precondition for the maintenance of the recipient’s social independence vis-à-vis the donor.  Failure can result in sorcery attack, loss of status or prestige, loss of rights over a wife or children, even enslavement to the donor.  The spiritual corollary of this sort of reciprocity is a strongly negative perception of the supernatural as the domain of sorcery and witchcraft, with socio-symbolic actions commonly taking the form of a do ut abeas seeking to maintain the necessary distance required to secure the recipient’s own identity vis-à-vis the source of life. 

The strength of this association of reciprocity and obviation in the Melanesian cultural area is such that its ethnographers can sometimes have difficulty imagining reciprocity in any other form.  Rio’s paper ‘Denying the Gift’ is typical.  Here all everyday transactions, including sacrifice, are claimed to be reciprocal on the grounds that they are inescapably dependent on a prior denial of the gift of life.  Rio understands the gift of life as a Derridean absolute of non-reciprocity which every human transaction must distance on pain of being rendered void.  What is most striking about this is Rio’s failure even to acknowledge, let alone discuss, the possibility that reciprocity might not be exclusively obviatory, but that there might exist forms of reciprocation of which the purpose might be other than to ward off the gift to which they respond.  Yet, this assumption has to be seen in the light of its ethnographic context.  To overcome the particular limitations of Rio’s argument here requires us to broaden the ethnographic basis of comparative evaluation.

                My own ethnographic material, therefore, derives from a wider range of cultural contexts.  It aims to demonstrate, contra Godelier, that the sacrifice which is a response to a state of indebtedness towards the source of life does not exist in a unilateralist sphere beyond the domain of reciprocity, but is properly reciprocal.

                Thus far in this study my own role has been the modest one of garnering the evidence of an existing scholarly consensus on the question at issue.  In the remainder of this chapter I shall be taking a position: chiefly in arguing, contra Godelier, against a unilateralist understanding of sacrifice; but also against the explicit view of Rio (‘Denying the Gift’), and the implicit understanding of reciprocity in the work of many Melanesianists to which Rio gives voice, that reciprocity is necessarily obviatory.   I may seem to be taking a more active role in the anthropological discussion than hitherto.  However, the non-obviatory understanding of reciprocity proposed below is intended not so much as a contribution to a theoretical debate (in which, as a non-anthropologist, I would feel ill-qualified to participate) than an attempt at representing the theoretical implications of a range of well-known ethnography that has hitherto been inadequately taken into account.  In deference to the place of Godelier in this discussion, I will return, in the last and longest case studies below, to his own example of Pharaonic Egypt in order to demonstrate the cogency of a concept of sacrifice as reciprocal in the relation to the very material which he uses to support his own notion of sacrifice as unilateral.

Non-obviatory reciprocity         

So what kind of reciprocity is non-obviatory?  The material below offers instances of a counter-gift, or return gift, in response to a state of cosmic indebtedness, in which the transaction serves, not to deny, but to acknowledge the gift of life, and to affirm the condition of inferiority that it implies for the recipient by soliciting the continuance of transactions that impose that condition.  It suggests a mode of relationship which it would seem reasonable – without any particular deference to the theories of Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus –[25]  to term ‘hierarchical’.  Certainly, relationships of this kind are not obviatory. 

For all the apparent bias of the material cited hitherto towards obviation, instances of evidently non-obviatory forms of gift exchange are not far to seek even in the ethnographic literature of Melanesia and Eastern Indonesia.  The hierarchical linking of wife-giver and wife-taker houses in many Indonesian cultures, for example, appears to solicit a nurturing relationship rather than averting a destructive one – albeit a relationship that enforces the wife-taker’s condition of dependence.  Rio’s argument (‘Denying the Gift’) implies, as we have seen, that identity loss constitutes the only alternative to obviation.  Yet, among McKinnon’s Tanimbur, a state of (variably temporary or permanent) dependence and inferiority in relation to the exchange partner is normal, and very far from constituting the kind of total identity-loss that ensues – among these very same cultures – where dependence is compounded by default on one’s wife-taker obligations.  Normal wife-taker status implies a ‘younger brother’ relationship to the wife-giver house (pp. 104-6); default on obligations entails fusion with the wife-giver house, and a form of slavery (pp. 268-73). The normal wife-taker status thus suggests an intermediate status between dominance and fusion – a state of affairs which implies a more complex paradigm than Rio’s alternative of obviation and identity loss.

When the relational terminology of studies of less obviatory modes of exchange is

examined, it becomes evident that the concept of encompassment frequently replaces that

of obviation in the anthropologist’s discourse around exchange relationships.  In the work of Dumontians like Itéanu, use of the term presupposes the theoretical perspective of Dumontian theory.[26]  According to Dumont, encompassment is the basic structure of the hierarchical relation (Dumont, pp. 239-46).  The essence of such a relation is, at one level, to oppose the identities of two parties to a relation, and, at another, hierarchically superior, level, to subsume the identity of one party within that of the other.  Dumont himself illustrates this with the instance of the relation of man and woman, which are opposed categories at one level, yet unified on the higher level at which man, as the superior term, encompasses woman, as the designation of the category including both man and woman.  Whatever the plausibility of this as a theory of hierarchy, the relationships to which it applies appear to be reciprocal without being obviatory.  The existence of such relationships seem additionally to be attested by the recurrence of the language of encompassment even in ethnographies not obviously influenced by the theory of Homo Hierarchicus, such as those of Wager,[27] McKinnon (pp. 163-5) or Marilyn Strathern (e.g. pp. 80, 109),[28] where a similar kind of relationality is indicated, though its hierarchical implications may not be foregrounded, as they are by Dumont himself in his analysis of Indian caste. 

In the following pages I shall consider some cases of gift transactions within hierarchical systems that, for all their evident reciprocity, do not conform to Rio’s type of the obviatory transaction, as described in the case of the Daribi, Mt. Hagen, and such cases.  They are all evidently sacrificial transactions that seem closer in nature to the transactions that Godelier describes as unilateral than to those he deals with in earlier chapters of The Enigma under the rubric of gift exchange.  The questions I pose in these ethnographic descriptions will be the following: first, whether the sacrificial relations described conform to Godelier’s model of unilateralism or to a reciprocal model; and, if to a reciprocal model, then, second, in what respects these sacrificial reciprocal relations differ from the reciprocal relations of obviation described above.

Case studies of sacrifice

Case 1: the Merina kingdom of Madagascar

Maurice Bloch’s account of symbolic transactions of a hierarchical kind centres on rituals performed in the 18^th-19^th century kingdom of Imerina in Madagascar around the annual New Year ritual of the royal bath.[29]  Bloch’s own primary focus is not, here or elsewhere, on gift and exchange, but on the role of ritual and its relation to political power.  The symbolism of the rituals is complex and will not be discussed here.  What interests this study is that they include certain transactions described by Bloch as ‘unequally reciprocated’ (p. 278) that involve relationships between juniors and seniors.  In the case of the New Year ritual they include (ethnographic present) two obligatory payments to the king: the vidy aina (‘cost of life’), and the jaka (‘new year present’).  The significance of these payments emerges in what Bloch says about the widespread tradition of ritual gift-giving between seniors and juniors which the New Year rituals exemplify.(Ritual, History and Power, (RHP), p. 278)  The New Year itself is marked by a bathing ritual undergone first by the king himself, and then by heads of households throughout the realm.  In the course of the bathing ritual water from the bath is sprinkled in blessing over hierarchical inferiors.  The subsequent festivities include sacrifice and a ritual meal, taken by the king, followed by his subjects.  The next day cattle are sacrificed and distributed by the king and by seniors to juniors (RR, pp. 283, 293). 

                Though Bloch’s emphasis is not on transactions, he insists on approaching the meaning of rituals from the perspective of their place in the entire sequence of New Year rites – and, indeed, of their place within the entirety of Merina ritual.  In the context of our own discussion of the relation of reciprocity and sacrifice, this challenges us to examine the potential relation between the gifts that flow upwards from junior to senior (vidy aina and jaka), and those, which, at a later stage, pass downwards from senior to junior (blessing through aspersion, and distribution of cattle).  Here, an important light is cast by a parallel, on which Bloch himself lays considerable stress, between the New Year rites summarily described above and the simple but apparently ubiquitous institution of tsodrano which he invokes to explain those rites(p. 284). The tsodrano is performed by seniors for the benefit of their juniors as a blessing for fertility and success, and apparently survives in Madagascar to this day.  Its relevance for us (and for Bloch) is that it encapsulates in a routine and everyday form the essence of hasina, or the gift, as exemplified on a grander scale at the New Year festival and other ritual contexts.  In the classic form of tsodrano (RHP, p. 68), a senior – such as the senior member of an ordinary household – positions his juniors in front of him.  Placing a coin they have offered him in a saucer of water, he raises the saucer to his lips and blows across the surface of the water, so as to sprinkle his juniors in an act of blessing.  He subsequently pockets the coin.  Bloch notes that the coin used in the tsodrano is the sort of coin customarily used to make the New Year gift (RHP, p. 68).  The implication of this parallelism is that the second and downward phase of New Year giving resembles the sprinkling of juniors in the tsodrano in being a form of blessing that proceeds from senior to junior, and its association with hasina – an upward flow of material resources in the opposite direction – is thereby explained.  Most importantly, however, the parallelism allows us to view the New Year ritual, taken as a whole, on the model of the tsodrano, as exhibiting a kind of reciprocity.  Evidently, the rites are ‘unequally symmetrical’ in that what moves downward is evidently incommensurable with what goes up; at the same time, this form of reciprocity does not appear to square with the kind of unilateralism that Godelier attributes to the relations of humanity to the ‘great gods’. 

There are reasons why it might have been expected to – since, on Godelier’s understanding of sacrifice, the rites of the Merina are certainly sacrificial. Both in the tsodrano and in the New Year ritual, power to bless inhering in the senior is clearly seen as originating with the ancestors (RR, pp. 284-5), and through the rite a sense of indebtedness to origin is evoked, though only in the latter is there any direct association with blood sacrifice.  In the case of the New Year ritual, however, it is possible to be quite specific about this origin.  This is evident from the symbolism of water among the Merina (RR, p. 280). Streams and lakes are associated with spirit creatures called Vazimbas, possessed of a kind of wild uncontrolled power and vitality.  As the original owners of the land, subjugated by the present rulers of Imerina, they are still considered a source of spiritual blessing presiding over the origins of the current socio-religious order.  This is why it is from their streams and lakes the water for the royal bath is taken.  Where the Vazimbas themselves are concerned (as in the New Year rites), the religious and cosmic dimension of the gift is apparent; yet, on the mundane level of the tsodrano, the symbolism of the water as the material vehicle of blessing suggests what the blessing has to do with the flow of life from the gods – and what the credit pertaining to the social superiority of the elder has do with a spiritual superiority associated with the spirit world.  Gift and sacrifice become, for all intents and purposes, inseparable.

So what exactly is the significance of these relations for our understanding of sacrificial relations?  And how would they fit into Godelier’s typology?  Let us begin by setting out the significant features of the relationship of the superior:inferior and divine:human relationship as characterized in the material we have cited.

                First, the content of the flow in one direction is qualitatively different from that of the opposed flow.  As against the materiality of the flow marking the respect due to the gods and those closer to the gods, the benefits conferred in exchange consist in the assurance of a spiritual capital deriving from a relationship with the source of life – something which is never, at the moment of invocation, ‘cash in hand’.  Second, the direction of these opposed flows cannot be reversed: the upward flow involves one kind of content, the downward flow quite another.  Third, the effect of this asymmetry is such as to manifest the ontological priority of the source of life, characterizing the upward flow as a ‘counter-gift’ which, as Godelier points out, acknowledges the debt, without ever fully repaying it.  Something of the character of this evidently non-obviatory kind of reciprocity is expressed in the indigenous concept of hasina itself as described in some detail by Bloch (RHP, pp. 64-8).  Bloch is very clear that the term hasina, or gift, has two meanings which he refers to as ‘Hasina Mark I’ and ‘Hasina Mark II’ (p. 68). Hasina I designates the state of ‘innate religious superiority’ that belongs to the senior and ultimately derives from the ancestors; Hasina II designates the action of ‘rendering homage’ by the junior to the senior.  Equally, the use of the same term to designate both state and action presupposes the relation which they bear to each other.  Because Hasina I is a state that implies the power to confer blessing on juniors, it can also be described as downward flow balancing the upward flow of Hasina II, when due allowance is made for the difference in the content of what flows:

Hasina mark II is thus doubly the opposite of hasina mark I: while the latter is natural, the former is supernatural; while the latter flows downwards, the former flows upwards.  […] In the light of the former, hasina is an essence which flows in the form of fertility from the superior to the inferiors; in the light of the second, hasina is gifts going the other way. (p. 68)

                How should this kind of relationship be described so as to distinguish it from the kind of obviatory relationship discussed earlier?  The relationship applied in hasina is certainly reciprocal in a sense.  The problem is that the term ‘reciprocity’ is often taken to imply the notion of equivalence between the parties (as with obviation).  Equivalence implies that given parties X and Y occupy positions that are potentially interchangeable with each other, such that the relationship X->Y and the relationship Y->X are convertible with each other.  A corollary is that X and Y are themselves non-identical (i.e. distinct persons) – or there would be no relationship. This is the kind of reciprocity described in the familiar instance of moka exchange.  An indefinitely extendible series of exchanges are undertaken between X and Y, in the course of which the parties alternate in the roles of donor and recipient.  Prestige accrues to the donor, but over time – and through alternating dys-symmetries an overall parity of status tends to emerge.

                Such a notion of reciprocity seems as remote as could possibly be from the ‘reciprocity’ exemplified by the case of the New Year gifts of Imerina.  Most obviously, the positions of the two parties in any given exchange are not interchangeable with each other (one is senior; the other junior), and the relationship J->S is certainly not convertible with the relationship S->J, as is evident from the content of the gift, which is never the same in both cases (money in one case; spiritual blessing in the other).  Second, the two parties are not necessarily posited as distinct persons, since S presents for the benefit of J an instantiation of his own (i.e. J’s) identity (M. Strathern, p. 161).  How, then, should this mode of exchange be described, so as to distinguish it from the mode of exchange exemplified by the moka of Mount Hagen?  The problem with asymmetry as a term is that it falls short of the sheer incommensurability of the two sides of the exchange – the material and the spiritual (RHP, p. 67).  Seen from the economic and material level, the sacrificial transaction suggests a tributary imposition; whereas the reciprocal gift exchanges described in the earlier chapters of Godelier’s book, however lacking in ‘economic rationality’, do at least bring a material quid pro quo.  There is something here that, in the words of Godelier, ‘goes beyond the logic of exchange’ (p. 193).  ‘For in response to the gifts made by the great gods, the powers of the invisible world […] there can be no true counter-gift’.  To describe a transaction such as hasina as unilateral, on the other hand, hardly seems more satisfactory – since it is evident that the sacrificial gift here takes its place in the context of a kind of exchange – albeit one that ‘goes beyond the logic of exchange’.  Hasina can only be accounted unilateral to the extent that the perspective we choose to adopt remains confined to an economic and material level.

How then are we to reconcile the two-sidedness of exchange with Godelier’s perception that what is ‘returned’ is ‘no true counter-gift’?  There is a flow from J->S and a flow from S->J.  But, in contra-distinction to the kind of relationships often labelled reciprocal, the flow in one direction does not reverse the flow in the other; rather the flows in either direction seem to represent complementary manifestations of a single non-reversible directionality – a circulation like the flow of cations and anions in an electrolyzed solution.  Such a relationship could reasonably be described as asymmetrical.  However, the term unidirectional seems more apt, and is the term that I shall henceforth employ to refer to this kind of transaction.  It recalls a dimension of the sacrificial gift that Godelier wishes to evoke in describing it as unilateral: namely, the sheer incommensurability of what is given and what is received.  At the same time, it does not lose sight of the circularity of gift exchange so widely evoked by contemporary ethnographers, to which, in deference to the Maussian tradition, one is tempted to apply the term reciprocity. 

It lies beyond the scope of this study to set out a complete typology of reciprocal relations; but the term unidirectional designates a form of reciprocity that is unquestionably non-obviatory in character, and is left out of account by theories that equate reciprocity with obviation.  The return-gift in the Imerina context does not serve – as Rio claims that it does among the Ambrym of Vanuatu – to ward off, still less to deny, the prior gift of life that passes from god to man, and, among men, from the more godlike to the less (Denying the Gift, pp. 463-4).  Actually, it serves to acknowledge that prior gift, and to affirm the condition of inferiority that it implies for the recipient by soliciting the continuation of the unidirectional circulation of transactions which imposes that condition.  What this implies, at the level of the relationship of donor and recipient, is a structure of hierarchical encompassment of the kind described in the previous section.  In many contexts, such hierarchical encompassment on the symbolic level seems to go along with strongly hierarchical political structures – as it does in Imerina and in the other societies we will be considering in this section. 

                A final parenthetical comment is in order at the close of a phase of my argument which owes so much to Bloch.  In view of that debt, and in deference to Bloch himself, it is important to point out – lest the reader be puzzled by what they may themselves remember of his most influential study – that, when that anthropologist later turns to the theme of sacrifice, he does not follow the route that the above paragraphs and his own earlier discussion of the gfit would seem to have mapped out for him.  He leaves behind the earlier analysis of gift that forms the basis of the above account of sacrifice/gift as unidirectional reciprocity, and develops a theory of ‘rebounding violence’ that resembles more traditional theories such as those of Girard or Jay. This theory has become integral to the work of Davies, who adapts it to a Christian theological context as ‘rebounding vitality’.[30]  The place of violence in sacrificial rituals will be returned to in the final chapter of this study.

Case 2: the Tikopia and wider Polynesia

Socio-symbolic transactions in the Polynesian cultural area have a patently hierarchical character which distinguishes them from the obviatory transactions discussed earlier, and gives them a closer resemblance to the unidirectional transactions of Bloch’s Imerina.  The patently hierarchical quality of Polynesian socio-political relations has frequently been remarked upon, as has been the contrast this cultural region presents in this regard with the less hierarchically developed structures of Melanesia.  For these reasons, the ethnography of Polynesia might seem the obvious first place to go for instances of relational structures that contrast with the obviatory structures of the New Guinea Highlands.  Unfortunately, as in many other areas where hierarchical institutions once held sway, Christianization and colonization had largely reduced them to a ritual shell devoid of political substance, well before the arrival of modern anthropology.  This ritual shell has been the subject of recent studies by Toren and Tcherkézoff;[31] however, accounts of full-blooded political and religious institutions depend on the works of scholarly reconstruction such as that of Valeri.[32]  (Bloch’s account of the Imerina is, of course, also an example of this kind of reconstruction).  This explains the enormous interest of an exception to the apparent failure of Polynesian political institutions to survive into the age of social anthropology – the small island society of Tikopia (1,200 individuals) – and of its documentation by the ethnographer, Raymond Firth.                                                                                      

So what kind of transactional exchanges do we find in Tikopia, and how do they conform to a unidirectional pattern?

               Most of the collaborative social and economic activity, beyond that of subsistence, which unites the four clans and the constituent lineages of the Tikopia under the leadership of their respective chiefs (the four ariki) has to do with the long annual ritual sequence ‘the work of the gods’.  Firth is more inclined than most anthropologists would be nowadays to view this apparently religious activity as serving specifically political and economic ends; yet, for all that, an impression emerges of the absolute inseparability of collective activity from religion, and of political from religious status.  The chiefly role is centred upon the management by the chiefs of rituals directed to the welfare of the community as a whole.  The material resources to which the chief can lay claim for this common objective are guaranteed ultimately by his power to requisition those resources (e.g. coconuts, bananas, breadfruit etc.) by rendering them tapu (i.e. taboo), thus unavailable for profane use.[33]  The seeds of much of the disharmony and incipient social stress described in some detail by Firth have to do with the use and abuse of tapu (Firth, pp. 377-85): there are cases reported of both the interested transgression by commoners of the chiefly interdict, and, conversely, of the apparently interested exploitation of tapu for the purposes of swelling chiefly wealth (p. 383).  At all events, the consecration of resources for the collective enterprise appears to be the principal means by which a flow of wealth is directed upwards through the chiefs to the clan gods.  The sacrificial form of these transactions is reflected in the nature of the rituals themselves.  These tend to climax in cava rituals, the sacrificial symbolism of which has been explored by a number of ethnographers where they occur in other Polynesian settings.[34]  Given the stated objective of the rituals, there can be little doubt that the reciprocating downward arm of the exchange is constituted by the sought-after blessing of the gods, who are the ultimate owners of the land, and hence the source of fertility and prosperity.  The nature of the blessing is evidenced by the association of each of the clans, and their chiefs, with a particular staple – banana, breadfruit etc. – on which the common prosperity depends.

              In serving as the priestly channel whereby the blessing of the gods descends to human beings, the chiefs are themselves the effective source of blessing.  This is an important pattern that we shall see replicated across the entire range of ritual activity having a unidirectional character.  The human intermediary of the sacred comes – at least in the eyes of the beneficiary – to share in the sacredness of that which he mediates: in others words, the action of sacrificial beneficence activates a paradigm that automatically exalts the spiritual status of the donor above that of the recipient. This is self-evident in the Polynesian case, since the chief himself has a tapu status that manifests the sacred essence that the chief shares with the gods themselves.  Indeed, like Godelier’s Pharaoh, the chief is already one of their number.

              In virtue of this socio-religious superiority the chief exercises a titular ownership over the resources of the clan.  His status nevertheless renders the chief a wealthy individual on his own account.  Just as the gods receive their tribute in the course of sacrificial cult, the tapu chief is himself the recipient of gifts on numerous occasions,[35] even if the core of his wealth consists in resources on which he draws for the communal benefit such as orchards and canoes.  Among the many occasions when gifts are offered to chiefs, the most interesting for our purposes are the gifts termed ‘the foremost food’ (muaki kai) (Polynesian Economy, p. 213).  These take the form of large baskets of food (porpora), which Firth describes as equivalent to the first fruits of an enterprise or a season’s crop.  The term ‘foremost food’ refers, according to Firth, to the claim that the chief has upon the clansman’s lands.  A comparison suggests itself here with the many rites the world over in which chiefs, as lords of the land, are offered its first fruits, and are associated thereby with the supernatural beings whose sacredness they share.  Firth also gives a comprehensive list of other gifts and appurtenances of the chief (pp. 221-2).  The corresponding downward flow of the unidirectional transactions is assured by overwhelming obligation on the chief to be generous.  To all the personal gifts we have referred to he is bound to reciprocate, though, according to Firth, ‘the equivalence of what is returned is less important than the intention of acknowledgement’ (p. 213).  The nature of the wealth moving upward is thus not qualitatively different from the nature of wealth coming down, as it is in the case of Merina New Year offerings; but the significance of the transactions is quite different in the upward and downward arms of the exchange.  Like other anthropologists, Firth refers to these movements of wealth in economic terms as ‘consumption’ and ‘distribution’, respectively.  Yet the politico-religious context of the exchange makes its relationship to sacrifice abundantly clear: the upward movement of pooling acknowledges the sacred on the part of its potential beneficiaries; while the downward movement represents the descent of the blessing.  Piety meets beneficence.    

Case 3: the Bemba of Southern-Central Africa

The same application of the language of the gift to a case of hierarchical reciprocity is to be found in another classic ethnography: that of the Bemba people of contemporary Zambia, documented by Audrey Richards.  Here again I shall confine myself to a few major themes of this study that offer parallels with the Tikopia ethnography in respect to unidirectional transactions.

              The social life of the Bemba is meticulously hierarchical, and the same hierarchical symbolism suffuses relationships in both the ritual and the mundane sphere, and at every social level, from that of chiefs with the ancestor gods, down to the everyday relationships of family and village.  The basic principal that encodes these relationships is expressed first and foremost in transactions that involve – primarily, though not exclusively – the staple food, maize.  There is no prestige economy, running in parallel with the subsistence economy – such as we so often find in Melanesia; the same substance, maize, is required to meet the requirements of basic subsistence, and to mark the gradations of status – with consequences that Richards finds not always beneficial from the nutritional perspective.  The essential coding of transactions is that socially upward flows of wealth take the form of uncooked maize, or of the labour required for maize production (e.g. corvée labour for a chief), while downward flows consist in cooked maize porridge, or ugali.  A visitor of higher rank, for example, is always offered maize in its uncooked form, while a day labourer in the village fields is recompensed with porridge or beer.  It is no surprise, then, that the establishment of a kitchen – as the place where an upward flow (uncooked) is converted into a downward one (cooked) – has a pre-eminent role in the socio-symbolic and religious world of the Bemba, both at the level of an individual life trajectory, and at the chiefly level of sacred ritual (Richards, p. 150).  Richard’s ethnography is largely concerned with charting these upward and downward flows and exploring their implications.  It offers us the most transparent case imaginable of what we have described as a unidirectional system of transactions.  While the socio-symbolic and religious dimension of these transactions is not Richards’ principal concern, crucial passages of her study leave us in no doubt of the centrality of a unidirectional ritual paradigm of sacrifice and its continuity with the network of mundane transactions which are the primary focus of her study. 

In order to understand this continuity a few further ethnographic details are required as to the overall structuring of Bemba society.  The villages of the Bemba centre upon a dominant matrilineal descent group, the head of which has been designated by a chief.  Both the chief, and – in a derivative capacity – the village headman, exercise authority by dint of a claim over land, resources and people which Richards terms ‘spiritual ownership’, and which invites some (qualified) comparison with the claims exercised by the Tikopian ariki (p. 249).  The headman, as the dominant lineage head, invokes his ancestors on behalf of all members of the village (though they may not share his lineage ancestry), just as the chief invokes his chiefly ancestors on behalf of the entire territorial chiefdom within which his royal lineage is dominant.  The isometry of these institutional levels reflects the association of socio-political authority with spiritual guardianship.  On the transactional level, the whole structure reproduces itself through processes of pooling and redistribution of food (maize).  Gifts are ‘an essential attribute of chieftainship’ (p. 148) (as indeed of authority at the household or village level) – a fact registered by the ritual and symbolic centrality of the institution of the ‘sacred kitchen’ (kamitembo).   At the level of chief an important component of the upward flow of resources is represented by the obligation of villagers to supply a few days of labour each year on the royal estate (umulasa).  This free labour contributes to providing the means of chiefly largesse through which the reputation of the chief’s court maintains itself in public eyes.  Thus social and political authority is inseparable from the power to give; and the power to give is sustained by a hierarchical circulation of resources that implicates the whole of society, chief and commoner alike.

Case 4:  Pharaonic Egypt

See Appendix C, for a case study that reconsiders Godelier’s paradigm of unilateral reciprocity.

5 WHAT IS THE RELATION BETWEEN SACRIFICE AND THE SYMBOLIC PRACTICE OF ETHICAL RELIGIONS?

Alms are the fruits of a moral notion of the gift and of fortune, on the one hand, and of a notion of sacrifice, on the other.  […] This is the ancient morality of the gift, which has become a principle of justice.  The gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth and happiness that has been offered to them and had been hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor and children. (Mauss, The Gift, pp. 22-3)

I turn in this chapter to an area which has so far received no attention in this study – that of the major world religions, such as Islam or Buddhism.  This chapter will examine what, if anything, their salient ritual practices, as described by historians of religion and social anthropologists, have to do with sacrifice, as defined ‘in the last chapter.  At stake here is the possibility evoked by Mauss (Essay, pp. 22-23) of a progressive enlargement of the phenomenon sacrifice beyond more ritualized forms to incorporate what are often seen as the more ethical forms of religion embodied in the almsgiving practices of Abrahamic religions.  This hypothesized trajectory is what I have hitherto referred to as ethicization.

                This raises the question of the use of terms such as ‘world religions’, ‘salvation religions’, ‘confessional religions’, etc., and whether the religions brought together by these classifications should be regarded as constituting, by virtue of certain shared characteristics, a distinctive sub-group of religious phenomenon.  In the light of recent work that places this in doubt, it will be important, at a later point in the discussion, to specify the common features in virtue of which such classificatory terms are being employed.  In the meantime, I propose to stick with ‘world religions’ as a means of referring, with least prejudice to the argument of this chapter, to those major religions – Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism – that have so far not figured in this thesis.

The reality of the trajectory I have described as ethicization constitutes, in the case of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the second of the key issues that divide the non-sacrificial and the sacrificial revisionist position.  The hypothesis of ethicization is, by definition, integral to any sacrificial revisionist account of the Christian salvation event (not just that of Hicks); it follows from the view that that salvation event is quite as much a sacrifice as the Hebrew sacrificial ritual – though one that has evidently undergone a transformation on the way from temple cult to Christian salvation event.  Conversely, the hypothesis of ethicization is excluded from the accounts of the Christian salvation event to be found in anti-sacrificial theology; this follows from the fact that the characterization of that event as the rejection or transcendence of sacrificial violence or transactionality implies that sacrifice is violent and transactional, and, as such, alien to Christian ethical values and practice.  The hypothesis is scarcely more compatible with sacrifice as metaphor, since the latter postulates a discontinuity between the ritual practices of other/earlier religions (including the cult of the OT) and the Christian salvation event – a discontinuity which is at least sufficiently important to render the meaning of those practices of only limited relevance to our understanding of the Christian salvation event.  The possibility that the Christian salvation event itself constitutes the outcome of an evolution in the notion and practice of sacrifice is thereby excluded. 

So what have anthropological accounts of ritual and ethical values/practices in world religions to tell us about the plausibility or otherwise of the hypothesis of ethicization?   And how – if at all – has this fed into the work of theologians? 

Here, as with the topic of the relationship of sacrifice and gift addressed in the last chapter, it is possible to give a general survey of the way in which the issues that concern us have traditionally been treated in adjacent disciplines, before going on to highlight some comparatively recent developments that mark the beginnings of a distinct shift in approach.  And here again it is possible to draw a contrast between the implications of those earlier treatments for the choice of a non-sacrificial or sacrificial position and the rather different implications of the recent developments I propose to highlight in this chapter.  That said, it will swiftly become evident, as regards our summary of earlier treatments, that what has been said in general terms about the anthropology of sacrifice and gift in world religions amounts to precious little; its impact on theology may largely be summed up in terms of the apparent consistency of that almost total neglect with an exceptionalist understanding of Christian salvation event which theologians may well have been inclined to adopt in any case.  Nevertheless, I shall summarize in the following section that small amount, before going on to describe an important recent contribution to gift theory that has brought to bear on the discussion of ethicization a range of recent ethnographic studies by domain specialists, and which takes the question of ethicization in a new direction.  

Traditional anthropological perspectives on the practice of salvation religions

Sacrifice

 Religious practices which might be considered relevant to the topic of sacrifice arise in two very broad cultural areas:  first, the practices of puja (literally ‘worship’) in Hinduism and Buddhism, which sometimes involve offerings of food; second, the practice of making animal offerings in Islam on the occasion of the Greater Eid (Eid ul-Adha).  Neither of these figure prominently in sacrifice theory. 

In the case of puja, this neglect is not hard to understand – for two reasons.  The first has to do with indigenous conceptualizations of sacrifice.  In their present form, Hindu and Buddhist devotional practices owe much to religious traditions that renounced blood-sacrifice in accordance with the principal of non-violence (ahimsa), as well as to attempts on the part of non-renunciatory traditions to accommodate that renunciation.  Accordingly, mention of sacrifice evokes the offering of animal victims (still current in certain groups), and a practice that the majority of Hindus and Buddhists no longer recognize.   Of course, Indian ethnography has always been at the heart of sacrifice theory – figuring in the seminal study of Hubert and Mauss as a comparator for OT sacrifice, and rarely absent from the debate that has ensued.  But the Indian rituals in question have been those of the Vedic texts, not those of contemporary Hinduism – let alone Buddhism.  The second has to do with the dominance of theories associating sacrifice with violence.  These are not at all in accord with indigenous Hindu, or Buddhist, notions of puja. 

                The neglect of Islam – by no means total – is harder to understand.  There is a notion, and a practice, of sacrifice that is integral to mainstream Islam.  This is the offering by Abraham/Ibrahim of his son Isaac/Ishmael commemorated every year by the sacrifice at Eid performed by pilgrims in the plain of Mina at the end of the Hajj, and by households throughout the Muslim world.  This is not a practice, as we shall later see, that conforms well to the notion of sacrifice developed by the theorists.  However, there exist various, less mainstream, manifestations of Islamic sacrifice that are more easily accommodated within their models; it is these that have tended to figure in theories of sacrifice.  Such manifestations include, on the one hand, certain ‘tribal’ practices,[36] on the other, notions of sacrifice associated with Islamicist martyrdom.[37]  In both cases, there are important links with mainstream Islam; but attention nevertheless tends to fall on what is marginal to the faith of the majority.  A good example of this is an anthropological study by M.E. Combs-Schilling[38] that seeks to integrate Muslim sacrifice into a generalized theory akin to that of Nancy Jay[39] on the basis of a rather esoteric development of the universal Muslim practice associated with the sharifi caliphate of Morocco. 

2.Gift

Gift theorists have largely ignored the case of world religions.  Mauss himself devotes a few lines to the developments of the gift in the Abrahamic religions; but, as we have seen, this is not a passage of his text that has attracted much attention from his disciples, while sociologists of religion have, for their part, rarely engaged with gift theory.  Hence there exists, where the religious gift is concerned, what the religious sociologist, I. F. Silber, has recently described as ‘a large, vacant space’.[40]  On the few occasions where Maussian theory enters the discussion of specific practices, they are seen as posing a challenge for the theory.  Thus Yuxiang Yan notes the failure of the gift practices at Chinese rural weddings to comply with Maussian principals;[41] J. Parry remarks on the apparently non-reciprocal character of Indian religious giving to Brahmins in Benares.[42]  Given the character of the gift in such contexts, it is no surprise that Maussian theory has rarely suggested itself as a promising line of approach.  Casting a broader eye over gift practices in contemporary societies, A. Testart comments, in relation to Mauss’s proposition that reciprocity is obligatory:

 I am astonished by such a statement.  It is manifestly false.  A short while ago, I gave a franc to somebody who was begging in the street.  Obviously, he will never give it back to me […] Nor is there any such question in the whole domain of what might be called charitable donation: this is relevant to a whole chapter of our social history […] It was a practice which in certain periods brought into play an impressive amount of wealth, when donations were destined for the Church […] The charitable donation is certainly even more important in the lands of Islam and Buddhism.[43]

Needless to say, Testart makes no reference to Mauss’s paragraph on almsgiving.  However, Silber picks up on Mauss’s observations, which she judges deserving of further investigation despite their ‘ambiguities’.  But, for all that, she never properly considers their implications – even in her comparative study of Christian and Theravada Buddhist monasticism;[44]  she is too suspicious of the the impulse of the Maussian project towards universalism.  Instead, she argues that the scope of the Maussian gift is constrained by the existence of altogether different forms of the gift existing in the ‘juridically-based systems of ancient civilizations’ such as the ‘euergetism’ of ancient Rome, as described by the ancient historian Paul Veyne.  She prefers a pluralist account of the gift, and effectively sidesteps the possibility, evoked by Mauss himself, that the one practice might have evolved out of the other through a process of ethicization such as described by Hicks.

The theological impact of traditional perspectives

As for the possible impact of these perspectives on theologians, there are two aspects of this situation that especially call for comment.  The first concerns the apparent lack of engagement of either sacrifice theory or gift studies with the case of confessional religions.  The previous chapter described the tendency of both sacrifice and gift theory to pursue their separate paths with little perception of common interest.  To this picture we must now add the apparent disengagement from either of these areas of theoretical concern of the sociological study of world religions. 

So far as theology is concerned, this failure of engagement in adjacent disciplines is consistent with the tendency of theologians, where they have adopted a sociological or anthropological perspective on Christian gift and sacrifice, to do so without any reference to the religious practices of other salvation religions.  The impact of this narrowness of perspective is to favour exceptionalist theological positions.  After all, Christianity is the more easily placed in opposition to all other religions, where the latter are exemplified by archaic gift exchange or the rituals of the Vedic Brahmanas than it would be if our comparators were Muslim almsgiving or the worship of Hindu devotionalism. 

A second aspect is the consonance of this eclipse of salvation religions with the failure of sacrifice theory or gift studies to pursue Mauss’s remarks on the origin of almsgiving:

Alms are the fruits of a moral notion of the gift and of fortune, on the one hand, and of a notion of sacrifice, on the other […]  The gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth and happiness that has been offered to them and had been hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor and children. (pp. 22-23)

What is so intriguing about the possibilities hinted at in these lines, seen from a theological perspective, is the corroboration they would appear to offer for the hypothesis of ethicization that is fundamental to the sacrificial revisionist position.  It is striking how far the hypothesis that Mauss adumbrates in connection with the Abrahamic faiths (and Islam, in particular (p. 23)), according to which a certain development of sacrifice and gift engenders almsgiving practices, resembles Hicks’ thesis of a development from tribal religion to ethical faith.  Unfortunately, no anthropological or sociological study has followed the route sign-posted by Mauss’s text by exploring the possibility of an expanded notion of the Maussian gift capable of encompassing the gift practices of confessional religions – or not until the publication of a paper in 1986 by the Indianist and anthropologist Jonathan Parry.  It is to this significant moment that we shall now turn.

Fresh perspectives on ethicization in salvation religions

 

What is important about Parry’s paper ‘The gift, the Indian gift, and the “Indian” gift’ is not simply the conclusions it reaches about the particular practice of gift that constitutes the focus of his study but the way that he brings these conclusions to bear upon the ongoing debate around Maussian reciprocity.  There are specialized studies, to which Parry refers, which reach conclusions regarding gift practices in Indian religion that are similar to his.  But, unlike the authors of those studies, Parry uses the ethnography – both theirs and his own – to re-open the question of the nature of the gift.  Rather than immediately jumping, like Silber, to the safe but unsatisfying conclusion that forms of the gift are as multifarious as the cultures in which they arise, he attempts to develop a more complex typology of the gift that both identifies the structural similarity between the gift practices of Indian religions and accommodates those practices within an overarching concept that embraces the gift in all its forms.  In other words, he continues to pursue Mauss’s original ambition of an all-embracing theory of the gift.  To this end, he picks up on Mauss’s observations on almsgiving, which he develops in relation to his own ethnographic material.  In the resulting theory, the Hindu and Buddhist religious practices investigated by Parry and other Indianists take the place of Mauss’s sadaka as the anthropologist’s primary example of the development of gift in world religions.  However, Parry does not shy away from generalizations that extend the relevance of his findings to the wider category which he evokes interchangeably as ‘salvation religions’ or ‘ethicized religions’.  The validity of the classification evidently rests, in this case, upon the existence of those common features to which Parry means to draw our attention through the use of these terms.  To this we shall presently come.

In the background to Parry’s analysis there stand two types of study.  There are broad-brush accounts of the evolution of current Hindu renunciatory and devotional practices out of a brahmanic sacrificial substrate, such as those of Madeleine Biardeau and Charles Malamoud.[45]  These studies seek to relate Vedic sacrifice to the various forms of more or less renunciatory practice that appear to have taken its place.  More important, however, there are various highly domain-specific accounts of contemporary Hindu – and indeed Theravada Buddhist – practices involving religious giving (dana) and its socio-political concomitants, the social and economic importance of which is such as to make them a central topic of sociological discussion:

[…] one has only to think of the huge landed estates donated to the big South Indian temples; of the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated 17-20% of the population of Benares […] were Brahmins living off religious charity […]; or of estimates of 25-40% of net disposable cash income being given to monks in the typical Upper Burmese village. (Parry, p. 459)

What Parry has to say about the gift in ‘salvation religions’ (i.e. the ‘religious gift’) and its relation to Maussian reciprocity is in essence the following: the religious gift is non-reciprocal in the sense that its religious value appears to depend upon its not being returned; but it is reciprocal in the sense that it seeks a return in the hereafter.  In other words, the reciprocity of the religious gift is what Parry (following Trautmann) calls a ‘soteriological’ reciprocity (p. 462).   To pre-empt the supernatural return by seeking a reward in the here-and-now is to cause the ‘unseen fruit (adrstaphala)’ (i.e. the fruit of karma) ‘[…] to wither on the branch’ (p. 462). This is not to say that the religious gift has no human recipient (in Parry’s primary example, it is a Brahmin priest).  Yet the religious meaning of the gift is viewed entirely from the perspective of the donor’s righteous ‘intention’ – as though its economic impact were a matter of no importance: it is the intention that brings supernatural reward, not the impact of the gift on the donor’s here-and-now.  It would seem to follow that a belief in the existence of the hereafter is indispensable to soteriological reciprocity – and therefore an indispensable feature of ‘salvation religions’:  

Essential to its articulation (i.e. of the religious gift) is a specific type of belief system, as is suggested by the fact that in all of the major world religions great stress is laid on the merit of gifts and alms, ideally given in secrecy and without expectation of any worldly return.(Parry, p. 467)

This brings us back to the question of ‘salvation religions’ – but with the criteria for membership in this category now clearly defined by Parry as the focus on individual ‘intention’ and the corresponding belief in the ‘hereafter’.  Davies (Meaning and Salvation)[46] questions the supposition that the notion of ‘salvation’ belongs exclusively to world religions, or to any such category, and there seems every reason to exercise a similar scepticism when it comes to belief in the ‘hereafter’.  But the emphasis on ‘intention’ that Parry also stresses in this connection points to another common feature of these religions that proves a more solid basis for distinguishing them as a category, and one that is adopted as such by Davies himself in another context: namely, their conversionist or elective character.[47]   The important thing for Parry is evidently to identify the common feature(s) of ‘world religions’ (i.e., for his purposes, forms of Indian religion and the Abrahamic religions) that link to – and potentially account for – the specific practices of exchange, or perceptions of such practices, that he labels ‘soteriological reciprocity’.  As will become evident, this will also be the important thing for the argument of this chapter.  If belief in the hereafter will not suffice as a description of what makes these religions different, I suspect, the decisive issue is rather the more individualist character that beliefs in the hereafter assume where the religion places a greater emphasis on intention.  Hereafter, I shall label the category of religions Parry associates with soteriological reciprocity as elective religions.

Another relevant aspect of dana which receives brief mention in Parry’s article but is of particular interest to this study is its relation to sacrifice.  Following Biardeau, Parry notes that the gift – i.e. the religious gift of dana – is‘a surrogate for sacrifice appropriate to our degenerate age’ (Parry, p.460; Biardeau, Hinduism, p.27).  What Biardeau means by this will be discussed below.  Parry, for his part, draws attention to the identification of the donor and the gift in both dana and the ancient rituals: the donor ‘gives himself’ when he gives the religious gift.  Arguably, this is also the case in archaic reciprocity, of course.  But the fixation on the donor’s intention that we see in Indian practice, takes this identification to an extreme, and appears to make of the gift an action addressed to spiritual rather than human ends.  

                Parry uses the terms ‘ethicized religion’ and ‘salvation religion’ interchangeably to indicate how in confessional religions there arises a notion of the gift dominated by an ethic of intention.  He has relatively little to say about how and when this change occurred.  But there are other studies, as we shall see, that offer a more extended treatment of this issue – albeit not in general, but from the perspective of specific religious and cultural traditions, notably : Biardeau and Malamoud (B&M); Richard Gombrich; Stanley Tambiah; Frank L. Reynolds.[48]  I would argue that there is a degree of consensus amongst these authors as to the significance of the religious gift in confessional religions and its relation to sacrifice.  Their explanations enable us to see how and why the gift of alms is the ‘fruit’ of sacrifice, and why the gods and the spirits should have preferred that their share of human wealth should cease to be ‘destroyed in useless sacrifices’.  In other words, they allow us to fill in with greater ethnographic detail what is only fleetingly sketched out by Mauss’ remarks on almsgiving.

A consensus on ethicization?

What is outlined below is a position on ethicization which, in the remainder of this chapter, I shall justify through a discussion of what recent domain-specific studies have to tell us about gift and sacrifice in confessional religions.  This outline is consistent with the understanding of religious gift developed by Parry, though the additional domain-specific material which we shall examine enables us to re-adjust our own focus from the religious gift itself (as defined by Parry) to the change in religious practice that its emergence represents vis-à-vis the kind of ritual sacrifice described in the previous chapter.  Those domain-specific studies are largely in the field of Indian and Buddhist studies.  But the kind of development they allow us to describe is a development that can also be shown to have occurred in other confessional religions, including Islam and Christianity.  And their account thus offers us some ethnographic support for Mauss’ thesis that practices of almsgiving developed out of sacrifice.

1. (Internalization).  Ethicization involves a weakening of the bond between sacrifice and the ritual prescriptions that determine the correct outward and material forms of religious action.  Focus shifts from the external aspect of the action to the intention or disposition with which it is performed.  It is the donor’s readiness to give that attracts a return in the hereafter, rather than any outward feature of the gift, such as its size or conformity to ritual prescription.  Once the link is broken between right intention and a prescribed form of expression, then religiously-motivated gifts can perfectly well take the place of the ritual performances.  Historians and theologians sometimes refer to this aspect of ethicization as internalization or spiritualization. 
2. (Individualization).  As a result of the ethic of intention, religious agency need no longer be confined to a specific class of persons – such as those with wealth or ritual expertise.   For where good intention is valued for its own sake, rather than for the sake of its material expression, then religious action lies within everyone’s capacities.  The socio-political implications of this are very significant.  A strong emphasis on ritual prescription will be associated with forms of society in which the religious actions people undertake on the common behalf create differentiated socio-religious roles.  As we saw in Chapter 4, one person/group will become a channel of divine beneficence to another.  An emphasis on intention, on the other hand, will be associated with forms in which each and every individual is capable of acting on his/her own behalf.  The socio-symbolic importance of religious action remains.  But the religious actions people undertake are no longer thought of as rendering them channels of divine beneficence to each other, but binding them severally to a divine object that remains set apart from all of them.  The spiritual effect of the religious action comes to be dissociated from its material effect in the here-and-now.   One gives to the religious recluse or the poor widow, but one gives for a spiritual good that is common to all, and beyond individual interests.

If Mauss is essentially correct to suppose that sacrifice survives in a de-ritualized form as religious giving (almsgiving) in ethicized religions, it does not follow that ritual of a sacrificial nature ceases to to be performed.  Here we encounter an aspect of ethicized religion that goes unremarked by Mauss and Parry, largely because the latter are interested primarily in gift, not ritual.  Nevertheless, the subsisting ritual of which we speak receives extensive treatment in specialist studies, as we shall see.  This aspect is the subject of the third element of the position on ethicization that I propose here.

• Religious rituals (often having a patently sacrificial character) become dissociated from substantive religious giving.  As expressions of ethical intention (as defined above), they become purely symbolic; what is given is of little or no material value, and, as such, offers no scope for differentiating one donor from another on grounds of wealth or ritual expertise.  Purely symbolic actions serve to enact an ethical paradigm which is given practical and material realization in substantive acts of giving outside the ritual sphere.  The ritual paradigm is the same for rich and poor; but the substantive gifts through which the paradigm is realized will differ according to the capacities of the individual donors.  The latter are evaluated according to the conformity of the substantive gift to a universal standard of religious intention, not according to the outward characteristics of the substantive gift.  Christians might thing of this as the ‘widow’s mite’ principle.

At this point, let us consider how far the ethicized practice described above conforms to the characteristics of sacrifice specified in Chapter 4.  There, sacrifice is defined as a response to the sacrificer’s source of life (1.).  In addition, it is proposed: that the source of life may be identified with a human individual/group, and does not require a sharp distinction of the divine from the human (2.); that the relationship with the source of life is, in some sense, a reciprocal one (3.).  The fundamental definition of sacrifice (1.) as a response to the source of life will require some modification if it is to fit the case of all salvation religions, since, for Buddhists at least, salvation cannot be straightforwardly identified with life.  This is an issue to which I shall return.  But, the aspects of sacrifice principally affected by ethicization – which is our immediate concern – are those covered by points 2. and 3..  Here, it will be noted that, in the case of ethicized religion, the addressees of the gift/sacrifice could be considered to include both the human recipients (recluses/widows and orphans) who benefit materially, and the spiritual god or principal that is honoured by the gift, and will return it in the hereafter.  But, whereas in the non-ethicized cases of sacrifice discussed in Chapter 4, the recipient is identified with the divine addressee, and the human divinized through the gift/sacrifice, in the case of ethicized religion, the gift/sacrifice has the very opposite effect:  it specifically dissociates the divine addressee and the human, assigning them to altogether discrete spheres.  Reciprocity (point 3) operates in the relation of the donor with the divine addressee, but not in the case of the human; indeed, it is a condition of soteriological reciprocity that relations with the human recipient be altogether non-reciprocal.  In sum, the gift and sacrifice of confessional religions appear to demonstrate a specific variation of same general schema we defined in Chapter 4.

The theological impact of fresh perspectives on ethicization

What is theologically at issue in the defence of ethicization?  We have seen that the non-sacrificial and the sacrificial position differ in their interpretation of the trajectory of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  Whereas the former sees Christianity – and, to an extent, its prophetic antecedents – as a rupture with the sacrificial and socio-symbolic religion of the Mosaic cult, the latter regards those later developments as the continuation and fulfilment of sacrificial religion; where the one traces back the genealogy of Christianity – as Schwager puts it – ‘through the line of’ the prophetic critique of sacrificial religion, the other places the Christian salvation event squarely within the narrative of the development of that religion.  If, then, it can be demonstrated that the same trajectory, which non-sacrificial and sacrificial theologians have been motivated to interpret so diversely in the case of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, has, in reality, been followed by other confessional faiths – in other words, that what theologians may have supposed to be unique to the Judaeo-Christian case is in reality common to all confessional religions.  And if, in addition, it can also be shown that this trajectory, where it is discerned in non-Judaeo-Christian faiths by specialists of those religions, has been interpreted as a transformation of socio-symbolic religion rather than as an escape from socio-symbolic religion into some supra-social and more ‘spiritual’ space.  Then this will constitute a not inconsiderable argument for the sacrificial revisionist, as opposed to the non-sacrificial revisionist, position. 

                In fact, even just the demonstration of the existence of that trajectory in non-Christian faiths tends to militate against the non-sacrificial interpretation of that trajectory in the case of Christianity.  This is because the latter view generally presupposes a Christian exceptionalist understanding of that trajectory as the development by which Christianity, and Christianity alone, escapes the frame of socio-symbolic religion in order to become the sole divinely legitimated source of its critique.  This is certainly the understanding of Girard-based theology, and of Schwager and Milbank.  As for Tanner, the association of her Trinitarian theology with a revolutionized human practice (i.e. the unconditional gift) stands in the way of any recognition of the emergence of that practice in the context of other faiths. 

Of course, such a demonstration would also militate against Hicks’ understanding of that trajectory as constituting the differentia of Christianity.  Yet his account of the trajectory itself would not thereby be invalidated, unlike the rival exceptionalist accounts of Christianity offered by non-sacrificial positions.   The difference here is that, in the case of sacrificial revisionism, the anthropological basis of the position is not itself vested in a notion of Christian difference – as it is in non-sacrificial positions.  Consequently, were it to be demonstrated that other religions have undergone an ethicizing transformation that replicates what Hicks observes in the case of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, this would support Hicks’ fundamental anthropology, even if, at the same time, it challenged his understanding of the Christian differentia.  

Evidence for ethicization

What, then, of the evidence for ethicization?  In the remainder of this chapter I propose to show that the paradigm developed above (largely on the basis of the Hindu ethnography of Parry and Biardeau) is clearly evidenced by Theravada Buddhism as described by Gombrich, Reynolds, Tambiah, John S. Strong,[49] and others.  This ethnography provides strong independent corroboration for the proposition which Mauss briefly outlines in connection with Muslim sadaka: that the religious gift (dana) is the ‘fruit’ of sacrifice.  The reason for not seeking corroboration, first and foremost, in the Muslim practices to which Mauss himself appeals for support is simply that no specialist study in that field has ever – to my knowledge – investigated the notion of ethicization.  I propose, therefore, to begin my demonstration with religious practices in relation to which the phenomenon of ethicization – if not the hypothesis of Mauss – has already been examined.  When I have demonstrated the breadth of support for the above paradigm in Indianist and Buddhist studies, the case will appear stronger, I hope, in favour of a potential application for which Mauss’s text would seem the only warrant – namely, to the case of Muslim practices. 

                The reasons for preferring Theravada Buddhism to Hinduism as an ethnographic case for the demonstration of the above paradigm of ethicization are twofold.  First, the paradigm itself arises largely in connection with a discussion of dana in Hinduism (Parry) and their relation to sacrifice (Biardeau).  While the development of Buddhism is not altogether independent of the development of Hinduism, and while Parry and Biardeau are themselves aware of the parallels between Indian dana and Buddhist practice, nevertheless scholars of Theravada Buddhism such as Richard Gombrich or Stanley Tambiah have evidently reached their conclusions on ethicization independently – and on the basis of different evidence.  As regards our paradigm of ethicization, therefore, their support counts as independent corroboration.  Second, the religious practice of Theravada Buddhism seems less polymorphous and more easily delimited than that of Hinduism – and conclusions reached by the studies on which our ethnography is based, present fewer problems of generalizability.

                Having sought independent ethnographic support for Parry’s extension of Maussian theory into the sphere of salvation religions, I shall return in the last section of this chapter to Mauss’s own example of Muslim almsgiving, in order to consider how far the hypothesis of ethicization set out above fits the case of Muslim religious giving and Muslim sacrifice as these have been described by recent specialist studies of Islam.

Ethicization in Theravada Buddhism

An understanding of ethicization is developed by the anthropologist of Sinhalese Buddhism and Sanskritist, Richard Gombrich (Theravada Buddhism, pp. 60-86) that is completely in line with the paradigm set out above, and strongly corroborative of the understanding developed by Parry and Biardeau.  It has to be said that the focus of Gombrich’s hypothesis is not primarily on the relation of sacrifice and dana, but on certain more general issues confronting the Western enquirer into Buddhism.  Nevertheless, the idea of ethicization, as developed in his work, involves a relation between the world of sacrifice and the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.  Furthermore, the anthropological orientation of Gombrich’s work brings him to consider a second issue which is particularly relevant to the angle on ethicization that I mean to develop in this study: namely, the relation between the Buddha’s teaching and the dominant forms of popular lay religiosity (i.e. dana and puja).  Gombrich’s concern in these two areas is with the Buddha’s teaching: how it relates to the religious practices that it superseded, on the one hand; how it relates to practices of lay religiosity, on the other.  The concern of the present study is with the relationship that Gombrich’s account of the Buddha’s ethicizing religion implies – incidentally, perhaps – between sacrifice and Buddhist practices of dana and puja.

                Gombrich expresses the religious transformation that leads from sacrifice to the Buddha’s religion in terms of the conceptual shift undergone by the Sanskrit term for sacrifice (karman) when it comes to signify, in its Pali form (kamma), intention or volition (cetana).  Ritual action (karman) is superseded at the heart of religion by a notion of ‘pure intention’ (literally, ‘pure’/’skilful’ (punna/kusala) kamma) which is conceptualized as a psychological formation, or disposition conducive to the cessation of attachment or thirst (tanha) (pp. 67-69).  Gombrich himself applies the term ethicization to this development.  Ethicization would be of little interest to us, if the idea of karman/kamma were marginal to Buddhist religious practice.  As it turns out, however, practices of meritorious intention (punna/kusala kamma)are the focusof occasions of public communal generosity towards monks (Sinhalese: pin; Burmese: kutho; Thai & Lao: bun; khmer: bon) which constitute the principal form of lay religiosity in Theravada Buddhist cultures.  This giving serves to supply the material needs of those pursuing a monastic vocation, while, from the donors’ point of view, constituting a fund of merit that will secure a better incarnation in the hereafter, and ultimately lead to nibbana.  Thus, the development Gombrich associates with ethicization would seem to involve the replacement of sacrifice as the central practice of religion by a practice of religiously motivated generosity, with Buddhist monks taking the place of the Hindu deities and Brahmin priests as the recipients.  At the same time, a correlative shift in religious focus from ritual action to intentional disposition would seem to render the material impact of religious generosity incidental to its religious meaning.  Consequently, the recipients are not divinized by their sacrificial relationship to the donor. 

                Such, then, is the essence of ethicization as it applies to Theravada Buddhism.  There is much in this account, needless to say, which will appear obscure to those unfamiliar with the ethnography, and much that, as we will see shortly, is controversial amongst specialists.  To these obscurities and controversies I shall need to return in order to elucidate and justify my position.  However, the above outline serves to demonstrate the conformity of Gombrich’s notion of ethicization both to our paradigm and to the Maussian hypothesis of the derivation of the religious gift (i.e. almsgiving) from sacrifice.

                What is obscure in this account concerns the real relation between brahmanic sacrificial ritual and the extinction of thirst or desire (tanha).   Simply to evoke the semantic or conceptual continuity marked by the use of a common term karman/kamma is, of course, very far from explaining what the Buddha’s religion could possibly have to do with ritual sacrifice.  As for the controversy, this relates to the centrality given in the above account to practices of conspicuous generosity.  One of the most hotly debated issues in the literature on Theravada Buddhism concerns the relation between popular and lay practice in Theravada cultures (where the centrality of dana is undeniable) and the teaching of the Buddha as transmitted in the canon.[50]  Why, after all, should commitment to the Buddha’s doctrine necessarily attach such religious significance to gifts – let alone to devotional practices involving veneration of relics?  Are the forms of popular religion really the natural expression of an ethicized religion, or just an accommodation of that teaching to elsewhere prevailing socio-political norms?  This question is evidently important to our argument, since, if the latter view is correct, then the pre-eminence of practices of dana, far from constituting the quintessential practice of an ethicized religion, could turn out to represent a regression from the truly ethicized doctrine of pure intention to a non-ethicized folk religion of merit and pious works.    

The Buddha’s doctrine and sacrifice

I shall begin with the question of the relation of the Buddha’s teaching to sacrifice

To understand fully the relation of karman and kamma requires us to see Buddhism in the broad context of Indian renunciatory religion.  Here the relatively brief outlines offered by the Gombrich and Tambiah can be usefully filled out by the more in-depth discussion of renunciation supplied by Biardeau and Malamoud. 

                Karman – meaning action, and paradigmatically, sacrifice, i.e. ritual action (Biardeau, Hinduism, p. 23) – is conceptualized by Indian sources as inherently purposive, and as linking what we do to its effects (Biardeau, pp. 70-73).  The fact that humans do not reap all the consequences of their karman in this life is grounds for belief in the cycle of rebirth (samsara) (p. 23).  Good and bad can thus be assured of exacting their own reward, while the notion of karman comes to imply a principle of cosmic determination.

                For renouncers (sannyasin), the association of the cycle of rebirth (samsara) with inevitable suffering leads to a desire for the renunciation of karman (i.e. of all purposive action, and pre-eminently sacrifice) with a view to escaping samsara.  Buddhism seems to be typical of renunciation, and of Indian thinking more generally, in its psychological understanding of action as purposive and motivated by desire.  Action, as reflected in the very concept of karman, is represented by indigenous psychology as something driven by desire for a known good (i.e. attachment).  The Buddhist doctrine that samsaric suffering (dukkha) has its origin in desire, or attachment (tanha), fits with this psychology. 

What distinguishes Buddhism, however, is the conceptualization of karman inessentially psychological terms (rather than in terms of its outward and potentially ritual aspect) as a ‘mental formation’ – that of ‘intention’ or ‘volition’ (cetana) (Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism, pp. 66-69).  It is this development that Gombrich and other Buddhist scholars refer to as ethicization.  It is important to be clear about what we mean by psychological.   Mental formations (samkharakkhandha), such as cetana, do not, as we might suppose, imply the existence of a self (considered by virtue of the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (or ‘no self’) to be a mere construct), but are nevertheless psychological in that they constitute the fourth of the five basic categories of the ever-changing forces or energies that make up being.[51]  Mental formations are no more permanent than the formations of any of the other four categories (kkhanda);  but are distinguished by their capacity for having good or bad or bad kammatic effect, according to whether they decrease or increase attachment (Rahula, pp. 21-23). 

Effectively, therefore, Buddhism replaces the notion of purposive action to be found at the heart of Indian karmatic/kammatic doctrine with the notion of a psychological formation of purposiveness (Gombrich, p. 67).  In this ethicizing development of karman, the implicit idea of a principle of cosmic determination, linking causes and effects, is somehow retained: Buddhist kamma implies a law of consequences, rather as the orthodox brahmanic karman does.  But it is the intentional disposition of the agent that gives rise to these consequences, rather than the action itself; good intentional dispositions produce good intentional dispositions in the beyond, and bad produce bad (Rahula, p. 32; Gombrich, p. 69). This kammatic effect is a matter of decreased/increased attachment; intentional dispositions conducive to decreased attachment produce future states of decreased attachment, leading, through a virtuous circle, to the ultimate cessation of attachment (nibbana); whereas dispositions of increased attachment lead, via a correspondingly vicious circle, to the perpetuation of attachment (dukkha).

  The question that concerns us here is what can be said, in view of the above, of the relationship of the Buddhist Noble Eight-fold Path to sacrifice? The answer is complex because the oppositional relation to sacrifice implicit in the whole idea of renunciation (which is, after all, essentially renunciation of sacrifice) is set askew by the ethicizing process which transforms karman/sacrifice into kamma/purposiveness.  Purposiveness, rather than action itself, is that which has consequences in the hereafter, and comes to be rejected in Buddhism.  Indeed, action itself can, in principal, be non-kammatic – for example, in the earthly life of the enlightened (arahant) after enlightenment (Rahula, p. 32).  Symbolic action, on the other hand, such as sacrifice, would seem, by definition, to engage desire and be kammatic.  With the Buddhist ethicization of karman, the distinct possibility of a non-symbolic, and non-kammatic, action seems to emerge for the first time, with sacrifice somehow ceasing to be synonymous with – and paradigmatic of – action.  Certainly, ritual sacrifice is superseded; yet, at the same time, ceases, from the Buddhist perspective, to be what is primarily targeted by Buddhist teaching.  The link between the Noble Eightfold Path and sacrifice is therefore oblique.  Nevertheless, if Gombrich is right about ethicization, it is wrong to think of the Buddha’s doctrine as altogether discontinuous with the sacrificial belief systems that it supersedes.  A certain underlying framework subsists within which it makes sense to situate Buddhist kamma, along, no doubt, with other renunciatory belief systems, as a development from certain sacrificial antecedents, rather than something that could have equally well have arisen at any time or place.  Such at least would seem to be the implication of Gombrich’s characterization of Buddhist belief and practice as ethicized.

The Buddha’s doctrine and the religious gift

Having considered the relation of the Buddhist goal to karman/sacrifice, I turn my attention to the controversy around the relation of the Buddhist goal to the religious gift (dana).  The importance of the latter in Buddhist societies has never been in dispute; the issue for anthropologists and sociologists of religion is how the religious gift came to have this importance, and whether it constitutes an integral aspect of the Buddhist religion, or an accommodation (even, perhaps, a betrayal) of that religion to social and political needs largely incidental to the religion itself.  It will be evident that the argument I am developing in this chapter for ethicization requires me to demonstrate that the religious gift is integral to the Buddhist religion.  This means taking sides in this dispute.  After all, if Buddhist gift practices are a mere incidental effect  of the socio-political dominance of the Buddhist doctrine within a certain kind of society, then those practices can scarcely be said to attest the continuity between Buddhist religion and sacrifice.

                Following the Noble Eight-fold Path involves the renunciation of the productive and reproductive duties of the householder – which, of course, means becoming a monk and pursuing the code of monastic discipline (vinaya).  The problem, of course, is that the modest material wants of monks must still be met – by the laity.  The achievement of spiritual goals by one section of society appears to depend, therefore, on their non-achievement by the rest.  This difficulty is mitigated somewhat by the belief that the good intentional dispositions evidenced by the material support of monks by lay donors (dayaka) will contribute to the spiritual progress of the donors themselves as well as the recipients, procuring for them good rebirths and ultimately their own opportunity to follow the Buddha’s renunciatory path.  The two sections of society, monk and lay donor (bhikkhu and dayaka) are perceived as sharing a common spiritual aspiration, though its fuller realization will, in the case of the dayaka, have to await some future rebirth. 

                The contentious issue for the sociologists of Buddhism is whether or not the lay Buddhism of the dayaka represents, for all the language of good intentions, the contingent outcome of a spiritual doctrine intended for an elite.  There is surely nothing inherently surprising in the fact that the practical outcome of a cessation of attachment would involve the movement of material wealth in the form of religious gifts.   However, the narrower view – that popular practices concerned with merit constitute at best a very secondary concern for religion concerned primarily with the spiritual goals of the monk – appears corroborated by the existence in popular Buddhism of traditional practices that do not, at first sight at least, appear to reflect the doctrine of intention.  Amongst the latter are practices involving, not just the earning of merit, but its transference to others (especially the dead), its exchange, and its treatment as a kind of spiritual currency (Gombrich, Precept and Practice, pp. 251-284).  Integral to our paradigm of ethicization, it will be remembered, is the aspect of individualization whereby the individual becomes responsible for their own salvation.  Whereas canonical Buddhism lays great emphasis on individual responsibility for spiritual progress, as, for example, in the Buddha’s oft-cited injunction to his followers to have ‘no refuge other than yourselves’,[52] popular Buddhist practices involving the earning and transfer of merit seem to present a very different picture – not to speak of practices of venerating the Buddha’s relics and images. 

The obvious way to save the conception of Buddhism as an ethicizing religion is to attempt to separate out its essential doctrine from the accretions of popular religion. This has sometimes been the tendency of sociological studies of Buddhist religion, from Max Weber onwards.[53]  There are also powerful modernizing voices within Buddhism itself (what the anthropologist Ganath Obeyesekere has referred to ‘protestant Buddhism’)[54] favouring a canonical reading of their faith that would tend to sideline traditional practices and redefine the role of the lay Buddhist in a way that would probably de-accentuate the gift.  Gombrich, whose understanding of ethicization has provided the leading thread for this argument hitherto, tends broadly in this direction – though devoting considerable attention, not least in his Sinhanlese ethnography, to discussing the conformity of popular practices to the doctrine of individual responsibility.  Interestingly, his analysis demonstrates how a formal justification of such practices as consonant with canonical doctrine is possible – and, indeed, is actually made by Buddhists.  Yet, it is evident that Gombrich himself perceives such ‘rationalizations’ (Gombrich, Precept and Practice, p. 284) as operating on a largely ‘cognitive’, rather than an ‘affective’, level.  In his view, popular practices, whatever their theoretical justification, have effectively crossed the bounds of what is proper to an ethicized religion.

An alternative position to Gombrich’s, more congenial to the Maussian hypothesis of a relation between gift and sacrifice, is widely expressed by studies adopting an approach which is more anthropological – in the sense that it views Buddhism as a cultural and socio-political formation rather than a religious doctrine.  Scholars such as Frank L. Reynolds,[55] Stanley Tambiah (World Conqueror, ‘The Ideology of Merit’), Ivan Strenski, Bardwell L. Smith[56] & John S. Strong[57] are united in their an emphasis on the Buddhist notion of a social order/law, i.e. damma, and its cosmological dimension.  Damma, through its hierarchical ordering of grades of being, gives a symbolic and mythological expression to a religious aspiration that is communal as much as it is individual; the Buddhist social order (damma) is, after all, the order of the universe (at least for Buddhists).  It is, of course, no less Buddhist for being cosmological, since the principal determining the hierarchical ordering of beings is nothing less than their closeness to nibbana. 

The non-individualist tendency of this dammatic perspective emerges with particular clarity in two contexts.  The first is the activity of Buddhist kings (of whom Asoka is a prime instance), who express their Buddhism through a practices of munificence and social justice that bring their rule into accord with damma itself (Reynolds, pp. 15-23).  Thanks to the dammatic ordering of the cosmos, this ensures divine favour, rain in due season, material prosperity, peace and good order, as well as fostering, through good law and good example, the spiritual progress of whole nations.  The dammatic king (cakkavatti or dammiko dammaraja), thanks to his cosmological role, is able to initiate virtuous cycles of prosperity and spiritual regeneration that advance the whole world on its journey to its ultimate liberation.  Damma is, consequently, represented by the canonical literature as an instrument of political domination superior to military force.  Dammatic rule carries all before it, even the realms of gods and demons, who press around in dense invisible multitudes, as the ‘damma-rolling king’ (cakkavatti) rolls his dammatic wheel to each of the four cardinal points in succession.[58] 

Secondly, a less individualist perspective tends to emerge from a reflection on the worldly role of enlightened beings (buddhas), of whom the Buddha Gotama stands in a long succession.  The concerns of such beings during their earthly life are not limited to their own individual happiness.  The doctrine of ‘no-self’ (anatta) can hardly imply less than the potential expansion of human identities beyond what we think of as pertaining to the individual.  The story that the enlightened Gotama himself needed the prompting of the Brahma Sahampati to set out on his mission[59] reminds us that, whatever else may have motivated the Buddha subsequent to his enlightenment, it was not the goal of his ‘individual’ salvation.  The highest levels of spiritual progress are associated with the virtues of loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), and sympathetic joy (mudita), which indicate the kind of expansion of human concern beyond the bounds of the individual implied by the doctrine of ‘no-self’.    

Both of the above contexts give paradigmatic expression to the role of the giver (dayaka):  in the first case through the example of a king such as Asoka, who is the lay donor par excellence, for whom, as we shall see below, not even the personal wealth of the greatest emperor ever known can come close to exhausting the readiness to give; in the second case, through the example of the one who achieves in this life the goal of ‘no-self’ and attunes the whole of his subsequent behaviour whole-heartedly to that goal.  These constitute, of course, respectively, the paradigm of the lay Buddhist who gives his possessions (amisadana) and that of the monk (who has already given up his possessions) and who subsequently gives damma (dammadana) in the form of teaching and religious service (Strong, p. 107).  The paradigms are brought together by the traditions represented in the Jataka, the stories of Buddha Gotama’s previous incarnations.  Among these, the story of his most recent incarnation as the Prince Vessantara is perhaps the most popular and well-known.  The latter achieves ‘the supreme quality of liberality’ (dana paramitava), giving away everything, even his wife and children.  The story is told by the Buddha himself, who concludes it by explaining how each character – the Prince himself, his parents, his wife and his two children – had been reborn as his (Gotama’s) own family.[60]

The relation of the religious gift (dana) to sacrifice

I have shown that the Buddha’s teaching relates to brahmanic sacrifice and that it relates to the religious giving of dana.  It follows that there is an (at least implicit) relationship, via that teaching, between sacrifice and religious gift.  With the emergence of Buddhism, a religion centring upon sacrifice is superseded by a religion that gives pride of place, on the level of practice, to the religious gift.  As Mauss put it, a form of almsgiving (in the Buddhist case to virtuous recluses) is the ‘fruit’ of sacrifice.

                Does this relationship of sacrifice and gift ever reach the level of explicitness, either in recent scholarly discussion of Theravada Buddhism or in the Buddhist sources themselves?  In various contexts it does.  These contexts will form the subject of the following paragraphs.

                For reasons discussed above, generic sacrifice rarely enters the discussion of Buddhism.  However, the issue of the Maussian gift exchange emerges in various contexts, and, where it emerges, imparts to the specialist literature of Buddhism, as the virtue particular to the Maussian perspective, a comparative and anthropological dimension which that literature might otherwise lack.  Such contexts are to be found in the work of Tambiah, Reynolds, Strenski, Rozenzweig,[61] as well as in the sociological work of Silber. Because of the dominance of a Structuralist understanding of Maussian reciprocity as essentially symmetrical,  the gift of Buddhism is often, though not always (see below), characterized as an alternative manifestation of the gift ‘beyond’ reciprocity. 

Strenski’s paper is a particularly interesting example because it introduces into the Maussian debate, for the purposes of a fuller description of Buddhist practice, a notion of sacrificial reciprocity alongside the Lévy-Straussian notions of restricted and general reciprocity.  It is no doubt debateable whether, in so doing, it remains faithful to a Structuralist perspective.  At the grossly economic level, according to Strenski, Buddhist society could be characterized by a restricted reciprocity through which two groups – monk and lay, bhikkhu and dayaka – are mutually defined by gift transactions taking the form of material gifts (apisadana), on the one hand, and gifts of spiritual service (dammadana), on the other.  When attention is paid to the formal structure of these relations, however, it becomes evident they are so patterned as positively to disrupt any sense of a quid pro quo (Strenski, p. 472).  The case of the monk’s consecration of the donor’s proffered alms to the gods (Precept, pp.227-228) is a particularly good example.  Gifts that might have been made to individuals are in practice offered to the whole community.  They thereby return to the donor indirectly via obligations owed by individuals to society as a whole, in a manner that suggests general reciprocity.  Furthermore, if indigenous discourses are to be believed, not even general reciprocity will suffice as a description of what is really going on in the Buddhist gift.  For the donor’s expressed aim is not to identify with any holistically conceived notion of society – such as we might assume to be expressed in the Indian worshipper’s union with Atman – but to exit from society, and, in so doing, assist others to follow the same course.  Strenski uses the term ‘sacrificial reciprocity’ to allude to this soteriological dimension of Buddhist relationships (Strenski, p. 476).  This is entirely in line with the notion of sacrificial reciprocity I have been developing in this and the previous chapter.

A second context in which the relationship of dana to sacrifice emerges is constituted by the various (largely non-canonical) traditions regarding five-year festivals of dana (pancavarsika) held by dubiously historical Buddhist dayakas, beginning with Asoka, and giving paradigmatic expression to the dayaka role.  An analysis of these texts by John S. Strong offers a series of powerfully sacrificial images of the Buddhist dayaka, which offer the most striking resemblance to traditions of sacrifice in the Islamic and Judaeo-Christian traditions – in particular, the tradition of Abraham/Ibrahim’s offering of his son on Mt Moriah.

Many of these traditions speak, in addition to ordinary gifts of possessions, of the qualitatively different kind of gift constituted for the Buddhist tradition by the gift of self.  After a  pancavarsika held, according to a Chinese tradition, by a rich merchant, Sanakavasa, the Buddha’s friend, Ananda, while commending the gift suggests to Sanakavasa that, now he has made a gift of material goods, he should go on to make a gift of damma, by joining the Buddhist monkhood (Sangha) (Strong, p. 111).  Embarking on the monastic life is thus perceived as a total gift of one’s being that trumps every gift of possessions.  It is a gift that a royal donor would seem to be debarred from offering.  Yet the stories celebrate the royal benefactors for pushing such formal boundaries to the limit. In the account of the Asoka legend found in the Sinhalese national epic, the Mahavamsa,  Mogaliputta Tissa, the leader of the Sangha, after much royal generosity, urges the king to a culminating act which somewhat resembles that of Sanakavasa (Strong pp. 110-111).  Only, the possession of royal office determines that such a step take a somewhat different form: Asoka is advised to give his son, Mahinda, to the Sangha as a monk.  In the account of the most famous pancavarsika of all, that of Asoka, given in the Sanskrit Asokavadana, Asoka, though giving both himself and his son to the Sangha, is obliged to exempt the state treasury from his donations, thus leaving in the hands of his ministers – no doubt unwillingly – the means to redeem their king and the heir to the throne (Strong pp. 118-121).  One is reminded here of the theme of filial sacrifice and redemption at the heart of the Abrahamic traditions.  Within Buddhism it seems to express a spiritual renewal of the kingship, akin to the royal sacrificial rites of the African sacred kings that de Heusch describes.  A non-Pali text, influential in Burma and N.Thailand – the Lokapannati – describes the king as having his body soaked in oil and set on fire so that he burns for seven days as a real-life human light-offering (Strong, p.112).  At the end of the period, he returns, born again, to his kingship.  Such traditions are widely evoked in monastic consecration rituals in Burma and Thailand, where sons are customarily given up to the Sangha by their families for a time as temporary ordinands (i.e. novices) – a tradition that suggests a kind of Buddhist initiation or rite of passage (Strong, 117-118; Tambiah, ‘The Ideology of Merit’, p. 58).  In such cases, entry into the Sangha is itself a form of dana on the part of the family and community – and is certainly presented in such terms in ordination sermons that, according to Keyes, are widely known in N.E. Thailand (Keyes, ‘Kammic Theory of Popular Theravada Buddhism’, pp. 274-275).  The ceremony evokes the giving up and resuming of royalty – such as we see in the stories of royal pancavarsikas – with the ordinand, king for a day, dressed in full royal regalia, mounted on a horse, or elephant and shaded with the royal umbrella (Strong, p. 118).

I come finally to canonical scripture which treats the question of sacrifice quite explicitly here and there – though it is difficult to judge the tone of its references.  The most interesting of these – and the most indicative of the relationship between gift and sacrifice – is a text cited by Gombrich in this connection: the Kutadanta Sutta.[62]  It is worth discussing at some length.  First I shall given an outline of the content of the sermon.

The Buddha is responding to a question put to him about ‘the wrong sacrifice and the right (in its three modes and with its accessory articles of furniture of sixteen kinds)’.  The jargonistic formulation of the question introduces, no doubt facetiously, the world of brahmanic rigmarole.  It seems to invite an answer in the form of detailed ritual prescriptions guaranteed by the teacher’s authority to ensure the ultimate magical efficacy.  The Buddha’s response is evasive.  He recounts the story of a former king – Maha Vigita – who, as the Buddha tells us, put just this question to a certain, wise Brahmin chaplain.

And he (King Maha Vigita) had the Brahmin, his chaplain, called; and telling him all that he had thought, he said:  ‘So I would fain, O Brahmin, offer a great sacrifice – let the venerable one instruct me how – for my weal and my welfare for many days’.

Thereupon the Brahmin who was the chaplain said to the king: ‘The king’s country, Sire, is harassed and harried.  There are dacoits abroad who pillage the villages and townships, and who make the roads unsafe.  Were the king, so long as that is so, to levy a fresh tax, verily his majesty would be acting wrongly.  But perchance his majesty might think: ‘I’ll soon put a stop to these scoundrels’ game by degradation and banishment, and fines and bonds and death!’  But their licence cannot be satisfactorily put a stop to so.  The remnant left unpunished would still go on harassing the realm.  Now there is one method to adopt to put a thorough end to this disorder.  Whosoever there be in the king’s realm who devote themselves to keeping cattle and the farm, to them let his majesty the king give food and seed-corn.  Whosoever there be in the king’s realm who devote themselves to trade, to them let his majesty the king give capital.  Whosoever there be in the king’s realm who devote themselves to government service, to them let his majesty the king give wages and food.  Then those men, following each his own business, will no longer harass the realm;  the king’s revenue will go up; the country will be quiet and at peace;  and the populace, pleased one with another and happy, dancing their children in their arms, will dwell with open doors.’ (Kutadanta Sutta,  pp. 175-176)

These recommendations seem to sidestep the whole issue of sacrifice.  Nevertheless, the king offers no objection, but puts the recommendations into effect. When the results turn out as the Brahmin had predicted, he then recalls him, and once again returns to his original question regarding the ritual prescriptions for a sacrifice that he now feels unquestionably ready to perform (in its three modes and its accessory articles of furniture of sixteen kinds).  Now, at last, he receives instruction regarding the modes and accessory articles.  The three modes are as follows:

1.Should his majesty the king, before starting on the great sacrifice, feel any such regret as: ‘Great alas, will be the portion of my wealth used up herein,’  let not the king harbour such regret.

2. & 3.Verbatim repetition of the above(Kutadanta Sutta, p. 178)

The sixteen accessory articles of furniture turn out to be qualities of character that the king and his chaplain are said to already possess. 

What are to make of this?  Asked for efficacious ritual prescriptions the Brahmin offers recommendations as to the necessary preparations, qualities of character and disposition of the participants.  The implication is surely to reduce the role of esoteric ritual expertise as represented by Brahminism to practically zero.  Does the sacrifice itself contribute anything to the desired result that could not have been achieved by the preparations themselves, even if they had not been followed by a ritual action?  It is as though a faith healer were to stipulate that, as a necessary precondition for the success of his ritual action, the patient should first make use of every recourse known to Western scientific medicine!

Is the text debunking sacrifice or endeavouring to re-interpret it? (Theravada Buddhism, p. 85)  The latter possibility should not be lightly dismissed – and is borne out by what ensues. The Buddha finishes his story, and the interlocutor stares open-mouthed.  What astonishes him is not the story itself, but the Buddha’s manner of telling it – as though he had been present himself either as the king or the chaplain!  Then, the penny drops.  Full of awe, the interlocutor asks the Buddha whether – in a previous incarnation – he had himself been the chaplain of the story.  And the Buddha responds in the affirmative.  At this point the interlocutor puts another question, and receives an answer that is of highly pertinent to our argument here:

‘Is there, O Gotama, any other sacrifice less difficult and less troublesome, with more fruit and more advantage still than this?’

‘Yes, O Brahmin, there is.’

‘And what, O Gotama, may that be?’

‘The perpetual gifts kept up in a family where they are given specifically to virtuous recluses.’  (Kutadanta Sutta, p. 181)

There is something about the oblique manner in which the topic of sacrifice is addressed by the story which seems characteristic of the Buddhist approach as we have represented it.  As earlier stated, a broadly renunciatory stance in regard to sacrifice is set askew by ethicized nature of the new religion.  This dictates that, while (and, indeed, because) ritual sacrifice is effectively superseded as the central practice of religion, it ceases to be what is primarily at issue.  Thanks to a new focus on the psychological formation of intention (cetana), sacrificial ritual loses its paradigmatic status.  At the same time, the cosmological dimension of religion, and, with it, the dammatic potential of royal action, remains a crucial element in the Buddhist religion.  Where the king is concerned, the behavioural manifestations of a good intentional disposition (e.g. the generosity of Asoka) have an enormous capacity to initiate virtuous cosmic cycles.  Both aspects are illustrated by the Kutadanta Sutta.  The importance of intentional disposition is seen both in the formulation of the three modes, and in the focus on the preconditions at the expense of ritual formalities.  The entire story is little more than a narrative expression of the primacy of intention.  At the same time, the dammatic potential of such intention, when exhibited by a king, is evidenced by the dramatic turn in the kingdom’s material fortunes achieved, prior even to the enactment of the ritual.

                More importantly, however, the sermon suggests the supersession of sacrificial ritual by the sacrificial giving of dana.  This is first suggested when the king calls on the chaplain’s sacrificial expertise and receives instead the instruction to practise a bit of Keynesian economics in the form of well-directed subsidies to farmers, traders and government officials.  But it is thoroughly brought home where ‘perpetual gifts kept up in a family’ are claimed to be a more fruitful form of ‘sacrifice’ than the great sacrifice of the king that has been the subject of the sutta. 

The persistence of symbolic actions in Theravada Buddhism

There remains the third point in our paradigm of ethicization: the proposition that symbolic action does not altogether disappear from the scene, but becomes disengaged from substantive giving.  The ritual, in other words, becomes entirely symbolic, and does not differentiate between worshippers on grounds of wealth; whereas the real-life gifts, through which that paradigm is actualized, reflect differences in wealth, though in a non-ritual manner that does not lend them symbolic importance.  This is essentially the ‘widow’s mite’ principal, which stipulates that a small donation on the part of a pauper may be more spiritually efficacious than a larger one from a wealthy man because of what it means for the donor.

                The symbolic action, in this case, consists in veneration for the Buddha on the part of the individual worshipper in shape of offerings of incense, flowers and candles ostensibly addressed to images of the Buddha.  It shares with Hindu rites its designation as puja, though the Buddhist practice is distinguished from Hindu worship on grounds discussed below.  To bring Buddhist practice into the discussion of sacrifice goes against indigenous usage.  First, developments in Indian religious tradition give rise, as we have already argued, to a foregrounding of the distinction between blood-sacrifice and other forms of offering which is not congenial to broader definitions of sacrifice.  Second, the distinction of Buddhist puja from the puja of Indian deities tends itself to be strongly marked, at least on a cognitive level – and all the more so in environments, such the rural Sinhalese community studied by Gombrich, in which the co-existence cheek by jowl of the two forms of practice within the same community, or even within the same temple complex, forces the comparison on our attention (Precept and Practice, pp. 142-143). On the one hand, no Buddhist would describe an action of Buddhist puja as sacrifice.  On the other, the outward and superficial similarity between the practice of making offerings to Hindu (Tamil) deities and to the Buddha is sufficiently evident for an ethnographer such as Gombrich to regard the syncretist explanation of Buddhist practices as deriving from Hindu cult as a possibility he needs to refute. 

                The objective of this chapter is to explore the fate of symbolic practice that is sacrificial (in the broad sense of sacrifice earlier defined) in ethicized forms of religion such as Theravada Buddhism, and to determine whether it is in line with our theoretical paradigm.  Once again, there is a convenient overlap here between the objectives of this study and those of Gombrich.  The latter is primarily concerned to establish whether popular Sinhalese practices square with the Buddhist doctrine of intention and personal responsibility, and are properly Buddhist, rather than syncretist.  This determines an emphasis in his work on the relation between symbolic practice and ethicization which largely coincides with our own interest in the development of salvation religions. 

As in the case of dana, the essence of Gombrich’s argument can be briefly stated.  Above all, the offerings made in Buddhist puja have no ‘goal’; they are not made with a view to encompassing the fulfilment of individual or communal desires (which, according to Biardeau, is the traditional Indian manner of conceptualizing the purposiveness of an action in which divine aid is invoked).  Rather, ‘the thought itself, the emotion on the mind of the worshipper, if it is pure (suddha), makes for what we might translate as spiritual development (hita diyunuva)’ (Precept and Practice, p.138).  This, of course, is entirely in line with the doctrine of intention.  A canonical text sometimes cited in justification of Buddhist puja itself strongly corroborates this interpretation of the practice. 

At the thought, Amanda: ‘This is the cairn of that Exalted One, of that Able Awakened One’, the hearts of many shall be made calm and happy; and since they there had calmed and satisfied their hearts they will be reborn after death, when the body has dissolved, in the happy realms of heaven. (Maha-parinibbana Sutta, Dialogues of the Buddha, Part II, pp. 156-157)

The above text forms part of the Buddha’s answer to a question posed by his friend Ananda about the types of men worthy to be honoured by a cairn (stupa) after death.  The exchange is set in the context of an account of the events and discussions of the Buddha’s final days, such as can hardly fail to raise, in the reader’s mind, the question of the subsequent treatment of the Buddha’s own mortal remains.  Regular offerings of flowers to the Buddha’s own image are clearly not what the Buddha seems to envisage in this passage; however, the relevance of the text to contemporary practice becomes less obscure when it is recalled that Buddha images are notionally relic shrines – as explained below – and thus embody the virtue of the cairn (Precept and Practice, p. 134). This, as our text makes clear, is to instil ‘calm and happy’ thoughts in the onlookers and cause them to be reborn in heaven.  The manner in which it does so may not be immediately clear to us, and is discussed in further detail below.  The fact that it instils such thoughts is nevertheless clearly stated – and this certainly accords with the orthodox justification of Buddhist puja that Gombrich proposes.  

As in the case of dana, the spirit of the canonical text is corroborated to a remarkable degree by the spirit of contemporary observance.  By comparison with the worship of Tamil deities, Buddhist puja is an individual rather than a collective affair.  Whereas worship at Hindu shrines gives symbolic expression to a differentiated social entity through the redistribution of food offered to the deity (prasada) among the gathered worshippers, the substances offered in Buddhist puja are consumed in the course of their use.  Where such substances are edible – for example, in the case of food offerings made to the Buddha’s image in monasteries – the leftovers have no spiritual value, but are simply thrown away after the rite.  This is in line with the idea that the Buddha, unlike the Hindu gods, does not benefit from what is offered, since he has exited from the cosmos once and for all.  The ‘purpose’ of the Buddhist puja thus consists entirely in the positive affective state instilled in the worshipper.  When seeking to express this positive affective state, Gombrich’s informant emphasizes, above all, the emotion of joy (priti).

When I asked the head monk at Migala about mal puja (offerings of flowers) he said that they are not for the Buddha, who is dead, but for us to derive joy (priti) from looking at them.  Buddhaghosa says that one gets Buddhalambanapiti, joy derived from contemplation of the Buddha, by looking at a Bo tree or caitya.  The head monk’s reply was therefore in this tradition in describing the emotion of a worshipper as priti, joy, though he gave it an interesting and perhaps idiosyncratic twist by making the flowers themselves the immediate reason for joy.  (Precept and Practice, p. 139)

It is significant that the substances most frequently offered – flowers, incense, lights – are either highly perishable or consumed in the process of offering.  They are appropriate to offerings that do not envisage any purpose beyond the offering itself.  Perhaps, the head monk’s ‘idiosyncratic’ attribution of the reason for joy to the flowers themselves has to do with the fact that their beauty is associated with transience. 

                We may conclude that the case of Theravada Buddhism presents us in the case of puja with a kind of religious practice that outwardly resembles sacrifice, in the broader sense developed in the previous chapter, to the extent that it consists in religiously motivated gift-acts (flowers, incense, lights) – but which differs from it in respect to the fact that it envisages no goal beyond the engendering of positive kammatic effects in the worshipper.  Furthermore, the ethicized nature of the ritual gift-act is reflected in its separation from material giving: substances consumed in the process of offering take the place of the substances that are consecrated and redistributed in less ethicized forms of ritual practice.  Both purpose and effect of Buddhist puja are entirely symbolic.  Of course, the same positive intentional dispositions that express themselves in symbolic gift-acts also give rise to gift-acts that are not merely symbolic but substantive, and vary in form with the status of the giver.  But those substantive and differentiated gift-acts (i.e. dana) do not take place in a ritual context that grounds difference in the cosmological order. This state of affairs corresponds very precisely to our paradigm of symbolic action in an ethicized religion.   

The conformity of Theravada Buddhism to the paradigm of ethicized sacrifice

I have now completed my demonstration of the conformity of the religious practice of Theravada Buddhism to the paradigm of ethicization developed earlier on the basis of Parry’s discussion of Hindu practice.  The next section of this study will seek to demonstrate the applicability of the paradigm to the case about which Mauss makes his brief comments on the practice of almsgiving and its relation to sacrifice – the case of Islam.  First, however, I shall briefly return to the paradigm of sacrifice set out in Chapter 4 in order to consider how far the ethicized practice exemplified in the gift of Theravada Buddhism can be accommodated within it.  Its principal elements – to recapitulate – are the following: 1. that sacrifice is a response to the state of indebtedness regarding the source of life; 2. that it can address itself to the human as well as to the spiritual sphere; 3. that it is, in some sense, reciprocal.

                As I have already stated, the ethicization of sacrifice relates primarily to elements 2 and 3.  The ethicized gift-act of dana does indeed address itself to the human as well as to the spiritual sphere – though in a manner that is quite distinct from that of non-ethicized sacrifice.  The spiritual and mundane are addressed simultaneously in the gift; but that simultaneity is the result of a diremption of the (spiritual) intention from the (material) effect of the gift-act rather than of a merging of human and divine in the person of the donor/addressee.  To the extent that intention and effect are envisaged independently of each other as affecting, respectively, the spiritual and mundane sphere, the result is a separation of the spiritual and mundane, not their convergence: the donor gives for a spiritual purpose but to a human individual (generally a monk) – and the spiritual purpose is consequently distinguished the from whatever material effect the gift may have on the human individual.  Similarly, the ethicized gift-act of dana is reciprocal, though only on the soteriological level.  A return on the gift is anticipated, but primarily in respect to the intention of the gift-act, and hence, primarily, in the hereafter.  This return has nothing to do with the behaviour of the human individual who happens to be the recipient of the gift.  Indeed, the intention to obtain a return from one’s gift-act in the here-and-now would compromise its soteriological value; while the deferment and spiritualization of the return effectively frees the recipient from any specific obligation to the donor.  Thus both the ethicized and non-ethicized gift simultaneously engage the religious and the social sphere – but they do so in ways which have contrasting implications; in the one case, the gift produces religiously-grounded social difference: in the other, a degree of socio-religious equality in face of an spiritual sphere that is distanced from every individual human donor/recipient.  

                There remains the crucial question whether the ethicized gift-act of dana conforms to the first, and most essential, element of our paradigm of sacrifice: which is that it should be a response to a state of indebtedness towards the source of life.  It has to be admitted that, as it stands, this definition of sacrifice hardly fits the case of Buddhist religious practice.  Source (or origin) is incompatible with the Buddhist idea of a cycle of continuity having its origin in ignorance, the first beginning of which is ‘not to be perceived in such a way as to postulate that there was no ignorance beyond a certain point’ (Rahula, p. 27).  Life (or being) – which we would have to equate with the Buddhist cycle of continuity (samsara) – is something that it is the whole object of Buddhism to escape, and cannot therefore be identified with spiritual well-being.  Indebtedness is akin to the craving (tanha) that a Buddhist might see as driving samsaric suffering (dukkha), not the joy (prita) that manifests liberation.

                However, the basic idea that life itself makes some kind of claim over the individual is not strange to Buddhism.  Indeed, it is strongly corroborated in the very relation that Buddhism presupposes between cosmic samsara, on the one hand, and the existential experience of tanha, on the other.  This fundamental relation implicates the non-enlightened Buddhist in cosmic socio-political realities that transcend him/her (i.e. samsara) no less than the obligation to sacrifice implicates Biardeau’s Brahmin householder – though, of course, in the case of the Buddhist, that cosmic relation is experienced negatively rather than positively.  The underlying symmetry between the non-ethicized and the ethicized understanding of the relation to life is obscured by the replacement of the idea of indebtedness by that of desire.  However, the essence of the relation between these apparently disparate concepts is contained, as we have seen, in what Biardeau and Malamoud have to say about the socially constructed nature of desire (Biardeau, pp. 70-73).  If the desires of the individual are largely a function of his/her place in the world as the bearer of a particular group identity, then it becomes comprehensible that desire and social obligation should in some degree converge.  And this is essentially what Biardeau argues in relation to the Brahmin householder:

The man who performs it (karman=sacrifice) is only aware of keeping his place in the socio-cosmic system […]  His social and family bonds are so strong that his troubles and joys are to a large extent those of the group to which he belongs.  He cannot think of his own prosperity without thinking of that of his whole lineage […] Reference to himself as ego is scarcely made explicit outside the vicissitudes of his physical life. (Biardeau, p. 37)

Moreover, we can also understand, why, with the reversal in the ethical polarity that, on the arrival of Buddhism, affects our apprehension of the relation to the samsaric realm, desire should be what is targeted as needing to be renounced.  According to Biardeau, desire is targeted as the face under which the social obligation of class or caste will inevitably present itself to that new individualist identity that Buddhism was the first to conjure up. 

                It follows, then, that the fundamental human situation to which religion (Buddhist or other) constitutes a response – what we earlier termed ‘the state of indebtedness to the source of life’ – continues in Buddhism to be what is essentially at stake, even if that situation is now formulated in more negative terms that reflect a different attitude on the part of the individual.  An obligated, or desiring, relation to life remains a fundamental given of the human relation to the sacred, even though, in the case of Buddhism, our response to it takes the form of a radical renunciation rather than willing compliance.  If this is right, then the Buddhist conceptualization of the human relation to the sacred can be thought of as a mirror-inversion of our sacrificial paradigm.  The ethical polarities reverse, while the underlying structure remains the same.  Life continues to be what is fundamentally at issue; but it is now regarded negatively rather than positively, and seen from the perspective of its potential future cessation, rather than its eternal reproduction.  In practice, this inversion corresponds, on the practical level, to the existence in Buddhism of religious practices such as dana and puja which resemble their Hindu counterparts, yet invert their cosmological directionality.  The religiously motivated gift remains, and continues to be productive of social identity; but, under the Buddhist regime, the practice of gift, when rightly intentioned, is seen as conducive to an eventual cessation of that practice, rather than its eternal reproduction, and, accordingly, the identity that it upholds is seen as a universal solidarity on the side of the ultimate dissolution of identities, rather than an identity that seeks its own perpetuation.

This, however, poses a further conundrum for our model of ethicized sacrifice.  A religious gift would, in order to comply with our paradigm, seem to require some specifiable spiritual addressee, corresponding to what in the Abrahamic religions, we would define, over and against the gifts human beneficiaries, as ‘God’.  A Muslim worshipper, who offers alms to the widow and orphan, does so, as we shall see, ‘for the purposes of Allah’ (fi sabil ulah).  What analogous cosmological principal does the Buddhist worshipper address when he/she offers alms to the virtuous recluse?  The problem is complicated by the fact ‘gods’ are indeed honoured in Buddhist gifts of dana in which the donor may envisage better incarnations for himself/herself as well as nibbana.  How can the spiritual addressee of the gift be specified in such a way as to encompass both worldly and other-worldly concerns?  Of course, such a question arises largely in response to the paradigm of ethicized sacrifice that this study is itself setting out.  It is unlikely to be answered in so many words by studies that do not share that paradigm – or, for that matter, any paradigm at all.  However, a possible answer is suggested by a number of studies that attempt to explicate the relation between Buddhist principles and observed practice of the dayaka without theories of an accommodation to pre- or non-Buddhist practice or of a separation of ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ levels of religion.  These are the studies such as those already cited of Tambiah, Strong, or Reynolds that seek a Buddhist cosmological explanation of observed practice.  What we find here is the specification of Buddhist spiritual goals in terms that span the worldly and the other-worldly – and the Buddhist concept that seems to offer itself in that context as best able to fulfil such a function is that of damma.  This designates a principle which is both imminent and at work in the samsaric realm and, ultimately, eschatological.  And none seems better able to accommodate the idea that, for merit-makers, the path to nibbana and heaven may be, as Strong put it, ‘for all practical purposes one and the same’ (p.122).

Ethicization in Islam

I know of no example of a theory of ethicization, such as Gombrich’s, being developed by Islamic scholars, or Western anthropologists of Islam.  This is surprising, given that Muslim charitable giving, or sadaka, is certainly what is foremost in Mauss’s mind when he makes his brief remarks on almsgiving and its relation to sacrifice.  No Islamic specialist, to my knowledge, has given to Mauss’s text the kind of attention it has recently received from specialists of Indian religions, like Parry or Strenski; nor is the case of Islam much considered in sociological discussion of Maussian theory.  And it is not just the issue of ethicization in Islam that goes unremarked in the specialist and sociological literature: there appears to be no instance of the sociological discussion of Muslim sadaka.  This leaves the topic of sacrifice as the only context in which we might hope to find some engagement with the issue of ethicization on the part of specialists.

                A practice of ritual sacrifice persists in mainstream Islam – though it is not alluded to by Mauss himself in the context of his remarks on almsgiving.  This is the practice defined as:

The compulsory slaughter of an animal as part of the obligatory pilgrimage (Hajj) and the optional slaughter by nonpilgrims on the occasion of Id al-Adha (the Festival of Sacrifice), viewed as a commemoration of the sacrifice of the prophet Abraham.  Muslim lore has it that Abraham’s son Ismail was the original token of sacrifice demanded by God but was miraculously replaced by a lamb.[63]

The bearing of Mauss’s remarks would lead us to anticipate that this sacrificial act would not occupy as central a place in the Muslim religion as analogous rituals hold in non-ethicized religions where they continue to be the dominant form of religious practice.  The evidence seems to conform to this expectation.  Ritual sacrifice has – it is fair to say – a secondary, though not insignificant, role in Islam.  Yet, for the purposes of our investigation, the practice has an interest that is disproportionate to its importance in Muslim life.  This is because, unlike the symbolic practice of Indian religions, the practice of Muslims avows, in its patently sacrificial nature, continuity with the practice of non-ethicized religion.  There has consequently arisen – at least in this narrow department of the Muslim faith – a discourse that relates the practice of Islam to what may have preceded it.  This discourse develops within the text of the Qur’an itself.  The story of the sacrifice performed by Ibrahim (Abraham), founder of the pilgrimage, suggests the substitution for human sacrifice (such as Ibrahim initially envisages) of the kind of animal sacrifice approved by Muslim tradition (Qur’an 37 (As-Saffat), 83-112).  Furthermore, detailed prescriptions for Muslim sacrifice evoke in preciser detail, albeit fleetingly, comparisons with the pagan sacrifice that the Muslim sacrifice has superseded (Qur’an 22 (Al-Hajj), 37).  Such texts, and the (initially oral) traditions (Sunnah) surrounding them, have given rise to some limited reflection in the Muslim tradition on the practice of sacrifice.  The question that confronts us in this study is how far the change in sacrificial practice represented by the Muslim tradition can properly be characterized as ethicization.

Islam and sacrifice

What is the relative importance of ritual sacrifice in Islam?  The primary obligations are represented by the five pillars, which include obligations that are daily (prayer/salat) or annual (alms/zakat; fasting/sawm).  That of pilgrimage/Hajj is once in a lifetime.  Sacrifice is one of the fifteen or so obligations of pilgrimage for those whose wealth is in excess of a certain threshold (nisab).  It has to take place in a prescribed place (Mina) and within a prescribed interval of time (10^th-13^th Dhu’l Hijjah), which begins with the day of Eid – the most important festival of the Muslim calendar.  The same practice of sacrifice at Eid is also recommended (mastahab) or mandatory (wajjib) (depending on the legal school that is followed) for Muslims not on pilgrimage – i.e. for each and every adult Muslim.[64]

                If the importance of ritual sacrifice in a religion is to be judged by the necessity for, and frequency of, its performance in the lives of believers, then, in the case of Islam, other rituals (e.g. prayer, alms, fasting) have to be considered more central.  Yet, as a symbolic enactment of the institution of community, the Muslim sacrifice of Eid has a particular interest for the sociologist of religion.  Not only does it give ritual expression to the unity of the Muslim world (Dar- al-Islam) around its symbolic axis in Mecca, as Muslims everywhere perform the same ritual act as their co-religionaries on Hajj.  But that ritual enactment is associated with a kind of mythology of origin, through its commemoration of the figure who serves, more than any other, in the etiolated mythology of the Qur’an, as a concentrator of mythological value – the archetypical prophet, Abraham (Ibrahim), founder of the Ka’ba, and institutor of the pilgrimage.  Of course, the institutor of pilgrimage is not the bringer of the ultimate revelation – a role that falls to Mohammed himself.  This separation of roles sets sacrifice (as an event of pilgrimage) at one remove from the origin of Islam and its characteristic form of polity (ummah), giving it a somewhat secondary role.      

If we now return, for a moment, to our paradigm of ethicization – and, in particular, to Point 3 – it will be seen that the case of Muslim sacrifice, with its powerful symbolism, but relatively subordinate place in Muslim life, corresponds to our expectation of an ethicized religion.  We have said nothing as yet of the details of the Muslim sacrifice.  Evidently, however, whatever substantive giving and exchange takes place in Islam, will take place outside this limited ritual context – something that we might have predicted from our paradigm of ethicized religion.

To go further in our analysis requires us to consider, above all, the aspect of intention.   Here, as in the case of Theravada Buddhism, the essence of the matter is quickly stated.  Ask any Muslim about the purpose of sacrifice, and they are likely to respond with the words of the Sura 22 of the Qur’an (al-Hajj):

                We have made the camels signs of God for you.

                There is good for you in this.

                So pronounce the name of God over them

                As they stand with their forefeet in a line.

                When they have fallen (slaughtered) on their sides,

                Eat of (their meat) and feed those who are content with little,

                And those who supplicate.

                That is why We have brought them under your subjugation

                So that you may be grateful.

                It is not their meat or blood that reaches God:

                It is the fealty (god-awareness) of your heart that reaches Him.

                That is why He has subjugated them to you

                That you may glorify God for having shown you the way. [65]

The crucial lines, for our purposes, are those in bold.  What is said to reach God is taqwa (here translated ‘fealty’), a term sometimes rendered ‘god-awareness’.  What we would be mistaken to believe was reaching God – and, by implication, what we might be misled by the sacrifice of other religions to believe was reaching God – is the meat and blood itself.  It will be evident that the insistence here on the importance to God of the intentional disposition of the individual worshipper, as opposed, for example, to the quantity of meat and blood, is absolutely in accord with characteristic emphasis of ethicized religions.  There is, by comparison with the sacrifice of the pre-Islamic past (jahiliyya), clearly an internalization of sacrifice in the sense that term possesses for our paradigm.

                The case of Islam differs, however, from that of Buddhism in that the ritual involves meat and blood, and not the purely symbolic, and normally materially valueless, substances of Buddhist puja.   The purely symbolic value of the act of sacrifice thus raises the question of the disposal of the meat and blood.  If they are not destined to be consumed by the deity (even in some symbolic way), then what is to be done with them?  The above text, among others, stipulates that they be consumed by the sacrificers themselves, and by the poor in the human community to which those worshippers belong.  In practice, Muslims, celebrating Eid, are traditionally enjoined to offer a proportion of the meat (traditionally a third) to the poor.[66]  This applies both to those performing the sacrifice at home (qurbani) or on Hajj (hadi).  This custom is still followed where circumstances allow, even in non-Islamic countries.  An alternative commonly adopted in practice is to ‘make one’s qurbani’ in the form of a charitable donation.  So far as the hadi is concerned, the process of slaughtering and distribution, on account of the numbers of pilgrims on Hajj, has become highly institutionalized, with pilgrims honouring their obligations by purchasing a voucher for the beasts slaughtered on their behalf, and the meat being shipped out in enormous quantities from Mecca and distributed to impoverished Muslims elsewhere.[67]  One way or another, these practices introduce into the concept of sacrifice, as an essential corollary of the spiritual aspect of god-awareness, a strong emphasis on beneficence and charitable welfare.  If anything, the contemporary practice of substituting a donation or the purchase of a voucher for the slaughter of an animal seems to reinforce this aspect, though the centrality of charitable welfare to the whole notion of Muslim sacrifice evidently goes back to the Qur’an itself.  ‘To the ordinary mind’, Maulana Muhammed Ali goes so far as to write, ‘the idea underlying sacrifice seems no more than charity, and the question arises:  May not a Muslim, instead of sacrificing an animal, give away its price in charity?’[68]  Ali answers his own question in the negative.  But the very posing of the question suggests the extent to which – at least in relatively recent times – ‘the socio–economic rationales’, as the Oxford Encyclopedia puts it, ‘seem to predominate even over socio-symbolic ones’.[69]  An additional indication of the charitable aspect of sacrifice is that the same principle of nisab operates for sacrifice as for the mandatory charity of the zakat (the annual giving of a fortieth that constitutes Islam’s third pillar), setting the minimum threshold for payment. 

                When the aspects of intention and charitable welfare are brought together, we see the two-fold destination of the ethicized gift – an offering which operates on both the spiritual and material level, simultaneously addressing God and the fellow believer: the first, through its expression of the worshipper’s pious intention, the second, through its conferment of a material benefit.  The Muslim gives for the purposes of God (fi sabil ulah) and to the fellow believer.  The first dimension is that of intention, the second that of charitable welfare. Thus Yusuf Ali comments, of the sacrificial animals referred to in the above text of Sura 22, that ‘if they are used for sacrifice, they become symbols by which men show that they are willing to give up some of their own benefits for the sake of satisfying the needs of their poorer brethren’.[70]  ‘Our symbolic act finds practical expression in benevolence’, he further states.  Sayyid Qutb speaks in this context of the link between ‘rituals of faith and rituals of worship’, reminding us of the insistent qur’anic pairing of worship (salat) and charity (zakat) as complementary expressions of faith – the symbolic and the practical.[71]

This brings us to the second point in our paradigm which concerns the element of individualization that goes along with a focus on spiritual intention in ethicized religion.  How is this represented in Islam?

                God-awareness (taqwa), unlike large-scale material generosity, is within the capacity of every believer.  So, it is no surprise that in Islam the sacrifice is enjoined on each and every adult believer in possession of the minimum threshold of the nisab.[72]  The appropriate offering for the competent individual can be a sheep, goat or ram; larger animals (e.g. camel or cow) may suffice for seven persons.  The implications of this, from the perspective of individualization, quickly emerge when the Eid ritual is seen against the background of what tends to take place in the sacrificial ritual of non-ethicized religions (described in Chapter 4).  Frequently, as we have seen, a sacrifice on the scale of the polity itself is undertaken on behalf of the community as a whole by its priestly or kingly representative(s).  As the channel of divine beneficence, we have observed that the community’s representative becomes associated with the beneficence for which he serves as the channel – and there is a consequent association of socio-political representation and religious status, which is the basis of social hierarchy.  Ostentation is consequently a common element, with the power of conspicuous ritual giving serving to associate the community’s representatives with the sacred powers presiding over its origin. What occurs throughout the Muslim world is comparable in respect to its unification of a socio-religious world about its cosmic axis at a particular moment, since people sacrificing at home throughout the Muslim world are united with those on Hajj.  In the words of Maulana Muhammed Ali:

Hundreds of thousands of people assemble there from all quarters of the world, people who have sacrificed all comforts of life for no object except to develop the idea of sacrifice […]  for the sake of God alone.  However grand that idea, it receives a greater grandeur from the fact that the people who have not been able to make that sacrifice actually are made to share the same desire and show their willingness to make the same sacrifice by the ostensible act of the sacrifice of an animal, which is the final act of pilgrimage.  One desire moves the hearts of the whole Muslim world from one end to the other at one moment, sacrifice, the red letters of which can be read by the ignorant and learned alike.(Ali, p. 442)

But, if this sacrifice recalls the sacrifice of non-ethicized cultures in regard to its cosmological and unifying significance, what evidently differs markedly is that the single cosmological unit constituted by the once-and-for-everyone performance of the king or priest has been replaced by a myriad, cosmological units constituted by individuals or households, though these sociological atoms are all orientated around a single common axis.  Nothing could be further from the idea of socio-symbolic representation than this atomization of sacrificial agency.  Each sacrifice has to be accredited to a named individual as ‘their’ qurbani.  Where slaughtering is undertaken centrally this is sometimes manifested in the labelling of carcasses.[73]  Where this is not practical, the existence of a clear intention on the part of the individual offering the qurbani (on their own, or someone else’s behalf) is reckoned to be sufficient.

In other words, the form of Muslim practice suggests the ultimate devolution of sacrificial agency – in theory, to the individual.  In the absence of priestly representation, each worshipper becomes, as in the case of the purely symbolic worship of salat, a priest unto himself.  In practice, of course, the need to purchase a carcass restricts the extent of this devolution to those possessing a certain means, whereas the obligation of salat, as a sequence of words and gestures, exhibits more perfectly the absolute universality of the ritual function.  Nevertheless, in the ritual constitution of monadic social unities, all directed to a common empty ritual centre (the qiblah), these ritual actions have a common style.[74]  Needless to say, through this universalization of the sacrificial function and the standardization of its style and content, the element of ostentation that is so much part and parcel of sacrificial ritual in non-ethicized settings is effectively excluded, along with the socio-symbolic differentiation that underpins hierarchy.  In sacrifice, as in other areas of Muslim practice, the relatively fixed form of ritual produces a uni-form-ity,[75] conducive, as Ali argues, to the equality of all before God. 

Islam and the religious gift

The question of the religious gift has already been touched on, since ritual sacrifice involves an element of substantive giving; the meat, it will be remembered, is offered out of a religious motivation, yet goes in part to feed the needy.  To this extent, the act of sacrifice itself exhibits the ethicized structure described in our paradigm, whereby, in the words of Mauss, ‘The gods and the spirits accept that the share of wealth hitherto destroyed in useless sacrifices should serve the poor and children’.  The question remains whether this ethicized structure manifested in Muslim sacrifice is replicated in actions of giving outside the ritual sphere and having a purely ethical character.

                The Islamic concept that comes closest to answering this specification is that of sadaka – which is, of course, the Abrahamic concept which Mauss himself uses to exemplify the idea of almsgiving.[76]  The word sadaka belongs to a constellation of terms (including zakat and, sometimes, infaq) employed by the Qur’an more or less interchangeably to denote the specifically religious gift (Gibb, Encyclopedia, p. 709).  Later tradition tends increasingly to restrict zakat to the obligatory gift of a fortieth per year (the third pillar), leaving sadaka to denote the enormously wider sphere of voluntary religious giving.  Popular etymology associates sadaka with the idea of the sincerity (sidk) of the almsgiver’s religious belief (p. 708).  Here already we find a suggestion of the working-out of a symbolic paradigm in mundane (i.e. non-symbolic) actions of everyday life – which is the essence of the relation of symbolic ritual and substantive gift-acts according to our paradigm of ethicized religion.  In the words of Ali, prayer (i.e. symbolic worship) ‘is useless, if it does not lead to charity’ (Ali, p. 458).

                The application of sadaka is enormously inclusive.  It includes what has market-value, but also what has no market value: lawful intercourse with one’s wife; giving assistance with the loading of a beast; every step taken towards prayer; planting something from which a person, bird or animal later eats; supporting one’s family; greeting with a smile – in fact, just about any act of kindness (Gibb, p. 710).  Conduct meriting a reward is, in fact, frequently referred to as sadaka by the hadith.  Its recipients can be anyone, rich or poor (though gifts to the needy are said to be more meritorious) – even non-Muslims.  The Prophet is said never to have delivered a sermon without mentioning sadaka (p. 711).  Its overwhelming importance is also evident from the Qur’an, when it is remembered that the concept to which we are referring as sadaka here figures also under the terms zakat and infaq.  In short, sadaka encompasses much of the ethical dimension of the Muslim religion – the outworking in day-to-day life of the religious principles asserted, in largely symbolically terms, in the ritual actions of believers. 

What defines sadaka, as opposed to gifts in a wider sense (hiba) – including gifts that would satisfy the definition of Maussian reciprocity – is the intention (niyyah) with which the action is performed (p. 712).  To be sadaka, the gift must be made in order to please God in the hope of a reward in the hereafter.  As such it constitutes a kurba, an act performed as a means of coming closer to God.  The reality of this spiritual dimension of sadaka is attested by the fact that God himself is sometimes identified, quite explicitly, as the addressee of the gift act by the Qur’an (9.104; 2.243) and in the juristic tradition.  It is also evident from a number of juristic implications of the concept that show up very clearly in the tradition.  The first of these is the exclusion of any possibility of reciprocity with the human recipient of the gift; to the extent that the gift is for God, it is from Him that the reward must be expected, not the human recipient (p. 712).  As with the dana of Indian religion, the reciprocity of the religious gift is exclusively soteriological.  A second implication is the validity of what we have termed the ‘widow’s mite’ principle (p. 710).  Because it is the religious intention of the gift, rather than its outward form, that matters to God, the merit of the gift is seen to reside in the degree of self-denial it entails for the donor rather than in impact it has on the human recipient; sadaka consisting of a dirham that constitutes half the almsgiver’s property is more meritorious than 100,000 dirhams given by a person of great wealth.  A third and final implication is the irrevocable nature of sadaka (p. 713).  What is once given cannot be taken back, whether because the recipient, in the first instance, is God, or because the donor’s heavenly reward already provides moral consideration for the gift.  Where the nature of a gift is disputed, the recipient resisting revocation has the burden of proving that it is sadaka.

                 Islam would appear, then, to exhibit at the very heart of its ethical system an all-important concept that possesses precisely the same bifurcate structure as the dana of Indian religion.  The Muslim gift of sadaka envisages, first and foremost, a spiritual addressee – God – with whom a spiritual account is opened, a relationship pursued, and reward expected, though the material content of the offering does not reach Him: second, a human addressee – the recipient – with whom there is no reciprocity of relationship, but who, as recipient, benefits from its material content.

The relation of the religious gift (sadaka) to sacrifice

The homology of structure between sacrifice and sadaka is evident.  Of course, sacrifice is not itself sadaka; but the practices of both sacrifice and gift share the characteristic of being directed simultaneously to the divine sphere, with which a form of reciprocity is entertained, and to human recipients, with whom it is not.

This structural homology of sacrifice and gift is evidently not a case of the survival of old-style ritual sacrifice into the age of the ethicized gift.  The practice of Muslim sacrifice, with its emphasis on beneficence and its distinction of intention (niyyah) from outward form, belongs, quite as much as the practice of sadaka, to the new-style ethicized religion; both conform to Mauss’s characterization of the ethicized religious gift as something ‘hitherto destroyed’ but that the gods and spirits accept  ‘should serve the poor and children’.  It is not, then, a relic of old-style non-ethicized practice, but a new-style sacrifice that, so far as its ethicized character is concerned, falls into the same category as Theravada Buddhist rituals of puja.

But what can we say about the relationship of this new-style ethicized sacrifice to the sacrifice of the pagan past?  We have already identified a parallelism between Muslim sacrifice and the homologously structured practices of puja that is indicative of the existence of a common ethicizing trajectory, and thus corroborative of Mauss’s hypothesis of a development of ethicized practices (both ritual and non-ritual) out of old-style non-ethicized practice.  Does this view find any corroboration in Muslim accounts of the origins of their religion?  Is there anything analogous in the Muslim religious literature to the treatment of sacrifice by the Buddhist Kutadanta Sutta?  Such a possibility should not be dismissed out of hand.  The tendency we have already observed amongst Muslim commentators to view the Eid sacrifice as a distinctively Muslim transform of a universal human practice already seems to point in this direction. 

I would argue that such texts exist; but the notion of ethicization is there expressed in characteristically Muslim terms.  What our own analysis has termed the bifurcate structure of the ethicized gift is expressed in the Qur’an through the principle of tawhid, or unity of God, in the sense of ‘not giving partners unto Allah’.  This equivalence is best understood in connection with the converse of tawhid – what Muslims term ‘idolatry’ (shirk)).  The latter condition corresponds to the outcome of non-ethicized sacrifice as this is described by Chapter 4, where the socio-religious gift divinizes one or other of the parties, by identifying the channels of divine beneficence with its source; that is to say, the (human) king or priest, by whose ritual action divine blessing is channelled to the community, takes on the aura of divinity themselves.  The ethicized alternative to this form of socio-religious practice is the radical separation of the human and divine sides of the sacrificial action that we have claimed to be a characteric of ethicized sacrifice, and this is what seems to be achieved in the case of Islam by the principal of tawhid, or radical monotheism.  The impact of this change, on the sociological level, is to render the spiritual effect of the religious action wholly independent of its material impact by distinguishing between the spiritual and the material beneficiaries of the gift; this translates, on the level of Muslim doctrine, as the principle of monotheism – according to which human agency is entirely divorced from divinity, and all human parties have equal socio-religious status in the face of a divinity ‘without partners’.

Muslim perceptions of old-style sacrifice are therefore articulated through a critique of practices opposed to tawhid – in other words, practices manifesting the opposing principle of shirk. The most striking instance known to me occurs in Sura 6 (al-An’am) and relates specifically to the denunciation of pre-Islamic sacrificial practices:

Out of what God

                Hath produced in abundance

                In tilth and in cattle,

                They assigned Him a share:

                They say according to their fancies:

                ‘This is for God, and this –

                For Our partners’!

                But the share of their ‘partners’

                Reacheth not God,

                Whilst the share of God reacheth

                Their ‘partners’!  Evil

                (And unjust) is their assignment!

Even so, in the eyes

Of most of the Pagans,

Their ‘partners’ made alluring

The slaughter of their children,

In order to lead them

To their own destruction,

And cause confusion

In their religion.(137-138)

It is evident there is a fundamental difference between the perspective of this text and that of any conceivable anthropological interpretation.  What anthropology would regard as an alternative socio-religious system (i.e. that of polytheism) is represented by the Qur’an as an aberration from a monotheistic norm that, but for the wilful ignorance of our corrupted self-interest, all humanity would be compelled to acknowledge.  Nevertheless, I would argue that, in the contrast represented by this passage between monotheist and pagan forms of worship, we can identify the underlying structural distinctions associated by this study with the difference between ethicized and non-ethicized forms of sacrifice.

                In the ‘partners’ of the above text it is not difficult to discern a reference to pagan priests.  ‘Our partners’ (with capitalization of the o in English translations) reflects the perspective of God himself, and is presumably ironic – as is the tone of the entire passage – since the injunction to give no partners to Allah is fundamental to Islam.  This qur’anic critique makes excellent sense in terms of our analysis of non-ethicized sacrifice in Chapter 4.  To give priestly ‘partners’ to the divinity through sacrifice, is, as we have seen, precisely what non-ethicized religious practice does, since, as mediators of divine blessing, human donors/recipients are indeed divinized.  The inevitably hierarchical character which this gives to human social relationships demonstrates, from a Muslim perspective, the undesirable social consequences of infringements of the Muslim principle of tawhid. 

Furthermore, the way in which this ‘divinization’ is claimed by the Qur’an to take place accords, no less than the fact of divinization itself, with the description of non-ethicized sacrifice given by Chaptern 4.  A proportion (usually small) of the offering is given directly to the divinity, while the remainder – and perhaps, ultimately, the divine share itself – is consumed by the priests or worshippers.  Even the claim of pagan worshippers to be offering a small material portion of the material content of the offering to God Himself is actually contradicted by what we all see to be taking place.  The truth of the matter, from the perspective of the Qur’an, is that the human share of the offering (i.e. the sacrificial meat that ‘reacheth not God’) is being hypocritically assigned to God only to be subsequently eaten by the worshipper, while the divine share (i.e. the honour that derives from the sacrifice) is appropriated by humans who falsely claim to be priestly ‘partners’ of God. 

                So, from the Qur’an’s ethicized perspective, old-style sacrifice looks like an impious confusion between two circuits of exchange which new-style ethicized sacrifice keeps carefully separate: the circuit of exchange between man and God, and the circuit between human beings.  As the proper content of exchange, God gives, in the former case, such intangibles as god-awareness and submission, and, in the latter case, the meat of the slaughtered animals.  What is, from the Quran’s perspective, wrong about the pagan sacrifice is not so much the consumption of all the meat by priests (though our text feigns indignation at this), but to claim that the meat reaches God in the first place.  This is effectively to allow that what God has given as the appropriate content of human exchange should become the content of the exchange that humans entertain with the divine.  Still more fundamental, however, is the error of supposing that God has ‘partners’ in honour – since this is to allow that what God has given as the appropriate content of exchange with Himself should become the content of the exchanges between human beings.

                The latter part of the above text contains an allusion to the practice of the sacrifice of children.  The sacrifice of young girls, in particular, is widely supposed by Muslims to have characterized the impious religious practices of jahiliyya.  This reference therefore develops the argument of the previous lines; children are held up as an example of a kind of ‘object’ even less appropriate to the exchange with God than the meat of slaughtered animals.  The pertinence of this reference is further enhanced if we read it in the light of the Structuralist anthropology of Lévy-Strauss, for whom young girls constitute the object par excellence of exchange between human groups.  As such, their inclusion in the category of objects of exchange with the God(s) becomes the most flagrant imaginable violation of the separation that Islam institutes between the two circuits of exchange.

There is a second well-known text, which seems to characterize the difference between Muslim and pagan sacrificial practice in terms that fit perfectly with the understanding of ethicization indicated by our reading of Sura 6.  What is more, it appears to give this notion of ethicization a historical basis.  I refer, of course, to the episode of the sacrifice by Ibrahim of his son in Sura 37 (As-Saffat).   This narrative suggests two successive moments in the development of sacrifice.  The second of these is the moment that institutes orthodox Muslim sacrificial practice, and has been commemorated as such by Muslims throughout history.  The moment preceding it in the qur’anic account – that of the vision of Ibrahim – is harder to characterize.  It cannot be identified with pagan practice, because Ibrahim is not, at the time of the vision, a polytheist – if he ever had been.  Yet it evidently precedes the revelation of the correct form of sacrificial worship.  Is it pressing the text too far to suggest that the vision reflects the influence of earlier religious practice? 

                For Muslims, the shape of the eventual outcome is evidently what matters, not the retracing of the path by which that outcome was arrived at.  That outcome suggests a form of ritual that is ethicized in precisely the manner indicated by the analysis of Sura 6.  Ibrahim ends up making a sacrifice that is entirely on the level of intention – and which, on that level, represents a supreme instance of submission and God-awareness.  The bifurcation of the two circuits of exchange could hardly be more clearly exemplified.  So far as the exchange with God is concerned, and in terms of its expression of taqwa, the cost of the offering is enormous: on the material level, it is nothing at all, since the young man is not slaughtered, and even the sacrificial beast is freely supplied.  In the words of Sayyid Qutb:

All that remained was the actual shedding of Ishmael’s blood and his death, which, in God’s scales, counted for little, compared with the energy, feelings and determination both father and son put into what was bidden of them.  By this time, the test had reached its climax, its results were known and its objectives fulfilled. What remained was physical pain and a dead body, but God does not want His servants to endure suffering. He does not require them to torment or kill themselves.(Qutb, Surah 37, p. 260)

Playing on this sense of a sacrifice that is, for the sacrificer, entirely one of intention, Shariati, in humorous allusion to the story, bids the pilgrim bring his/her Ishmael (the object of their personal idolatry) to Mina, and ‘let the Almighty help and present it (the sheep) to you as a gift’. 

To offer a sheep instead of Ismail is a ‘sacrifice’, but to sacrifice a sheep just for the sake of sacrifice is ‘butchery’. [77]

The point here, of course, is that the sacrificer should be so focussed on the objects of their potentially idolatrous desires that the contingent nature of the ‘ransom’ that God offers in place of those cherished objects – i.e. the sacrificial beast – should strike them with the same surprise with which it struck Ibrahim, when he espied the providential ram.

                About the ethicized shape of the Muslim sacrifice, then, there can be little doubt.  Yet, the narrative form of the qur’anic text could also suggest an ethicizing development such as might encourage us to go behind the accomplished fact of ethicized religion to its event.  I freely admit this is a very speculative undertaking, and one that does not, in any case, accord well with the Muslim tendency to characterize religious truth as revelation.  Yet it is so pertinent to the matter of ethicization that, for all its hypothetical nature, it well deserves some brief comment.  

As already stated, the moment of the sacrificial vision cannot be straightforwardly characterized as a moment of pagan religion.  Yet, might it not constitute a moment of non-ethicized religion?  Certainly, the initial vision of Ibrahim violates the subsequent separation of two circuits of exchange; Ibrahim envisages an offering that goes beyond the symbolic one of taqwa and submission and embodies itself in a material victim.  But, if we compare his action with the pagan sacrifice of Sura 6, it becomes apparent, that while Ibrahim offers to God something that belongs in the human circuit (i.e. a (?) marriageable son), his offering does not serve him, as the pagan offerings do the pagan priests, as a pretext for offering to a human what belongs in the divine circuit.  There is no suggestion here of shirk.  But there is still the possibility that the form of non-ethicized religion common to polytheistic belief systems (i.e. the failure to demarcate the two circuits of exchange) conditions Ibrahim’s response to the challenge of offering fit sacrifice to the true God, so that his initial intention reflects the non-ethicized structure of such religion, even though he has renounced its polytheistic intent.  In support of such a possibility I would urge the psychological verisimilitude of a narrative in which a human worshipper, only recently emancipated from polytheism, and seeking an appropriate form of worship for a monotheistic religion, finds himself tempted by a practice that still exhibits the structure – even where it has renounced the intent – of non-ethicized religion.  More specifically, as has been observed by numerous commentators, the story appears to mark a discontinuation of the practice of human (specifically child) sacrifice, which has traditionally been supposed to characterize the ritual practice of the pre-Islamic era.  In this narrower respect – of being a child-sacrifice – Ibrahim’s vision seems to constitute a moment of non-ethicized religion.  Read on these lines (which I freely admit to be somewhat speculative), the story of Ibrahim can be viewed as an indigenous, mythologized account of the Islamic ethicization of sacrifice.

6 THEOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF SACRIFICE REASSESSED IN THE LIGHT OF THE EVIDENCE FROM NON-THEOLOGICAL DISCIPLINES

It was argued in Chapter 1 that the way theologians conceptualize the relation between salvation event and sacrifice, as determined by the adoption of a non-sacrificial or a sacrificial position, has an impact not just on their understanding of salvation event but on their concepts of sacrifice.  The directly and exclusively theological impact of the choice of one or the other position was described and evaluated in Part I.  The other aspects of its impact – namely on concepts of sacrifice and the characterization of Christian differentia that depends on it – are also relevant considerations for the comparative assessment of non-sacrificial and sacrificial positions, for reasons given in Chapter 1: namely, that these concepts are in some degree determined by the position adopted on the relation of salvation event and sacrifice, and must be anthropologically plausible.  This demand, it was argued, opens theological thinking to an engagement with non-theological disciplines in regard to its anthropological entailments, and provides a means by which the validity of theological positions may be independently evaluated.  Yet it was recognized that the comparative assessment of non-sacrificial and sacrificial positions on this second, anthropological, basis required the broadening of the scope of our discussion to include an examination of the treatment of anthropological topics of theological concern in the context of non-theological disciplines.  This second aspect of the impact of the adoption of a non-sacrificial or sacrificial position has been the theme of Part II of this study, and the required examination of the treatment of these topics in comparative religion, the history of civilizations and social anthropology, is given in our two previous chapters (4 and 5).  We have already identified a convergence between the conceptualization of sacrifice in adjacent disciplines and in its conceptualization by sacrificial revisionist theology (as represented by Hicks).  It now remains, in the present chapter, further to explore that convergence, setting out in more formal and abstract terms what it is precisely about the sacrificial revisionist concept of sacrifice that accords with the understanding that emerges in adjacent disciplines, and, conversely, what it is about non-sacrificial concepts that is discordant with it.

               The anthropological topics of theological concern, to which we have referred, were earlier identified as: first, the question of the relation of sacrifice and religious gift; second, that of the relation of sacrifice and ethical religion.  In what follows, I shall, on each topic, first summarily contrast the general tendencies of non-sacrificial and sacrificial theologies in regard to these questions, and then specify those considerations emerging from the foregoing presentation of non-theological discussion of these topics that do, or do not, accord with these theological tendencies.  It will become evident from the exposition of the contrasted tendencies of the non-sacrificial and sacrificial positions (if it is not evident already) that, where the non-sacrificial side of the comparison takes the form of gift theology, it is the question of the relation of gift and sacrifice that polarizes the opposed theological positions, and it is, accordingly, the conclusions of Chapters 4 and 5 touching that topic which are of greater relevance; whereas, in the case of Girard-based theology and sacrifice as metaphor, the contrast with sacrificial revisionist theology emerges chiefly in relation to the second of our anthropological topics, and it is the evidence touching the relation of sacrifice and ethical religion that is more germane.  There is, of course, some degree of overlap.  Yet, for convenience of exposition, I shall limit myself to gift theology in my assessment of the relative compatibility of theological positions with anthropological evidence on the relation of sacrifice and gift, and leave consideration of Girard-based and metaphorical theology to be considered in connection with the relation of sacrifice and ethical religion.  It will emerge In the course of our exposition that in both cases the contrasted positions of non-sacrificial and sacrificial theology stem from opposed evaluations of the socio-symbolic, and that, with regard to the non-theological discussion, too (especially in Chapter 5), the relation of religion to socio-symbolism emerges as the decisive issue. 

Topic 1: Sacrifice and gift

Contrasting  perspectives of gift theology and sacrificial revisionism

Gift theology views the Christian paradigm as a liberation of interdividual relations with God or one’s fellow (Milbank) from sacrifice – or else as a challenge to prevailing economic order (Tanner and Milbank).  Either way, the terminology of gift serves to distinguish a properly Christian mode of relations from a sacrificial mode that is characterized as economicist and transactional.  What seems missing from such understandings of the Christian paradigm is an institutional dimension – including the kind of ritual-based (or socio-symbolic) institutional dimension that Chapters 4 and 5 have placed at the heart of other religions.  Milbank’s interdividual gift displays only an exceptional form of socio-symbolism that stands in paradoxical opposition to the socio-symbolism of all institutional systems, and constitutes the minimal symbolic armature required to safeguard the gift’s essential interdividuality.  Tanner’s unconditional gift is so far from being socio-symbolic that it is hardly even relational, but consists in a kind of anti-economicist and anti-transactionalist economics that stands in opposition to the economism and transactionalism of non-Christian economic and political systems and the sacrifice of traditionalist Atonement doctrine.  What both theories share, at a more fundamental level, is a negative characterization of the socio-symbolic as the locus of that transactionalism and agonism to which the Christian paradigm stands opposed.  And, in both cases, the concept of gift, applied to the Christian mode of relations, serves to bring out its opposition to socio-symbolic modes of relations that are associated with sacrifice.

Hicks’ theology, by contrast, is distinguished from the above theories by the fact that, despite its concern with the Christian differentia, it establishes no opposition between Judaeo-Christian and non-Judaeo Christian modes of relations on the basis of the distinction of sacrifice and gift.  On the textual level, this is manifested in the virtual synonomy of the terms sacrifice and gift in the sense he attributes to them.  The fundamental religious action of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (epitomized in the self-offering of Christ) consists in the ‘offering’, ‘transforming’ and ‘sharing’ of ‘life’ (which is necessarily ‘life in society’).  This action he terms sacrifice, and in its more ritual enactments (e.g. OT cultic sacrifice, or the Eucharist), where ‘life’ is represented in the form of life-giving substances, suggests a ritual manipulation.  Yet, the scope of the sacrificial action is not limited to such ritual enactments, as is evidenced by its extension to the largely ethical action of the ‘offering’, ‘transforming’ and ‘sharing’ of life that is the work of Christ himself, and of those who follow him in offering their lives as a ‘spiritual’ sacrifice.  Hicks’ notion of sacrifice is open to this ethical enlargement partly because, even in its more ritualized enactments, it is not a notion that centres on the kind of ritual behaviours that would, on other definitions, seem to separate it from the gift.  He refuses, for example, the foreshortened perspective of theologies that understand sacrifice as a ritualized killing, and thereby identify the salvation event exclusively with the moment of Christ’s death.  Moreover, gift is no more dissociable from sacrifice, on Hicks’ account, than sacrifice from gift.  As opposed to the more blandly sociological characterizations of gift in non-sacrificial theology, Hicks’ characterization is conveyed through a rich language of ‘offering’, ‘sharing’ etc. suggestive of the symbolic dimension of mundane ethical action and its openness to sacrificial interpretation.

Just as, with gift theology, the presence of the sacrifice:gift opposition marks a fundamentally negative evaluation of the socio-symbolic, so, with Hicks, its absence is associated with an entirely positive evaluation.  Indeed, Hicks’ definition of religion practically coincides with the notion of the socio-symbolic as developed in the course of this study.  On the one hand, the symbolic – i.e. ‘religion’ as Hicks understands it – is defined as ‘life in society’; on the other, the social – i.e. ‘life in society’ – is explicated throughout Hicks’ text as something symbolically instituted, for example, in the ritualized sharing of food and drink.  In the words of Hicks himself, ‘Ancient religion is just part of a social order which embraces gods and men alike.’ (p. 34) 

Comparative  assessment of gift theory and sacrificial revisionist perspectives in the light of non-theological evidence

How do these diverse understandings of the relation of gift and sacrifice square with what we find in the ethnographic literature explored, above all, in Chapter 4, where the question of the relation of gift and sacrifice constituted our primary theme? 

                Notwithstanding the tendency in earlier non-theological literature to view sacrifice and gift as discrete areas of human activity, constituting the appropriate fields of independent lines of anthropological investigation, Chapter 4 drew attention to a comparatively recent sea-change in ethnographically-based anthropological thinking as a result of which these distinctions have become increasingly difficult to maintain.  On the one hand, some degree of consensus appears to have emerged in the understanding of sacrifice as a response to cosmic debt – an understanding that allows expansive sociological applications to practices of affinal or compensation exchange.  On the other, a fundamental shift has occurred in social anthropologists’ understanding of archaic ceremonial exchange towards a holistic and cosmological perspective – a change that opens up their thinking to religious concerns.  As a result of this convergence between religious studies and social anthropology, the notions of sacrifice and gift increasingly come to appear alternative conceptual means of apprehending a single socio-symbolic reality, rather than discrete areas of enquiry.  As Parry points out (p. 454), these developments mark a return to an aspect of Mauss’s thinking on the gift that has, until relatively recently, remained neglected.  They evoke, once again, the ‘mythological’ dimension of archaic exchanges which ‘not only bear people and things along in their wake, but also the sacred beings that, to a greater or lesser extent, are associated with them’. (Mauss, p. 20)     

                At a general level, the developments we have just outlined constitute a challenge to the kind of theological thinking that grounds an understanding of the salvation event on the opposition of sacrifice and gift as respectively transactional and non-transactional modes of behaviour.  If gift and sacrifice cannot be opposed on this basis, then it is hard to defend an understanding of the salvation event that relies upon such an opposition.  By contrast, these developments are supportive of Hicks’ position, which, with its notion of a social order ‘embracing gods and men alike’, (Robertson-Smith, p.32) echoes Mauss’s vision of a mythological dimension of archaic exchange.  Mauss and Hicks would both seem – in their different ways – to have anticipated contemporary understandings of the social order as reproduced through symbolic and cosmological enactments. 

                More specifically, the arguments that Chapter 4 mobilizes against the ‘dualist’ and Structuralist understandings of sacrifice, as illustrated by the case of Godelier, apply equally to theological gift theory.  This is because both non-sacrificial theologians, like Milbank and Tanner, and Structuralists are equally committed to the notion of a form of human sociality independent of sacrificial motivation.  The stakes of this commitment are, of course, quite different in the two cases: for Godelier and the Structuralists it is a matter of a purely sociological, and hence ‘non-mystical’ kind of social relation (Godelier, pp. 17-18); in the case of the gift theologians it is the possibility of characterizing the differentia of Christianity in terms of a unique form of sociality that stands altogether apart from the mode of sacrificial transactionalism that prevails everywhere else.  Yet both Structuralists and gift theologians are united in attributing to human sociality a two-fold structure.  Behaviour associated with the religious impulse reflected in sacrifice (characterized by the theologians as transactional) is effectively distinguished from social behaviour of a still more universal kind – indeed, behaviour that is the basis of our essential humanity – consisting in the drive to reciprocity and exchange.  It follows that the challenge that recent social anthropology poses for the ‘dualist’ understanding of human sociality, it poses also for the Christian gift theologies of Milbank and Tanner.  And the arguments mobilized by Chapter 4 against Godelier’s idea that the archaic gift has a sociological motivation independent of sacrifice also weigh against Milbank’s notion of a purely relational motivation of the gift underlying all sacrificial determinations, and Tanner’s idea of the unconditional gift as the essence of Christian revelation.  Both versions of theological gift theory require us, like Structuralist anthropology, to posit a mode of the gift that exists beyond the sphere of sacrificial religion – and neither version of the position can be reconciled with the position on gift and sacrifice advocated on the basis of the ethnographic material set out in Chapter 4.

                At a more concrete level, the opposition of sacrifice and gift on grounds of transactionality has implications for the characterization of both practices: sacrifice is seen as an essentially transactional operation, or, at least, an operation that displays a relatively greater degree of transactionalism or agonism as compared with the gift (Milbank); the gift, as escaping from the socio-symbolic altogether (Milbank and Tanner). These implications for sacrifice and gift should be evaluated in the light of what Chapter 4 shows us about the nature of such operations in non-Christian cultures. 

                It cannot be said that our evidence is particularly supportive of the non-sacrificial case. Where sacrifice is concerned, there seems little to support the theological characterization of sacrifice as essentially transactional, or Tanner’s lumping together of archaic sacrifice and contemporary commodity as comparable instances of transactionalist social operations.  As for the gift, our ethnographic material casts considerable doubt on the idea that the kind of culturally salient gift exchanges described by Mauss and the ethnographic accounts of contemporary social anthropologists should be seen as transcending the realm of sacrifice – let alone that of the socio-symbolic.  At the same time, they challenge the idea that there is a close kinship between these socio-symbolic forms of reciprocity and the salient contemporary Western practice of the altruistic gift, since the latter, at least as they are defined by Carrier, cannot, by definition, be other than entirely interdividual. 

The case against Milbank and Tanner   

The challenge that our ethnographic material poses for these gift theologies is all the more evident because their understandings of the gift evoke real-life sociological practices, and appeal to accounts of those practices in the non-theological literature in defence of those understandings  and in order to refute rival understandings.  Evidently, this opens, not simply their anthropology, but, in some measure, also their theology, to cross-disciplinary critique.  It is legitimate in such cases to comment on their use of ethnographical material, and and how far it genuinely supports the case that is built upon it.

With Milbank, the difficult implications of an anti-sacrificial position arise both in regard to the bifurcate nature of human modes of interaction that we have just described, and in regard to the characterization of the sacrifice as a behaviour involving the setting of boundaries, the establishment of a ‘simple’ social space and the creation of a ‘state of exception’ that potentially reduces the trans-organic individual to ‘bare life’. 

Let us begin with the implications of the bifurcate nature of human modes of interaction.   As we have already seen, this involves the supposition of a fundamental duality of human impulse arising from: on the one hand, an underlying serial relationality that is constitutive of humanity itself in its prelapsarian fullness, and safeguarded by the liturgical symbolism of covenant and Eucharist – i.e. gift; on the other, a post-lapsarian and ultimately life-impoverishing instinct towards social closure – i.e. sacrifice.  It is important to bear in mind that the first of these impulses is not itself the effect of redemption, but intrinsic to the human condition itself. 

As regards Milbank’s account of the pre-Christian world, this fundamental duality gives rise to two problems. First, the ritual and symbolism of sacrifice and that of covenant must be sharply demarcated. (CGG, pp. 144-154) Milbank, like Schwager, requires us to make a sharp distinction between rituals that express one or the other of these opposed paradigms, both of which may be associated with sacrifice and the slaughter of domestic animals.  Only those rituals deemed to be convenantal (Milbank refers specifically in this context to Jacob’s covenant with Laban) (CGG, pp. 145-146) contain, on Milbank’s view, the seeds of that uniquely Judaeo-Christian development that was to lead first to the practice of almsgiving and the distinctively Hebrew form of temple economy, and ultimately to Christian agape and Eucharist.  Needless to say, the greater part of what we are accustomed to see as the Jewish form of symbolic ritual – namely Mosaic cult – is entirely sidelined by Milbank, both here and elsewhere in his work.  The genealogy of Christian sacrament is here (as in Schwager) traced ‘through the line of the prophetic critique of cult, rather than through the cult itself’.  In his account of the evolution of the covenantal paradigm Milbank highlights the temple economy, but passes in silence over the ritual cult that lay at its symbolic heart.  This highly selective reading of the Jewish salvation narrative with a view to the requirements of an apparently Structuralist anthropology seems even less convincing than Schwager’s.

Second, Milbank wants to show that both the prelapsarian impulse to reciprocity and the post-lapsarian impulse to sacrificial closure are operating in varying proportions in real-life institutions of the pre-Christian era.  Of course, on the level of effects, what one might expect to see, empirically and ethnographically, as evidence of the operation of these impulses (towards gift and sacrifice) might not differ significantly from what one would see on the sacrificial revisionist presupposition that symbolic gift and sacrifice are alternative ways of approaching essentially the one and same social phenomenon; in either case, there are things that circulate both between human individuals and between humans and gods.  The Milbankian supposition of duality could only be demonstrated through a typology such as we find in Godelier where societies would be shown to differ from each other in terms of the greater or lesses admixture of the sacrificial element.  CGG offers us more than a hint of such a perspective.  Societies remote from our own, and more ‘local’ in character – such as ‘the archaic societies described by Malinowski and Mauss’ – are described as offering ‘a great accentuation of all the traits of gift-exchange which survive spasmodically in our society’. (p. 126)  This localness seems to be chiefly a matter of scale, since ‘Intra-familial as opposed to cross-clan exchanges usually seek balance rather than imbalance’. Milbank goes on:

The more one discovers a quasi-feudal chief or king who heads a state rather than a ‘big man’ dominating kinship groups, the more exchanges are ‘tributary’ in character. (p. 127)

In other words, the remotenss of these societies from our own to some extent suggests a developmental ‘phase’, prior, not so much to our own, as to the advent of larger-scale forms of human organization such as what in another anthropologically-orientated paper, ‘Stories of Sacrifice’ (SS) Milbank describes as the ‘Urstaat’.  The latter, exemplified by the centralized West African kingdoms, he describes as dominated by ‘state religions’, which, with their ‘absolute self-renunciation’ seem ‘curiously akin to the secular sacrifices of person to society, and present to future’ – i.e. the form of sacrifice in contemporary Western polities. (SS, p.52)

                The problem, however, is that the deployment of this typology – which which bears out the duality of reciprocity and gift and sacrifice – seems to run up against a key feature of the ethnographic accounts that Milbank chooses to cite.  This is the ‘crucial significance of the inclusion of sacrifice to gods/ancestors within the exchanging cycle’ – a feature we have already mentioned, and whose discovery Milbank correctly attributes to ‘recent research on gift-exchange’.   The ‘primary relationality’ of archaic society (i.e. Milbankian reciprocity) is, as he puts it, integrated into a ‘spatializing totalization that charts the bounds of the symbolic cosmos’.  ‘Hence the primacy of human debt, intrinsic to the gift economy, is only fully established by way of the always inherited debt to the ancestors.’ (p. 145)  But for the fact that Milbank scrupulously avoids the term sacrifice in this context (an evasion that can hardly be disingenuous), the reader might well wonder how this pre-sacrificial mode of relations differred from the mode of relations characteristic of the sacrificial polity.   Chapter Four offers little evidence to warrant the notion of a positive correlation between the scale of the society (i.e. how ‘local’ or ‘archaic’ it is) and the transactionalism or violence of its symbolic practices – such as would automatically attribute a heightened degree of these qualities to a hierarchical polity (i.e. one characterized by uni-directional reciprocity) than to an egalitarian one (i.e. one based on obviatory reciprocity). The evidence is complex and might well point in the opposite direction.[78]

We come now to Milbank’s characterization of sacrifice as the setting of boundaries, the establishment of a simple uniform social space, and the state of exception.  This is a characterization that must apply, as I have already argued, as much to the antique as to the modern polity, if Milbank’s explanation of the relevance of the Church to contemporary society is to retain its biblical authority. Milbank’s problem is that the social realities he seeks to bring together in this way are, in fact, highly diverse – as he is himself very much aware. (PNM, pp. 37-42)  Certainly, the conceptual framework that he applies demonstrates a remarkable consistency as between ancient and modern; in both cases we find broadly the same sacrificial characteristics of boundary-setting, establishment of simple space, and the reduction to bare life.  However, the question remains – in the case of ancient society – how far this conceptual framework could be claimed to arise out of the socio-political realities themselves as opposed to the unifying schema that Milbank’s anti-sacrificial understanding of the ecclesial mission requires him to impose.  In other words, the question remains whether Milbank escapes the charge that he himself makes against Girard and Levi-Strauss of ‘projecting a modern liberal grid onto traditional, “hierarchical” societies’. (TST, p. 397)  The resistance that the Church encounters on the part of hostile socio-political structures reflects consistently diverse – and practically complementary – aspects of Milbank’s concept of sacrifice depending on whether those structures are ancient or modern.  This challenges the unity and consistency of his concept of sacrifice.  Thus, in the case of the Gospel narrative, what seems, above all, to be at issue, so far as sacrifice is concerned, is the boundedness of the socio-political space from which Christ and the Church find themselves expelled.  In the modern case, it is rather the simpleness and uniformity of the sacrificial space which is important, and the fact that it tends to exclude the ‘gratuity’ of those gift relations that generate ‘corporate bodies and intermediary associations’. 

                Indeed, it is even uncertain how far the diverse aspects of the sacrificial concept really belong together.  So, for example, the ancient polity, while clearly bounded, exhibits, on Milbank’s own admission, a considerable complexity in its forms of sociality, which include a preponderance of reciprocal exchange as well as more unilateral forms of gift. (BR, pp. 157-167; PNM pp. 37-42)  The modern liberal capitalist polity, by contrast, is distinguished primarily by the simplicity of its conception of social space, and the relative absence of gratuity and intermediary associations; the manner of its boundedness is described as temporal rather than spatial, and involves chiefly the acquiescence in present loss in order to sustain a trans-temporal identity.[79]  Admittedly, a terminology derived from Agamben helps to unify the ancient and the modern version of the sacrificial concept; but what is, in practice, primarily at issue differs considerably in the two cases.  By and large, Milbank deals with the aspects of biblical authentification and contemporary relevance of his ecclesial concept in different texts; but on the relatively infrequent occasions where he brings the two together (as detailed in 2.2.2), the world of traditional, hierarchical structures based on sacrifice emerges as far more closely akin to that of ecclesial symbolism that to the contemporary spatialized structures to which Milbank means to compare them.  This is clearly seen in PNM, where the claim to discover a ‘biopolitics’ in the antique polity has to be qualified to the point that it ceases to be at all convincing.  Milbank altogether fails here to allay the suspicion that the biopolitical proprement dit might not exist outside the Christian tradition.  This is very troubling because it effectively renders Christianity sole responsible for the evil for which Milbank would have us believe it the remedy.  It is but a step from here to the view that the global impact of Christianity has been, not to resist the biopolitical, but, through supposedly heterodox forms of itself, to implant the biopolitical for the first time – then in subsequent centuries to eradicate every alternative form of political governance, first within its own bounds, and then, thanks to colonialism, throughout the world. 

                An intriguing alternative to retrojecting biopolitics onto the antique polity would be to maintain the ongoing relevance of socio-symbolism to the contemporary liberal-capitalist state.  Just how close such a strategy can come to delivering the kind of continuity of ancient and modern politics that Milbank requires is suggested by Marvin and Ingle’s engaging study, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation [1999].  This is dedicated to nothing less than demonstrating, not only that the contemporary state is sacrificial, but that its distinctive mode of sacrifice is precisely what Milbank claims it to be (with apparently little empirical evidence); namely, a trading of its vital substance of human blood against an abstract trans-temporal identity. Furthermore, the demonstration is made in relation to that epitome of liberal-capitalist imperialism, the US state.  But, were Milbank tempted by this solution (which seems unlikely given his stated position on ‘civic religion’ (TST, pp. 107-110)), he would need to demonstrate – more convincingly than Marvin and Ingle – the relative importance of this kind of symbolic civic religion, as against the more rational/discursive modes of state ideology that his own work seems to presuppose.

In the case of Tanner, the same bifurcation generates an exceptionalist characterization of Christian relationality over and against the potentially transactionalist sociological tendency of all other modes of human relations (EG, pp. 50-5, esp. p.55).  This is open to criticism on two points.  First, her claim, echoing Appadurai, that the archaic exchange resembles modern commodity relations more than either of them do the Christian paradigm of ‘unconditional’ giving.  In practice, this could be countered by the objection that Tanner’s discussion (as indeed Appadurai’s) shows insufficient sensitivity to features that, as we have seen in both Chapters 4 and 5, distinguish religious from non-religious giving – such as Parry’s ‘supernatural sanctions’ and ‘the question of origin’ (‘The Gift’, p. 454).  More importantly, Tanner’s determination to conceptualize Christianity in sociological terms as the philanthropic gift, or gift of alms, commits her, thanks to her exceptionalist characterization of the Christian revelation, to the implausible view that this social practice is uniquely attributable to Christian revelation.   This flies in the face of the understanding of the religious gift we find articulated by Parry on the basis of ethnological phenomena that are evidently akin – and which Parry himself recognizes to be akin – to the practices of dana and sadaka which Chapter 5 argues to be common all ethicized religions.  The uniqueness to Christianity of the social practice of the unconditional gift is not something which Tanner claims – at least in so many words.  But it has to be a presupposition of her theology: for the reason that the practice of the unconditional gift constitutes not just one among a number of expressions of the Christian ethical paradigm, but the key element of her Trinitiarian theology (JHT).  If the ‘unconditional’ gift is essential to the paradigms of other ethicized religions, then either Tanner’s Trinitarian theology is misconceived, or Islam and Theravada Buddhism are also Trinitarian. 

The challenge of the ethicized gift of confessional religions

Before leaving the theme of the relation of sacrifice and gift, it is important to draw attention to the more general bearing of the ethnography of Chapter 5 on this question.  The change from less to more ethicized forms of religious practice involves the marginalization of practices of ritual sacrifice in favour of practices of religious gift.  At first sight, such a transformation would itself appear to give grounds for a formal separation of the concepts of sacrifice and gift – especially as the indigenous discourses that accompany this shift to more ethicized forms of religion frequently adopt, as we have seen, a strongly anti-sacrificial tone.

                But ultimately, in the context of confessional religions, the question of the relation of sacrifice and gift is subsumed within the broader question of the relation between ethicized and ritual religion.  Whether or not, like Mauss, we see charity and sadaka as migrations of ritual sacrifice will depend on whether we view those practices as having a socio-symbolic role that is in important respects equivalent to that of sacrifice, or whether we see them as personal or interdividual expressions of an ethical religion that has left socio-symbolism behind. This is the question addressed in the next section of our argument.   The evidence of Chapter 4 weighs strongly against the non-sacrificial interpretation of the relation of sacrifice and gift, and in favour of Hicks’ sacrificial interpretation.   However, our final conclusion on this issue must – like our conclusion on the relation of ritual and ethical religion – await our reflection on the additional ethnographical material presented in Chapter 5. 

 

Topic 2: Sacrifice and ethical religion

 

Contrasting perspectives of sacrifice as metaphor/Girard-based theologies and sacrificial revisionism

These theologies tend to view ritual as synonymous with ritualism and/or violence, and the advent of Christianity as a liberation of religion from ritual in order to become largely, or wholly, ‘ethical’.  The notion of ‘ethical’ religion as applied in this way to Christianity (conveniently illustrated by St Paul’s notion of sacrifice as the ‘life offered’ (Romans 12.1)) implies an opposition to ritual on the grounds of its supposed ritualism and violence.  By ‘ritualism’ I refer both to the characterization of ritual as meaningless repetition (something that comes close to the street-level understanding of ritual as ‘mumbo-jumbo’), and its characterization as non-purposive or mechanical – i.e. as having a purpose concealed from its agents.   The assumption made by non-sacrificial theologies that Christian religion is ‘ethical’ in this sense effectively distances its characteristic forms of religious action from the ritual sphere.  By the same gesture, it distances characteristically Christian forms of relationality from the ritually enacted institutionality which our investigations in Chapters 4 and 5 have shown to be at the heart of archaic religion, and by no means absent from confessional religions.  It is not clear to me that being an ‘ethical’ religion would necessarily also exclude Christianity from all forms of socio-symbolism; in practice, however, these non-sacrificial theologies tend to locate distinctively Christian forms of relationality in the interdividual and non-institutional sphere.   From the perspective of non-sacrificial theology, this marks a clear distinction between Christianity and other forms of religion.   

                An extreme case of this non-sacrificial position on ritualism is that of theologies based on the Girardian thesis.  By stipulating that ritual (which, for Girard, is always ‘sacrificial’) is an instinctual but socio-politically constructive behaviour that it is the mission of the Judaeo-Christian revelation to lay bare and thereby disable,  this theory takes to the limit the tendency of non-sacrificial theology to propose an oppositional characterization of Christianity and all other religions as respectively ritual and ethical.  But a (sometimes) milder version of the same opposition is found in sacrifice as metaphor theology.  By relegating sacrifice from its traditional status of typological figure to that of metaphor, this form of non-sacrificial theology establishes a discontinuity between OT cult and the Christian salvation event that is, as we have seen, prone to being interpreted in terms of the same opposition of ritual and ethical.  Underlying both Girard-based positions and sacrifice as metaphor, there is a negative characterization of ritual (as ‘ritualist’ in the above sense), and, along with that, of religious institutionality, at least to the extent that it is seen as taking a ritually enacted form.  If our understanding of other religions as socio-symbolic phenomena (as developed in Chapters 4 and 5) comes anywhere close to the truth, we can begin to understand why Christianity, when characterized, as it is by non-sacrificial theology, in opposition to those other religions, will tend to assume a non-social, as well as a non-ritual form, becoming an individual, or interdividual, ethical, rather than a collective or institutional identity.  Indeed, for Girard-based theology, such collective or institutional identities are precisely what Christianity has come come into the world to destroy; whereas in sacrifice as metaphor, they are relegated, at best, to a secondary effect of rituals whose primary function consists in their articulation of inward and spiritual ‘meanings’. 

                By contrast, the revisionist sacrificial position of Hicks establishes no opposition between ritual and ethical religion/sacrifice on the grounds of ‘ritualism’.  Not, of course, that he denies the reality of ethicizing developments within the Judaeo-Christian tradition – indeed, he sees that tradition (questionably, as we shall see) as uniquely distinguished from other religions by its carrying of these developments to their ultimate limit.  But he regards such developments as bringing a fuller expression of the sacrificial religion initially expressed in less ethicized form, rather than the supersession of a ritual religion by an ethical one.  Religion/sacrifice is, for Hicks, always, in varying degrees, simultaneously ritual and ethical – and, with this positive evaluation of ritual, goes a positive evaluation of ritually enacted institutions.  Even the culmination of ethicization that is the Christian salvation event itself is no more than an offering, transformation and sharing of ‘life in society’, which finds ritual embodiment in ritual symbols of eating and drinking that evoke the practices of the West Semitic clan.  Conversely, even the ‘cruder’, more obviously ritualized, forms religion/sacrifice characteristic of clan, tribe or kingdom, already contain a germ of that ethical dimension of which Christian salvation event represents the ultimate embodiment.  Thus, as regards the oppositional characterization of Christian and non-Christian religion as ethical and ritual, and as individual/interdividual and institutional, Hicks takes a diametrically opposite line from Girard-based theology.  As for the sacrifice as metaphor position, Hicks, as we have seen, explicitly refuses the terminology of metaphor  in favour of a concept of symbol in order to avoid ‘abstracting’ the material signifier (i.e. ‘blood’, nourishment, etc.) from the spiritual signified.

                It will be noted that the positive attitude to ritual on the part of sacrificial theology goes along with the positive evaluation of ritually enacted institutions – or socio-symbolism – and vice versa.  We touch here on an important link between the non-sacrificial theology to be discussed in the present section, and the non-sacrificial theology covered in the last.  A common characteristic of non-sacrificial theology – whether Girard-based, gift-theory, or sacrifice as metaphor – seems to be a negative evaluation of socio-symbolic forms of relationality and institutions, as opposed to the intrinsically positive evaluation characteristic of Hicks’ sacrificial revisionism; what, for Girard and the gift theorists, Christianity came to do away with, and what, for sacrifice as metaphor, it came to supersede, represents, for Hicks, the terrain that Christian practice is called to inhabit, and the bounds that it has been forbidden to overstep on pain of becoming a pale abstraction of itself without anchorage in the world of our socio-political realies.

Comparative assessment of non-sacrificial and sacrificial revisionist perspectives on ethical religion in the light of non-theological evidence

How, then, do these opposed positions on ethicization square with the ethnological evidence considerend in Chapters 4 and 5?              

                Let us begin with the ethnographic material considered by Chapter 4.  Here, the case was made for an understanding of sacrifice as a type of gift affecting the relation of the community to its source of life and reproducing social relations through enactment of a cosmological worldview.  According to this picture, people are religious precisely in their conduct of social relations such as those that link them to their seniors or juniors through bonds of piety or filiality.  How does the conceptualization of sacrifice we find in non-sacrificial theology – as mechanistic or violent – square with this?  So far as ‘ritualism’ is concerned, the idea that sacrifice operates at a wholly instinctual level is not consistent with the reproduction of social relationships through cosmological enactment.  If the mythological dimension of this collective religious action is mystificatory, it is certainly not so in the sense that it places a theological mask over a reality that is sub-social or instinctual.  As for violence, the issues are more complex.  A number of the cases of sacrifice considered in Chapter 4 have a violent character, though the interpretations we have discussed do not suggest that that violence is at the core of their significance.  The role of violence in ritual will be dealt with below in connection with our more detailed conclusions on Girardian theory.  Suffice it to say, at this stage, that the general picture of sacrifice offered by Chapter 4 does not, on the whole, favour the characterization of sacrifice as ritualist (Girard and sacrifice as metaphor) or violent (Girard).  Rather, it seems to support Hicks’ vision of sacrifice as operating on a simultaneously social and religious level.

                The ethnographic material treated in Chapter 5, however, suggests, regarding the topic now under discussion, both more relevant comparators for the Judaeo-Christian tradition and a more serious challenge to the position on ritual developed by Hicks.  More relevant comparators, because Theravada Buddhism and Islam are ethicized religions like Christianity in which the role of sacrificial ritual is, at the very least, less central, and the primary emphasis of the religion seems to fall on the salvation of the individual rather than the social reproduction of community.  And a more serious challenge, because the religious development that brought about this new kind of religion (ethicization) has been represented by some – though by no means all – interpreters as an escape from sacrifice and the socio-symbolic into a personal religion of ethical values.  Seen from the perspective of Christian theology, such a characterization of ethicization would be more consistent with the non-sacrificial position that sees a fundamental discontinuity between the ritual sacrifice of the OT cult and the Christian salvation event than it would with Hicks’ refusal to make any distinction between sacrifice and ethical religion.

                So do the conclusions of our investigation of ethicization in Chapter 5 weigh in favour of the non-sacrificial position?

                Critical to the understanding of ethicization developed in that chapter is the centrality in ethicized faiths of the religious gift (dana and sadaka), and the changing, and to some degree marginalized, role of symbolic actions resembling ritual sacrifice.  It was additionally noted that in some cases this shift is accompanied by a critique of old forms of ritual sacrifice, such as implied in the Indian doctrines of non-violence (ahimsa).   At the very minimum, this suggests some degree of dissociation between the religious gift and old-style sacrifice.  And it is doubtful how far even that limited dissociation would be altogether compatible with the sacrificial revisionist view of ethicization entertained by Hicks as a development wholely containable within the bounds of sacrifice.  The specific issue of the validity of a Hicks’ view is something to which we shall return below.  So far as concerns the broader question of whether the material considered in Chapter 5 does, or does not, support a non-sacrificial position such as that of Girard or sacrifice as metaphor, the crucial issue is whether or not ethicization should be understood as involving an absolute break with socio-symbolic practice.  Here, the views of ethnographers discussed in Chapter 5 are divided.  Certainly, where Theravada Buddhism is concerned, the argument has been made in favour of an understanding of ethicization as the development of a primarily personal religion or religious philosophy (Gombrich and Keyes).  Moreover, there is good ethnographic evidence of contemporary forms of Buddhism that have tended to assume this form (Obeyesekere).  In the case of Islam, a privatized religion may be harder to envisage.  Key practices, such as zakat or Hajj, have evident corollaries on the social, political and cultural level – the demonstrable existence of which would seem to qualify the kind of ethicization associated with those practices as remaining within the bounds of socio-symbolic religion.  Unfortunately, some Muslim sources display an extreme reluctance to characterize, or sometimes even acknowledge, such social, political and cultural corollaries, along with a suspicion verging on hostility towards the any idea of an ‘Islamic anthropology’.[80]  The resulting exclusion of socio-symbolic considerations from the sphere of what may legitimately be attributed to the religion qua religion, easily leads to the characterization of the religion as a purely personal and spiritual practice, even if such treatment does not altogether square with the evidence.

                In response to interpretations of ethicization as a departure from socio-symbolic practice, Chapter 5 argues for the importance of the religious gift in ethicized religions.  It opposes the ‘accommodationist’ view (Gombrich and Keyes), which sees such such practices as the incidental outcome of the application of a personal and spiritual doctrine to the society of the day, in favour of the ‘cosmological’ view (Tambiah, Reynolds, Strenski, Strong), which confers a central role on those practices as an essential expression of Theravada Buddhist religiosity.  To this end Chapter 5 assembles ethnographic evidence demonstrating both the absolute centrality of practices of religious gift in traditional Theravada Buddhist cultures, and the concordance of these practices with canonical teaching.  It then goes on to make the case for the centrality in Islam of a practice of the gift (zakat/sadaka) possessing a broadly similar structure (Parry’s ‘soteriological reciprocity’) to that of the gift of Buddhism.  Moreover, in both cases (Theravada Buddhism and Islam) that structure is found to be symbolically exemplified in the enactment of sacrificial (Islam) – or quasi-sacrificial (Buddhism) – rituals that continue to retain an important, if less than central, place in those faiths, as a ‘purely’ symbolic expression of an attitude of spiritually-motivated generosity that is materialized in substantive actions beyond the ritual sphere.

                How far these religious gifts can be adequately comprehended within the bounds of a concept of sacrifice is no doubt debateable.  What, however, emerges very clearly from Chapter 5 is that such practices are most certainly socio-symbolic – quite as much so, indeed, though in a rather different manner – as the more obviously sacrificial practices considered in Chapter 4.  It is interesting to compare the position of Davies, which I would see as broadly compatible with sacrificial revisionism, but, in this respect, situated at the opposite end of the spectrum of potential sacrificial revisionist positions to Hicks.  Davies places less emphasis than Hicks on the symbol of blood, which he sees as being replaced, in the New Testament context, by the notion of monetary reciprocity as the medium of embodied Christian values.[81]  But the ongoing condition of religious embodiment he sees as evidenced in the way that attitudes to ultimate values – for the new Christian community of the Holy Spirit, no less than for old Jewish kinship community – are expressed in terms of purity/impurity.  Thus, for example, the taint associated with the offence against the Spirit through the sordid transactionality of Ananias and Sapphira, or Simon the Sorcerer, indicates the embodiment of values, no less than the impurity mediated in the Jewish kinship community through contact with blood.  The fact that in both cases we have to do with a bounded social body marks the continued importance of the socio-symbolic – whether or not we choose to recognize some break in the continuum of ritual practice between the natural and the cultural.  So even if one adopts a position closer to that of Davies than of Hicks, there remains every reason to follow Mauss, Biardeau and Parry in regarding religious gifts as – at the very least – migrations of sacrifice, ‘fruits of the moral notion of gift, on the one hand, and the notion of sacrifice, on the other’.  Our investigation in Chapter 5 offers us no grounds for favouring the non-sacrificial theological position according to which ethicization marks an exit from the socio-symbolic practice into the sphere of purely ethical and non-socio-symbolic relations.

The case against Girard and sacrifice as metaphor

Hitherto, the position of Girard has been treated as typical of a range of non-sacrificial views that fail, on the same grounds, to demonstrate consistency with the approach to socio-symbolic practice implicit in the understandings of sacrifice defended by Chapters 4 and 5.  In the cases of Girard, however, this attitude to socio-symbolic practice is embodied in a specific theory of generic sacrifice.  Here, then, it is possible to explore the consistency of the resulting anthropology of sacrifice with evidence from non-theological disciplines – as it was possible in the last section to explore the consistency with that evidence of the anthropologies of Milbank and Tanner.  How far is the sacrificial theory of Girard consistent with the understanding of sacrifice that emerges in Chapters 4 and 5? 

               The answer turns upon the importance of the role of ritual violence in sacrifice.  Neither the accounts of sacrifice discussed by Chapters 4 and 5, nor the theories developed on the basis of this ethnography, seem to foreground this violence.  However, it is by no means absent from these accounts.  The obviatory form of gift/sacrifice, in particular, involves an assertion of separation that amounts to a sacrificial do ut abeas, and so characterizes the sacred as a potential source of violence to be warded off.  Admittedly, the more hierarchical form of sacrificial reciprocity that we have termed unidirectional establishes a tributary relation within the primary social group rather than a relation to the outsider.  Yet even here, the gift marks a degree of separation across the boundary of socio-religious status.  This seems to lend the gods a more beneficent and tutelary character; yet the sacred continues, notwithstanding, to be haloed with an aura of violence – as we have seen with the Vazimbas of Imerina, or of Ancient Egyptian deities such as Sekhmet and Apophis.

                From the Girardian perspective, these potentially violent elements are pointers to the underlying reality of scapegoating violence; while alternative explanations rooting the phenomenon in a response on the part of the community to the gift of life – such as we find developed in Chapters 4 and 5 – are mythological rationalizations.  While there is no necessary contradiction between Girard’s account of sacrifice and that of our sources, what is primary in the one case, becomes secondary in the other.  The two accounts thus offer alternative explanations of the same social phenomenon.  Which of them is better able to offer a plausible account of the sacrificial phenomenon across the range of its manifestations? 

                One serious problem for Girardian theory is the apparently large number of instances of sacrifice in which ritualistic violence plays no part.  Girard argues that in such cases, the violence of the original scapegoating event has been ‘suppressed’ (Violence, p. 137).  However, the effectiveness of the sacrificial re-enactment of the primordial scapegoating event lies in its diversion of communal violence; so to the extent that a sufficiently wide range of sacrificial rituals demonstrate the absence of violent motivations in the participant – or, indeed, violent symbolism in their mythological aetiology – the case for Girardian theory appears considerably weakened.  A comprehensive survey of all relevant rituals is impossible.  The closest we have to such a thing is de Heusch’s magisterial survey of sacrificial rituals across the sub-Saharan continent.  This study, moreover, possesses the additional benefits from our own point of view, of being partly intended as a response to Girardian theory, and concentrating on the rituals of African sacral kingship which, as described in de Heusch’s earlier work and elsewhere, constituted Girard’s primary ethnographic source.  So it is significant from the perspective of this study that, according de Heusch, the preponderance of sacrifice, at least in Africa, belongs within the non-violent category he terms ‘domestic’.                

                There nevertheless exist sacrificial rituals, described by de Heusch among others, that possess a violent character.  So the question remains how – if not in terms of Girard’s scapegoat mechanism – that violence is to be explained.  It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a conclusive answer.  But there are various possible responses that are more convincing than Girard’s.  A rather neat one would be to return at this point to the Bloch/Davies theory of rebounding violence/vitality referred to in Chapter Four.  This might appear surprising given our earlier classification of Bloch’s Prey into Hunter as an example of traditional approaches to sacrifice; after all, we described that study as leaving behind the theories of reciprocity (hasina) mapped out by RHP that are the basis of the idea of unidirectional reciprocity developed by this thesis.  Unsurprisingly, however,    

Bloch’s theory of sacrificial violence presents a strong structural resemblance to the earlier theory of the gift: the upward gift of ‘hasina I’ comes to be seen in the sacrificial theory as a moment of ‘giving-up’, perceived as an act of internal violence separating off the sacrificial agent from society; while the downward movement of blessing becomes a transforming incursion of divine vitality that reintegrates that agent by transcribing his/her experience of sacrificial liminality into mundane life.  In view of the fact that Bloch himself regards the element of gift in sacrifice as the more fundamental (p.30) (‘the lowest common denominator of sacrifice’), we should maybe see the theory of rebounding violence/vitality as a transform of a unidirectional gift-theory that has considerable interpretative power for that admittedly significant proportion of unidirectional rituals that take on an inwardly and/or outwardly violent character. 

                A more sociological response to the issue of violence – and one perhaps more in line with the spirit of my earlier discussion of the ethnography in Chapter Four – is given in Appendix D.

The case for and against Hicks

So we come at last to the position of Hicks’ study on the relation between sacrifice and ethical religion.  We have established that it conforms to the picture that emerges in Chapters 4 and 5, at least to the degree that its understanding of ethicization implies a transformation of, not an escape from, the socio-symbolic.  But Hicks’ account of the Judaeo-Christian tradition goes further than this, appearing to evoke an understanding of the ethicized gift that poses no challenge whatsoever to pre-existing understandings of religious action as ritual sacrifice.

                The problem we face here is that Hicks himself makes no reference to other ethicized religions.  Indeed, in sketching out the ethicizing development of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, he believes himself to be describing a feature of that tradition which derives from its uniquely ‘convenantal’ nature, and differentiates it from all other religions.  Unfortunately, this perception of Hicks’ is challenged by the existence of the other, non-Judaeo-Christian traditions, described in Chapter 5, which would appear to have undergone a broadly comparable ethicizing development.  In the light of these parallels, we need to ask how far the development Hicks describes conforms to the pattern of ethicization that we have found in other ethicized faiths.  To the extent that it does so conform, ethicization will not, in itself, constitute a unique feature – i.e. the differentia – of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  In that case, we are left with question (insofar as we opt for a sacrificial revisionist position) of how the Judaeo-Christian differentia should be defined.

                In our examination of the question how far and in what respects Hicks’ characterization of the Judaeo-Christian covenantal tradition fits the pattern of ethicization described in Chapter 5, we need to consider: first, whether the principal elements of Hicks’ account of the development of covenantal religion are replicated in our characterization of ethicized religion (as provided by Chapter 5); second, whether the elements of our characterization of ethicized religion are replicated in Hicks’ account of the development of covenantal religion.   

The first of these tasks is relatively straightforward. The main characteristics that Hicks draws to our attention in the development that he traces back to the emergence of the ‘covenantal’ understanding of divine:human relations in the Judaeo-Christian tradition are: first, a progressive universalization of the socio-religious community; second, an expansion of ethical demands commensurate with an enhanced appreciation of the divine holiness which liberates ethics from its former subordination to local considerations deriving from the closed nature of the socio-religious group.  These features are certainly replicated in the ethicized faiths we describe in Chapter 5.  Both in Theravada Buddhism and Islam we find the aspiration both to universal community and to a universality of ethical message that is commensurate with that socio-political aspiration. 

The second task is more complicated, since there may be features of Hicks’ account of covenantal religion that fit our characterization of ethicization, yet are not foregrounded by Hicks himself in relation to ethicization because they do not match his characterization of the Judaeo-Christian differentia.  Chapter 5 characterizes ethicization in terms of: first, the heightened importance of individual intention; second, the resulting individualization of religious agency involving the replacement of sacrifice with the religious gift as the main occasion for substantive religious expenditure; third, the persistence of ritual in a purely symbolic role dissociated from such expenditure.  How far are these features replicated in Hicks’ account of the development of the covenantal relation?  To begin with points 2 and 3 – the idea to be found in Hicks’ account of a sacrificial structure of relations capable of embodiment equally in the ritual and the non-ritual sphere harmonizes remarkably well with our characterization of ethicized sacrifice in Chapter 5 as a paradigm that is symbolically represented in ritual in order to be actively realized in actions outside the ritual sphere. 

As for the focus of ethicized traditions on individual intention – which, it will be remembered, represents for Gombrich the primary feature of ethicization – this is certainly viewed by Hicks as an implication of the development he describes, as attested, somewhat incidentally, in his rather questionable claim that ‘it was only through Christian experience that the full value of the individual […] was apprehended’ (p. 111).  Yet there is a crucial difference between individualization as Hicks understands it and the kind of individualization described by Chapter 5.  For Hicks, individualization evidently does not involve, as it does in Theravada Buddhism and Islam, the suppression of priestly mediation – or its paradoxical devolution to the individual worshipper.  Indeed, Hicks insists, in the face of what he sees as abstract and over-individualized understandings of the Christian salvation event, on the centrality of public rituals to all forms of religion.  The evidence of Chapter 5 would indicate that Hicks was wrong about this because he has failed to take account of other ethicized religions. 

So if we want for the purposes of our own analysis to retain the conceptual category of ethicized religions – a notion that has the merit of drawing attention, as we have seen, to a wide range of important common features – then we are forced to conclude that ethicization takes place along more than a single trajectory.  While, in Theravada Buddhism and Islam, it involves the suppression of mediation and representation, with religions founded on the covenantal relation, it takes place without any such suppression.  This difference is hugely significant – to the point, indeed, that I would maintain that Theravada Buddhism and Islam have more sociologically in common with each other than either has in common with the Judaeo-Christian covenantal tradition, despite the fact that Theravada Buddhism and Islam emerge independently in enormously diverse cultural settings, while Islam belongs with Judaism and Christianity within the family of Abrahamic religions.  It is therefore a crucial consideration when it comes to addressing the question – unavoidable for sacrificial revisionism – of the Christian differentia.

Our conclusions as regards the conformity of Hicks’ account of the development of the Judaeo-Christian tradition with the account of ethicization given in Chapter 5 is as follows: that both accounts share the enormously important perception that the religious developments with which they are concerned constitute a transformation rather than an escape from socio-symbolic relationships (and differ, in this respect, from the accounts of non-sacrificial theology); but that Hicks’ account differs significantly from that of Chapter 5 in the view that socio-symbolic action necessarily involves collective ritual (i.e. sacrifice).  It is the recognition of a form of the socio-symbolic that lies partly outside the sphere of collective rituals (e.g. sadaka or Christian charity) that stands between the account of ethicization given in Chapter 5 and Hicks’ account of the transformation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  The limitations of Hicks’ account of ethicization, and his belief that sacrifice always entails collective ritual, arise from his failure to take into account those other ethicized faiths that offer the most apposite parallels for the Judaeo-Christian tradition.  Thus Hicks does not offer an adequate description of ethicization or the sacrificial phenomenon, though his defence, in the case of Christianity, of an understanding of ethicization as a transformation of, rather than an exit from, the socio-symbolic offers a valuable corrective to non-sacrificial positions.

A return to the Christian differentia

The last section has shown how Hicks’ understanding of the ethicizing development of the covenantal relation is inextricably bound up with his understanding of the Judaeo-Christian differentia – perhaps to the detriment of the former.  Yet the need for sacrificial revisionism to come up with an account of the Christian differentia which this so amply demonstrates cannot just be by-passed.  For if the Christian salvation event is regarded as a specific transform of a generic phenomenon of sacrifice, then the achievement of an adequate understanding of generic sacrifice will only be the first step on way to giving an adequate account of the Christian salvation event.  Any sacrificial revisionist position will then need to go on from this to give an account of the specific inflexion of the sacrificial phenomenon that Christianity represents.  Hicks’ study deserves credit for recognizing this to a greater extent than some other sacrificial revisionist studies.

                The primary aim of this study is to bring us only as far as the first stage in this process; a detailed formulation of what constitutes the Christian differentia lies beyond its scope.  However, our assessment of Hick’s position in the light of Chapters 4 and 5 has already entailed an evaluation of one sacrificial revisionist attempt at such a formulation.  So it would seem an opportunity missed, given the gathering of material in the earlier chapters of this study that might serve as a point of departure for that task, not to offer at least some brief indication of how an adequate formulation of the Christian differentia would, in the opinion of this study, diverge from that of Hicks.     

                Let us begin, then, by summarily restating the three main points of Hicks’ treatment of the issue.  First, the uniqueness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, he claims, originates in the covenantal relation, of which the particularity consists in the bringing together of human and divine, not on the basis of some pre-existing family connection, but as stranger-partners in an elective relationship.  Second, the way that this covenantal relation impacts on religious practice is through its liberation of sacrificial relations from subordination to the claims of local loyalties.  Third, the historical development enabled by this liberation takes the form of a universalization of the notion of community and a correspondingly heightened sense of divine ‘holiness’ entailing an enlargement in the conception of ethical demands.  This, then, is Hicks’ account of the Judaeo-Christian differentia.  Where precisely does its inadequacy lie?

                So far as concerns the first point in Hicks’ formulation – his perception, that is, of the significance of the covenantal relation as a marker of Judaeo-Christian difference – it is evident, from our analysis of non-sacrificial theologies in Chapter 2, that this is a view shared by a range of the theologies there considered, both non-sacrificial and revisionist sacrificial, especially those that seek to take into account the wider background of developments in non-theological studies on the subject of sacrifice and gift.  Indeed, these relatively widely informed theologies, notably, those of Schwager and Milbank, appear to share with Hicks’ analysis, not only the perception of the significance of covenant, but also essentially the same understanding of its mode of influence – as a liberation from the political and ethical claims of local allegiance.  Given, therefore, this surprisingly wide area of consensus among anthropologically informed theologians holding very divergent positions as to both the significance of the convenantal relation and the nature of its impact (Hicks’ first and second points), these elements of Hicks’ understanding of the Christian differentia would seem to merit at least very serious consideration.  The discrepancies between Hicks’ understanding and the account of ethicization given in Chapter 5 relate only to the third point identified above – namely, the characterization of the developments enabled by the liberation of the human/divine relation from localism.  Even here, it is not Hicks’ characterization of these developments (i.e. the universalization of community and of ethical demands) that is at fault, but rather his claim that they constitute the basis of the Judaeo-Christian differentia.  

                This poses the question whether the apparently distinctive feature of the Judaeo-Christian tradition – the convenantal relation – constitutes, in practice, just an alternative route to an ethicized religious practice that is essentially common to all confessional religions, or whether, the developments in religious practice arising from that distinctive feature serve to characterize Judaeo-Christian religious practice in a manner that distinguishes it in any important respect from the practice of other confessional religions. 

                An adequate response to this question would require a survey of a broader range of non-Christian religious traditions than we have considered in Chapter 5.  Nevertheless, in regard to those that have been considered, there does appear to be an important respect in which the ethicization of religion that originates in the covenantal relation will produce religious practices and structures that are distinct from the practices and structures of those other religions.  I refer, of course, to the way in which the ethicization that Hicks describes appears to take place without the degree of individualization of religious agency that we see elsewhere, and without the abandonment of socio-religious mediation and representation.  The various OT covenants, it will be remembered, address themselves to a collective entity – albeit one that may yet remain in the loins of the patriarchal ancestor (‘the people’; ‘Israel’; ‘you and your descendants’).  The entry into relationship of God with a people in this way presupposes a possibility of collective representation.  This possibility we see developed throughout the biblical narrative: for the Old Israel, by means of priestly hierarchy of the Mosaic cult, as that is represented, above all, in the Pentateuch; for the New Israel, in the priestly act of Christ’s sacrificial life, death and resurrection. 

                Like many commentators, Hicks draws attention to the progressive disengagement of Judaeo-Christian socio-symbolism, first, from territoriality (manifest even in post-exilic literature of the OT), and second, with the advent of Christianity, from ethnicity.  The tendency towards less localist understandings of community goes along with increasingly individualized notions of religious agency.  In the light of Chapter 5, we are able to see the parallelism between the latter development, as described by Hicks, and the transformation of religious agency evidenced in the emergence of Muslim and Theravada Buddhist practices of the religious gift.  As a result there arise, both in Hindu-Buddhist or Muslim faiths and in Judaism or Christianity, practices of the gift that, as we have seen in Chapter 5, actualize, through substantive expenditure outside the ritual sphere, a religious paradigm that is expressed symbolically (though without substantive expenditure) in ritual actions.  Sadaka and dana also resemble Judaeo-Christian almsgiving in their exemplification of universal ideal applicable to all human action (i.e. sadaka and detachment in the case of Islam and Buddhism; agapeic love in Christianity). 

                In Theravada Buddhism and Islam, however, these individualized practices express a symbolic paradigm that leaves limited scope for collective religious agency; individuals are called to be ‘a refuge unto themselves’; whereas in Judaeo-Christian tradition, there can be no question of the elimination of mediation – since this would be altogether incompatible with a mode of religious interaction that brings God into relationship, above all, with a collectivity.  Yes, salvation for Christians is an individual affair in the sense that it cannot be procured for individuals without their active religious co-operation (any more than salvation can for Buddhists or Muslims).  At the same time, Christians are ‘saved’ through their belonging within ‘the body of Christ’ – rather as the Jews were called to membership within a chosen people.  In other words, their salvation is collectively achieved by means of incorporation into a sacrifice that is performed pre-emptively for the benefit of all those to be incorporated.  It follows that the collectivity instituted through the calling of individuals is no mere incidental result of the salvational project – in the way, for example, that a kind of collectivity results from the choice of individuals to pursue a personal interest in common with others through an association, such as an amateur symphony orchestra or a football team.  The Church is the embodiment of Christ, not the instrument of a salvational project directed to individuals.    

                How, then, should a sacrificial revisionist position define the Christian differentia?  I would  propose – tentatively and provisionally – something along the following lines.  That, as Hicks, Schwager and Milbank appear to agree, it consists in the notion of the covenant, as a partnership of divine and human that is elective and implicates parties that are independent, in the sense that the relationship is not already determined by a pre-existing ideology of descent.   This notion of a covenantal relation differs from the sacrificial relation of archaic sacrificial ideology in that the divine is not a tutelary ancestor or ancestral spirit bound to representatives of the human party by ties of descent; it differs from the relation of certain other ethicized religions in that the ethicized practice that results from the fully-orbed development of covenantal relationality does not exclude the mediation of the human:divine relation and the representation of human party of the covenantal relation by a priestly representative (e.g. Christ).  Thus Christian religious practice, while ethicized, does not thereby forfeit the notion of salvation as a collective rather than primarily individual project.

Conclusions

The first conclusion of this study is that only a revisionist sacrificial position is consistent with the idea that Church is a sacramental community; non-sacrificial interpretations of the salvation event can be hard to reconcile with the idea of Christian community, and are altogether incompatible with the sacramental understanding of that community.  Part I of this study did not set out to explain in general terms why non-sacrificial theologies experience this difficulty, but merely noted, for each case, the failure to arrive at such an understanding. 

                In the light of our investigation of sacrifice in Part II the reasons for this difficulty become apparent.  Chapters 4 and 5 arrive at a definition of sacrifice as socio-symbolic action, and of religious community as socio-symbolic community – i.e. community instituted through socio-symbolic action.  This is relevant to our present concern because the kind of relation between religious action and community which we find in those chapters is replicated in Hicks’ understanding of the relation of sacrifice and Church, but excluded by non-sacrificial theologies that characterize Christian religious action as interdividual (Alison; Milbank; Schwager) or economic (Tanner).  The socio-symbolic understanding of community developed in our ethnographic chapters would prompt us to see the sacramental community of the ‘body of Christ’ in the same relation to Christian religious action (both liturgical and ethical) as religious community stands in relation to the socio-symbolic action of other religions.  And this, of course, is how Hicks sees things.  But if, like the non-sacrificial theologians, we exclude the socio-symbolic mode of relations from Christianity, the relation between religious action and community cannot be explained in socio-symbolic terms.  In practice, however, as we noted in Part I, some kind of relation between religious action and community continues to be assumed, as is evident from the characterization of religious action and community as sacramental – even though the sense of sacramental in this context must presumably be distinct from that of socio-symbolic.  The distinction thereby implied is sometimes left ill-defined (Mark Heim; Daly; Tanner), sometimes rendered fully explicit (Alison; Schwager; Milbank) – as, for example, in the opposition between revelation and paradigm (Alison), or between serial relationality and sacrifice (Milbank).  This study has found such characterizations of the sacramental to be unconvincing.  At all events, we are left wondering how the relation of salvation event and community in Christianity could bear so close an analogy to the relation of socio-symbolic actions and community in other religions without actually being socio-symbolic.

                We are prompted to ask at this point how serious a thing it would be for a theology to abandon its understanding of the Church as sacramental community.  It has to be said that the theologies discussed in Part I do not appear to take this route, though it would rid them of certain inconsistencies.  Nor is this surprising.  For one thing, an understanding of the Church as ‘the body of Christ’ is well rooted in the NT writings, and especially in the theology of St Paul where it is integral to the understanding of salvation itself as participation in Christ’s sufferings and resurrection – an understanding, moreover, reinforced through the ritual enactments.  For another, the alternatives to a sacramental understanding of the Church – such as, for example, that it is a fellowship of people committed to common convictions or to a common programme of moral reformation – are patently inadequate to the nature of a religious community.  When we compare the Church to communities that unmistakably bear a non-sacramental character – let us say, the Labour Party (common conviction) or Alcoholics Anonymous (moral reformation) – it becomes apparent that the latter are distinguished from religious communities by their instrumentalist relation to their goals.  Like other voluntarist associations in contemporary culture, their social role has to be viewed as an incidental benefit of the achievement of their primary goals.  By contrast, community is inseparable from the primary goal of the Church as the ‘body of Christ’; the Church is the embodiment of Christ, not just his instrument. 

                Our second conclusion is that only a sacrificial revisionist position is consistent with an understanding of the salvation event that is both scripturally based, and meaningful.  This conclusion is related to our first.  For it is the possibility of a socio-symbolic understanding of sacramental action which, on the one hand, offers a plausible explanation of the relation of sacramental action to the production of community, and, on the other, assigns a meaning and a function to NT sacrifice as the Christian form of socio-symbolic action.  In other words, to speak of the salvation event as a sacrifice makes sense to the extent that – and only to the extent that – the salvation event is being seen from the perspective of its socio-symbolic impact in producing and reproducing a distinctive form of socio-symbolic community (i.e. the Church).  Where theology loses sight of – or expressly distances itself from – the understanding of sacrifice as a socio-symbolic mode of relations, the biblical understanding of salvation event as sacrifice becomes disengaged from the only context in which it can make sense. The result, in the eloquent words of the sacrificial revisionist, Ashby, is the rise of ‘models and theories’, ‘a very thin doctrine of the Atonement, a concentration on the ransom paid to the devil, and a legacy of unsettled Eucharistic controversies’ (p. 55).  Since patristic times (to which Ashby here alludes), non-sensical and morally questionable theories about the ransom to the devil have, by and large, been replaced non-sensical and morally questionable theories of satisfaction or penal substitution.   Sacrifice as metaphor relegates the primary biblical schema in which the salvation event is understood to the status of just another ‘model’, and cherishes the resulting disharmony as a testimony to the mystery of a soteriological reality that no comprehensible words can express.  Anti-sacrificial positions generate interpretations of the salvation event that are socio-symbolic, and hence (by our logic) meaningful, only in their rejection of elsewhere prevailing, supposedly non-Christian, community, such as the liberal capitalist forms of the state.  The only way to arrive at a convincing understanding of the salvation event, is, as Ashby, Hicks and Chilton suggest, to restore it to the context of the biblical narrative of the development of sacrificial community.

                Our third conclusion is that a sacrificial revisionist position is compatible with an understanding of generic sacrifice that is consistent with contemporary understandings of sacrifice in religious studies, social anthropology, and the history of civilizations literature.  Anti-sacrificial positions inevitably characterize sacrifice negatively as violent, transactional and non-ethical in line with definitions of the phenomenon that have been challenged in more recent ethnographically based discussions in adjacent disciplines.  Sacrifice as metaphor positions tend in the same direction. 

                Our analysis distinguished non-sacrificial and sacrificial revisionist positions on the basis of their contrasting views of the relation of sacrifice and gift and of the relation of ritual and ethicial religion.  We have argued in this chapter, in the light of the ethnography of Chapters 4 and 5, that the position of sacrificial revisionism as represented by Hicks is closer on both points than non-sacrificial revisionism to the views of the relatively small number of specialists of adjacent disciplines that have discussed these issues.           

I would conclude that, on both theological and anthropological grounds, the sacrificial revisionist position is to be preferred.  The recommendation of this study would therefore be that Atonement theology should in future abandon Girardian anthropology and gift theory, along with an exceptionalist view of Christian socio-symbolic phenomena, and, like Hicks, develop an understanding of the Christian salvation event (and its ritual and ethical enactment) as a specific form of the generic phenomenon of sacrifice.

                An additional gain of the sacrificial revisionist position is to be able to situate Christianity sociologically in relation to other religious traditions, and to engage with non-theological disciplines in so doing.  This I hope to have demonstrated (contra Daly (p. 6)) to be not at all incompatible with the theological goal of framing in intellectual terms the meaning of Christian sacrifice and Atonement.  Indeed, I would argue that Hicks’ study demonstrates that far from being incompatible these two intellectual tasks are complementary and can assist each other.  This is because – as we have taken as our axiom throughout – where a theology presupposes an anthropology that seems inconsistent with the findings of the ethnographers, that theology should be suspected of being inadequate.  Thus empirical observation of anthropological phenomena constitutes in relation to theological thinking a means of calibration, and a potential corrective. 

                As regards the proper relation between theology and adjacent disciplines, the study of Hicks offers a good model.  Evidently, the ethnography on which it partly relies is no longer fit for purpose.  Consequently, there remains the task of developing a sacrificial revisionist theology on the basis of a wider range of more up-to-date ethnographic material.  This is a task in which theology and adjacent disciplines of social anthropology and religious studies can collaborate – and which, from the theological standpoint, offers a more fruitful opportunity for Christian outreach into the academy than the anti-sacrificial theories of Girard or Milbank. The present study is intended as a first – and no doubt inadequate – attempt at mapping out the territory still to be fully explored.

APPENDIX A

Chapter 1:

Potential objections to the methology proposed

Robert Daly, who adopts what I would categorize with some qualifications as a non-sacrificial approach, beings his recent study, Sacrifice Unveiled, with an explicit reference to the possibility of an alternative approach such as the one referred to by the present study as a sacrificial revisionistapproach:

Since sacrifice, in one form or another, has been an important part of practically every major religion, studies on sacrifice have typically begun by looking first to the various religions of the world […].  This is an eminently logical, scholarly, even scientific way of proceeding.[82]

So why not adopt it?  Daly proceeds to give two reasons why he feels such an approach to be misguided:

For us, however, such an approach is fatally flawed: flawed in its assumption that Christian sacrifice legitimately fits into the general category of sacrifice; and flawed as well in its failure to recognize that the salvation event did away with sacrifice in the history-of-religions sense of the word.

This appears to be the beginning of an argument against the adoption of a sacrificial revisionist approach, and in favour of the adoption of a non-sacrificial one.  It raises the expectation that Daly will now proceed to justify his position.  A discussion of this kind would certainly qualify as an attempt to deal with the methodological considerations around the choice of a non-sacrificial approach as opposed to a sacrificial one.  Curiously, however, the discussion never takes place.  Instead, the alternative, sacrificial revisionist, view to which Daly has alluded is promptly dismissed, with no explanation given of why he considers that the idea that Christian sacrifice does not fit into the general category of sacrifice should be any less an ‘assumption’ than the idea that it does fit into it, and no explanation of why we should believe that the ‘salvation event did away with sacrifice in the history-of-religions sense of the word’.  Unless, of course, the answer lies in the Girardian anthropology that he develops at the end of the study (pp. 217-22) in an extended ‘bridge’ passage, of which the relation to the rest of the study is left entirely unclear.  If, however, that is the case, why does Daly not see himself as obliged to justify that anthropology, as against the evidently very different anthropology of the ‘studies of sacrifice’ to which he refers at the beginning? 

                Consequently, what looks at first like the beginnings of an argument against sacrificial revisionism turns out to be an argument against any engagement between theology and the ‘history of religions’ whatsoever.  This would, of course, also be an argument against the kind of preliminary investigation of the relation of Christian salvation event and generic sacrifice proposed by this study.  On the basis that Daly is here voicing a point of view that, while rarely expressed in so many words, nevertheless concurs with what some theologians – and some readers of this text – are inclined to believe, I propose to interpret it in this sense.              

                However, even on this interpretation, we are faced with exactly the same problem we face if we take Daly’s remarks as a critique of sacrificial revisionism.  No justification – still less evidence – is given for why we should believe, like Daly, that what Christianity has called ‘sacrifice’ and what history of religions designates by the same term are two distinct phenomena without relation to each other.  Instead of any such justification, Daly gives us, in the remarks cited above, that potent appeal to the reader implicit in the words ‘for us’ – presumably a suggestion that, as the kind of people he might expect to be reading his book (Roman Catholics of a more progressive persuasion?), we will naturally accept his theological premises with no further questions asked.

                Daly’s tentative foray into methodological territory is instructive and well worth evoking in the present context.  It comes as close as any theological argument to an explicit statement of why the methodological issues between a non-sacrificial and a sacrificial approach are simply not worth considering.  At the same time, it brings home just about as effectively as can be imagined why such a consideration is absolutely indispensable. 

A more serious objection, voiced to me informally, having to do, like Daly’s, with the nature of the relationship between theology and adjacent disciplines, could perhaps be developed on the basis of John Milbank’s radical critique of the social sciences in Theology and Social Theory.[83] 

                According to this, the discourse of the social sciences is itself a dissident secularizing ‘theological’ discourse, its true import emerging only when we consider it in its proper genealogical relation to the theological discourses that precede it, and to which it is, in reality, a development and a response.  This global critique is relevant to my argument, because, on Milbank’s analysis, we would not expect the discourse of adjacent disciplines (supposing it, for a moment, to be a social scientific discourse) to be theologically neutral, but to be already predisposed, as a dissident secularizing discourse, against any understanding of the Christian salvation event as exceptional (which is, of course, the common feature of all non-sacrificial positions).  In other words, we would be misguided in going to adjacent disciplines for evidence against which Christian truth could be calibrated (essentially the methodology of this study) because that evidence will be skewed by precisely the same factors that have influenced the theological views that we are seeking to calibrate.

                This objection is totally unsustainable.  Not because Milbank is necessarily wrong about the relation between theology and the social sciences, though he may very well be; but because the material that we use as a control is not social scientific discourse – and certainly not social scientific discourse as Milbank himself understands it.  Of course, discussion of sacrifice and gift in the anthropological and historical disciplines manifests a form of discourse.  After all, even what, with seeming naiveté, I term ‘ethnography’, or ‘ethnographic evidence’ is necessarily filtered through (a) discourse(s) that situates us in pre-emptive relation to the phenomena discussed.  However, Milbank’s quarrel is not with the anthropologists like Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner or Mary Douglas.  We would scarcely expect it to be, since recent instances of that discourse have not tended towards secularism in their orientation (rather the reverse).  Such examples would alone suffice to disrupt any hypothesis that discussion of sacrifice in social anthropology constituted a branch of social scientific discourse that was inherently secularizing.  Actually, Milbank’s quarrel is essentially with important strands of the mainstream sociological tradition – which is something else entirely.  That tradition is represented, on the one hand, by Anglo-American sociologists and social theorists like Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Robert Bellah, Niklas Luhmann, Peter Berger and Bryan Turner: on the other, by French social thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida.  If this were not already obvious in Theology and Social Theory, it is demonstrated beyond question in the papers discussed below (‘Can a Gift be Given?’ and ‘Stories of Sacrifice’) in which Milbank not only engages in some detail with social anthropology, but frequently makes clear what his own theory of gift owes to this anthropological literature.  Indeed, Milbank’s own radical and anti-secularist stance towards social theory, in some respects resembles more extreme elements in 1990’s anthropology, with its radical de-construction of social concepts, and its distrust of secularizing rationalizations.  The acquaintance with such work demonstrated in the above-cited papers might even suggest that Milbank himself was influenced by such writing.  At all events, there is no question that, while Milbank’s ideal academy may have ejected the ersatz religion of social science in order to re-enthrone theology, it still envisages a place for the comparative study of religion. 

APPENDIX B

Chapter 2:

Metaphor in Paul Ricoeur

Finally, in this exploration of the limitations of the ‘language as metaphor’ position, it is instructive to consider the case of Paul Ricoeur.  Not because his position on metaphor should be thought of as offering a theoretical basis for theological options other than those supported by the kind of approach to metaphor represented by McFague, Gunton and Soskice.  But simply because, like McFague, he develops a theory of meaning that reserves some (small) independent place in its overall scheme for symbol as well as metaphor.  A sense of Ricoeur’s understanding of the relation of symbol and metaphor already emerges in the argument of The Symbolism of Evil.[84] But a passage from Interpretation Theory[85]  constitutes perhaps his most explicit statement on the subject. 

Certain fundamental human experiences make up an immediate symbolism that presides over the most primitive metaphorical order.  This originary symbolism seems to adhere to the most immutable human manner of being in the world, whether it be a question of above and below, the cardinal directions, the spectacle of the heavens, terrestrial location, houses, paths, fire, wind, stones or water.  […]  Everything indicates that symbol systems constitute a reservoir of meaning whose metaphoric potential is yet to be spoken.  And, in fact, the history of words and culture would seem to indicate that if language never constitutes the most superficial layer of our symbolic experience, this deep layer only becomes accessible to us to the extent that it is formed and articulated at a linguistic and literary level since the most insistent metaphors hold fast to the intertwining of the symbolic infrastructure and metaphoric superstructure. (p. 65)

The most salient feature of this text is the assignment of symbol and metaphor to layers of, respectively, non-linguistic and linguistic experience, which are characterized towards each other in the relation of infrastructure and suprastructure.  The implication for the symbolic is that it is a universal substrate, a layer of sub-linguistic, sub-conscious experience, out of which the combinatory of real-life cultural and linguistic possibilities finds itself variously derived.  This sounds like the kind of understanding of symbol we would associate with Freud, or perhaps Mircea Eliade – and it is hard to imagine anything more at odds with the understanding of the symbol to be found in Bell, Douglas, Victor Turner, or the ethnographic accounts of ritual discussed below (Chapter 4).  For the social anthropologists, the symbol does not constitute a datum of human experience (an idea against which Douglas fights tirelessly), but is actively produced through purposive and often verbalized social processes.  It follows from this: first, that language is not restricted to the articulation of the symbolic, but is already engaged in its production; second, that symbolic meaning is not universal but culturally specific.  No wonder, then, that Douglas sets out on her exposition of a ritually sustained notion of contamination in Purity and Danger by dismissing Ricoeur’s understanding of ‘defilement’ along with that of the nineteenth century, in favour of what we can learn from anthropologists ‘who have ventured further into these primitive cultures’.[86] 

APPENDIX C

Chapter 4

Case 4: Pharaonic Egypt

This seems a particularly apt case with which to conclude our discussion of unidirectional reciprocity, since it is precisely the ethnographic example that Godelier uses, in one of the few recent theoretical treatments of gift and sacrifice, when he argues for the impact of a unilateralist sacrificial paradigm on a pattern of gift-transactions entertained between human individuals as the basis of a hierarchical form of society: 

The divine essence of Pharaoh confronts us with two fundamental facts. On the one hand, it becomes understandable that those who owe everything, even their very existence and that of their progeny, to such a power, willingly consent to its authority. […] And the second basic fact, which also sheds light on the first, is that this consent was the expression of a primordial debt that humans owed the gods and in particular the god who dwelled among them, Pharaoh, a debt which all the counter-gifts of their labor, their harvest, and even their person could not counterbalance, and even less obliterate if Pharaoh were to demand their life. (p. 193)

The ethnographic evidence we have so far adduced in support of the notion of unidirectional giving corroborates most features of Godelier’s model:  above all, (1.) the meaning of sacrifice as a response to a state of indebtedness to the powers presiding over cosmic and social origin, and (2.) the extension of the sacrificial paradigm into human relationships outside the ritual sphere, where the addressee of gifts is a ‘divinized’ human individual.  However, the same evidence brings into doubt Godelier’s characterization of this mode of giving as unilateral, and supports the notion of sacrificial giving as a form of reciprocity, as suggested by more recent discussions of gift and sacrifice in the work of Rio and S&S.  The obvious ethnographic context in which to test these propositions is that of Ancient Egypt – especially as Godelier’s primary ethnographic source for these remarks – the study of Bonhême and Forgeau (B&F) – is a good example of that ‘anthropological’ trend of French ‘history of civilization’ writing that seems to have entrenched itself in the wake of Paris sociological school of Vernant and Détienne.  How far is Godelier accurately following his ethnographic source when he claims: 1. that consent to royal authority derives from an acknowledgement of cosmic debt; 2. that the mundane tribute of ‘labor’ and ‘harvest’ constitutes a kind of impossible counter-gift?  More broadly, we might ask whether B&F support Godelier’s notion of the sacrificial gift as unilateral, over the alternative view that it represents a particular form of reciprocity. Could the sacrificial giving of Ancient Egypt be described as ‘unidirectional’ – in the same sense as the transactional system of the kingdom of Imerina or that of the Bemba chiefdom? 

The particular interest of this ethnographic case in the light of such considerations justifies a more extended treatment of the Egyptian material than we have allowed to other cases discussed hitherto.  The following pages will give attention to every aspect of the unidirectional paradigm outlined above.  We will begin by examining the transactional character of the sacrificial ritual itself; subsequent sections will then consider whether practices of ‘pooling’ described by B&F conform to Godelier’s notion of the impossible counter-gift, and whether there is ethnographic evidence of a compensating downward and redistributive flow of spiritual and material resources that would justify a characterization of the transactional system as unidirectional.  

Unidirectional ritual

We begin by considering the sacrificial ritual itself, and the kind of transaction that it constitutes.  Our first question: can it be considered a response to a state of indebtedness to origin?  On the specifically mythological dimension of the sacrificial ritual B&F have little to say.  On the whole, however, this is the dimension on which accounts of Ancient Egyptian religion have focussed, and there is a considerable degree of consensus amongst them.  Occasional allusions in B&F tend to bear out the overall picture we receive from other accounts.  I rely particularly here on the recent study by Dunand and Zivie-Coche (D&Z). [87]

The idea of sacrifice as implicating a relationship to cosmic and social origin is all-pervasive in temple rituals.  It is clearly expressed in the spatial and temporal choreography of temple ritual.  As regards the spatial aspect, every Egyptian temple is deemed, in a notional way, to be situated at the precise point of cosmological origin (D&Z, p. 88).  The cosmos of the Egyptians is shaped by their spiritual and everyday experience of dependence on the annual inundations of the river Nile – it begins with a little mound of earth emerging from the waters of chaos (noun), rather as the first shoals of mud, with their promise of a new agricultural year, appear above the ebbing waters of the Nile when the floods begin to decline.  Set on just such a primeval hill, sits each and every temple:  its foundations are ceremoniously sunk to the level of the water table, and the edifice itself takes the form of a succession of courts progressively darker and more roofed in, increasingly sacred and forbidden, which lead the worshipper simultaneously upwards and backwards through time into the gathering obscurity of the world’s sacred origin.   As regards the temporal aspect, there is a belief, traced by D&Z through its many iconographic expressions, that the birth of each day – and all the more so, of each year – requires the successful management of a precarious interval of crisis and challenge, in which the powers of order and light find themselves pitched into a struggle with gods of chaos and darkness seeking to disrupt the orderly procession of time (D&Z, pp. 64-67).  The ritual of sacrifice conjugates these spatial and temporary concepts in an enactment of cosmic and social origin.[88]  Every morning before dawn the sacrificial procession begins to wend its upward and backward course through the temple precincts, carefully regulating its speed in order to synchronize the priest’s final arrival at the place of cosmic origin – marked by chamber containing the divine effigy, or naos – just minutes before the great moment when dawn brings the rebirth of the sun-god Re out of the watery darkness of chaos (Nun) (D&Z, pp. 90-93; B&F, pp. 144-5). Leaving the rest of the procession outside, the high priest goes on alone with lighted candle through the darkness to lift the seal on the naos – so that the divine image glimmers through the darkness at the moment of sunrise.  The naos is, by a striking terminological confirmation of this orchestration of ritual time and place, the ‘horizon’ of the divinity.

                We come now to our second question respecting the Ancient Egyptian ritual transaction: whether its response to a primordial indebtedness is better characterized as unilateral (Godelier) or reciprocal (Rio & S&S).  According to B&F, surviving depictions of sacrificial ritual appear to take two forms.  Sometimes, friezes running along the lower inside temple wall show a procession of allegorized figures representing the nomes (territorial entities), bearing a stereotyped selection of offerings.  Here there is no reference to the role of the king, or to any divine counter-gift.  Elsewhere, friezes take a similar form but with the offering-dishes borne by the allegorized figures surmounted by the words ‘In the name of King X’ (i.e. the current Pharaoh) (B&F, pp.126-7). Here, the message of the frieze – and the reciprocal nature of the ritual action – is summed up in a formula such as:  ‘The King X makes you (the gods) an offering: may you grant him power/strength’.  Thus, though Godelier’s evidence for Ancient Egypt apparently derives primarily from B&F, B&F themselves do not seem to support Godelier’s understanding of sacrifice as unilateral.  Summing up this evidence in a section entitled ‘Gift and Counter-gift’, they speak of a transaction in which ‘attending to the needs’ of the divinity, on the one side, is reciprocated by the return of what they term ‘creative impulse’ (‘l’influx créateur’).  In Ptolemaic temples in which limitations of space does not allow the depiction of the whole ritual, D&Z refer to the case in which only the single scene of the offering of Maat is included – a figure of the goddess of the socio-religious order depicted as a small effigy in the palm of the offerant (more about Maat below).  This, they continue, is ‘not to be considered as pars pro toto, but rather a veritable summary and program of the entire ritual’ (p. 91). 

Something of the content of the downward arm of the sacrificial cycle – B&F’s counter-gift – may be indicated in the attributes that the divinities possess, and consequently have in their power to communicate: in the hieroglyphic signs for ‘life’ and ‘power’ that in the depiction of sacrificial scenes become, as symbolic appurtenances of the gods, part of the their distinctive iconographic representation.  In view of this possibility, it is likely to be significant, that the figure of the goddess Maat in the representation of the sacrifice of Maat (which, according to D&Z, is the epitome of the whole sacrificial ritual) carries in her outstretched hand the ankh symbol, the ansate cross, which is the hieroglyphic character meaning life.

                B&F tend to speak of sacrifice as though it were a crudely transactional matter of barter with the gods. Yet, the material they cite speaks for itself.  The following prayer could scarcely make clearer the fundamental difference between the kind of bilateral transaction characteristic of sacrifice and the do ut des transactionality of commercial relations: 

You (the god) will give me (Pharaoh) an abundant and generous flood (of the river Nile), in order to provide for your divine offerings and in order to provide for the divine offerings to the gods and goddesses who are the masters of Upper and Lower Egypt, in order to give life to the sacred bulls, and in order to give life to the whole people of your land, their animals and trees, all of which your hand has created. (p. 127) 

What characterizes the sacrificial relation here is a dependence (of man on god), fittingly expressed in a circulation of benefits, that has its source in the gods.  The descent of divine blessing (in the form of a generous flood) supplies the necessary conditions for the ascent of offerings (in the form of sacrifices), which in turn occasion the further descent of blessing (in the form of renewed life).  A sense of the dependence of all life on its ultimate source – and hence of the priority of the downward over the upward arm of the exchange – is suggested by the river itself, the paradigmatic example of natural profusion, as well as by the reference to the divine creation and sustenance of people, animals and trees.  A better illustration would be hard to find of a circulation of gifts that unites the human and divine parties to exchange, but in an altogether unidirectional manner that guarantees the hierarchical nature of the relation.  But if we had to spell out the difference between this and obviatory reciprocity, then two features of unidirectional reciprocity identified in our earlier analysis of exchanges in Bloch’s Imerina kingdom immediately stand out.  First, the content of the gift is qualitatively distinct in the case of upward and downward transactions: the tangibility of the heaped offerings constituting the care of the people for their gods, as against the never ‘cash-in-hand’ benefit of a symbolic and relational capital that is always yet to be redeemed.  Second, the irreversible directionality of these upward and downward flows that determines that what goes up in one form can only ever come down in another. 

                It is worth spending a moment considering who the two parties to the exchange are.  God and man?  It is tempting in the Egyptian case, to say: god and Pharaoh – since it is a fact that Pharaoh is the individual for whom, and at whose expense, sacrifice is undertaken at every state temple rite – though, in practice, of course, his place is nearly always taken by a priestly substitute.  On the other hand, Pharaoh is one of gods.  That principal of unidirectional exchange to which we refer as exemplified in the Polynesian chief could not be better exemplified than in the case of the Pharaoh.  The human intermediary of the sacred comes – at least in the eyes of the beneficiary – to share in the sacredness of that which he mediates.  Godelier describes Pharaoh as a recipient of sacrificial offering as the recipient of the sacrificial tribute of ‘labor’).  Certainly, the indigenous representations of which we have spoken convey an overwhelming sense of the Pharaoh’s divine attributes, and, above all, of his intimacy with other members of the pantheon.

So is Pharaoh human or divine?  If he is divine, is it not the case that the sacrificial exchange takes place, not between man and god, but between the gods themselves?  Borrowing the terminology of some contemporary anthropological writing (Gender of the Gift, pp. 273-4), we might say that the ambivalence in the Pharaoh’s sacrificial role reflects a two-fold agency (human and divine) united in a single person.  The two-way sacrificial flow seems to constitute an alternation within the royal person of a human and a divine ritual agent.  Support for such a view – as well as a good illustration of the unidirectional circulation of the sacrificial gift – is to be found in the salient indigenous symbolism of Maat (widely discussed in the Egyptological literature).  Often translated ‘righteousness’, at a more fundamental level the term has a twofold significance.  On the one hand, it denotes the divine energy constitutive of the essence of Pharaonic kingship, constituting an indispensable element of the royal name (B&F, pp. 132-5). Simultaneously, it denotes the action of making a sacrificial offering.  It will be observed that these two senses of Maat correspond respectively to Bloch’s hasina II and hasina I.  There is a component of the sacrificial sequence that illustrates with particular clarity this duality of meaning: the ‘offering of Maat’, to which we have already referred.  The proffered figurine is that of a female seated on an offering basket, the curve of which precisely matches the hollow of the royal hand outstretched to offer her, representing both royal action and royal essence.   However, Maat is also divine essence – though the role of the gods is to receive, and the king’s to offer:  in the words of an inscription that neighbours the divine effigy in Ptolemaic temples (B&F, p. 134): ‘You exist because Maat exists and Maat exists because you exist’.  The offering of Maat by Pharaoh evokes the gods’ dependence on sacrifice.  At the same time, implicit in the idea that Pharaoh sustains the gods through sacrifice – but, as it were in counterpoint to it – is the implication that through sacrifice Pharaoh sustains his own relationship with them, and thereby his own divine substance.  This unidirectional circularity is evoked in the words of Hatchepsout (1490-1468), which bring out the notion of sustenance underlying the symbolism of Maat:

I have offered him (Amon) Maat which he loved, for I know that he lives on it.  It (Maat) is also my bread and I drink its dew.  Am I not one with him (Amon)? (B&F p. 132)

It appears that this divine essence is not something that can simply be retained in the manner of Weiner’s sacred object; it must constantly be re-engendered through the process whereby the Pharaoh sustains her gods, and, in so doing, sustains her own sacred essence.

Sacrifice and pooling

So far, our discussion has been restricted to the ritual aspect of sacrifice as a transaction between man and god.  Yet Godelier’s treatment of Egyptian sacrifice appears to extend beyond this, and beyond the temple precinct itself, to the whole economic and political sphere.  The obligation of religious giving is thereby associated, not just with the ritual action of Pharaoh and his substitutes in the confines of the temple, nor even with the pooling of resources by the wider community required in order to sustain such sacrificial ritual, but also with the pooling of resources implicated in sustaining the entire political system.  This pooling is claimed to be nothing less than a response enjoined upon every Egyptian subject by a condition of primordial indebtedness to ‘the gods and in particular the god who dwelled among them, Pharaoh’ – an indebtedness ‘which all the counter-gifts of their labor, their harvest, and even their person could not counterbalance, and even less obliterate if Pharaoh were to demand their life’.  The ritual notion of sacrifice is thereby transformed into a universal ethical norm and a fundamental principle of the political and economic system.  From this perspective, sacrifice is not simply a ritual affair between man and god, but the whole system of social and political relationships dominated by that ritual paradigm.  Godelier’s perspective here invites us to view sacrifice as a modality of the gift.

Is there evidence, in the case of Ancient Egypt, to support Godelier’s notion of economic pooling as driven by a sacrificial ideology of debt to origin? Does the Pharaoh truly exercise the absolute claim over the labour, harvest and person of his subjects claimed by Godelier?   If so, does this claim really derive from a religious conception of Pharaoh’s power as divine representative?  B&F offer an excellent point of departure for an examination of these questions, since a primary focus of their work is on ‘the Pharaonic mode of production’ and ‘the place of the Pharaonic institution in the appropriation and management of wealth’ (B&F, pp. 166, 169). 

As regards the nominal ownership of the land and its resources, the position of Pharaoh seems clear cut:  Egypt is ‘the co-property of the gods that created her and of Pharaoh, their earthly lieutenant, and, as such, the Double Kingdom constitutes a unity that is theoretically inalienable’ (p. 169).  Yet these assertions seem also to be reflected in the practices – and juridical provisions – surrounding the proprietorship of land and other resources (see B&F, pp. 170-7).  Obviously, these vary over the course of Egypt’s long history, and the evidence, though considerable for certain periods, is always patchy and hard to interpret.  The underlying mechanism remains that of the royal ‘donation’ which dedicates a productive unit to the maintenance of a particular cult, or grants the individual nominal rights over a productive unit as remuneration for the exercise of his function – ‘without the distinction between these alternative forms of delegation being very clearly determined’ (p. 171).  In practice, most of the cases of donation described take the form of a concession on the surplus product of a productive unit theoretically dedicated to the service of a deity.  Units are often subject to multiple deductions, the return to the deity amounting to ‘a nominal jug of beer’ (p. 173).  In the early period, an individual’s house and its immediately surrounding land would seem to be the only form of private property, with the exception of concessions affecting the service of public and funerary temples (which are heritable, but inalienable).  During the Middle Kingdom there are signs of greater flexibility, but it is only as late as the Ramessid period that good evidence becomes available.  At this stage, possession of land is ceded only to managers and cultivators of temple estates; otherwise, a system of heritable tenure obtains for the benefit of soldiers, mercenaries and government functionaries (p. 174). Later periods see the strengthening of the economic power of the sanctuaries – a policy encouraged, for all the dangers of the emergence of a state within the state, because ‘it did not challenge the principle of the Pharaoh’s possession of the land’ (p. 174).

Is B&F’s account consonant with Godelier’s understanding of the sacrificial offering as a counter-gift?  The apparent incongruity to our eyes of the language of gift to transactions resembling a form of fiscal imposition should not be treated as an absolute disqualification.  The Hawaiian makahiki  is both a first-fruits offering  and a form of taxation sustaining the political elite.[89]  At the same time, there are important differences between Ancient Egypt and the Hawaiian kingdoms, despite the fact that both systems exemplify a complex imbrication of sacerdotal and non-sacerdotal considerations in the attribution of donations.  In Egypt, levies clearly enter the treasury directly, as well as passing through concessions on temple estates.  How do levies of the former kind – those that do not support temple states either directly or through associated tenancies – fit the paradigm of Godelier’s counter-gift?

The key concept that links the vast upward pooling of resources sustaining the centralized state with the notion of a sacrificial gift to origin is that of Pharaoh’s ultimate ownership of the land and its resources (B&F, p. 172).  This clearly derives from Pharaoh’s religious position as sole sacrificer on behalf of his people, and hence unique channel for the diffusion of the divine beneficence of Egypt’s creator gods.  This dogma of royal ownership – shown by the legal concept of donation to be to be efficacious, since donation presupposes it – lends the tributary imposition the character of a moral obligation akin the obligation towards the tutelary gods elsewhere expressed in sacrificial offering.  The underlying kinship between the chiefly imposition and the debt of sacrifice (where these are not identical) is noted by Audrey Richards in the case of the Bemba, to whose chief, as sacrificer and divine representative, is attributed an absolute (but notional) proprietorship of land, resources and people comparable to what is attributed to the Pharaoh of Egypt.  When questioned as to their non-resistance to these exactions, the Bemba give two reasons: first, that not to pay the tribute would be to refuse the chief his due, just as to consume the harvest before the payment of first fruits, would be to steal from the ancestors; second, that the one kind of theft, like the other, would inevitably incur divine sanctions (Richards, p. 260).

It is in this dimension of moral obligation that we find the element of ‘consent’ that is emphasized strongly both in the account of B&F and in Godelier’s presentation of their material.  ‘Consensual’ does not, of course, mean voluntary.  The meaning of consent here is apparent in the contrast that B&F draw between what they term the ‘Pharaonic system of redistribution’ and the conventional picture of ‘hydraulic’ societies and ‘oriental despotism’ dear to Marxists, with its emphasis on central planning and the enslavement of the population (pp. 169, 176-7).  B&F insist that, so far as Egypt is concerned, the initiative in planning lies with the producer, and the appropriation of the surplus production takes place on the basis of the shared norms of the sacrificial ideology, rather than through arbitrary impositions of authority.  ‘The economic structures of ancient Egypt, in place since the inception of the monarchy, derive from the religious conception of power, not from the technical imperatives of hydraulic societies in which the sovereign, master of the water supply, exercises an unyielding state dirigisme’ (p. 169).  In response to the apparent incongruity of religiously sanctioned levies in support of administrative and military expenditure,  B&F emphasise throughout their account the unity of  the Pharaonic notion of sovereignty, as essentially religious:

The duties of Pharaoh can seem diverse: he maintains religious cult, he gives out the law, looks after the food supply and fights at the head of the armies.  While we can, for the sake of clarity, distinguish various government functions […] we must always bear in mind sovereignty in Egypt is one and indivisible: in each of his roles the king embodies the totality of Maat. (p. 128)

Sacrifice and redistribution

Godelier’s association of the counter-gift with pooling in the politico-economic sphere focuses attention on the upward phase of the circuit of sacrificial giving – the things which, from a symbolic perspective, move from man to god, and which, from a politico-economic perspective, flow up the hierarchy from subject to sovereign.  His extension of sacrifice beyond ritual into the wider sphere of transactions supporting the hierarchical regime seems very much in line with the views of the ethnographers, B&F.  The possibility entertained by some anthropologists, however, that  ritual transactions may be bilateral and reciprocal leads us to push our examination of this ethnography a little further, in order to discover whether there may not also be some evidence for a corresponding flow of the gift down the hierarchy from sovereign to subject.  This would obviously not be in line with Godelier’s understanding of sacrifice as unilateral; but our characterization of ritual sacrifice as reciprocal rather than unilateral encourages us to seek practices of redistribution in society at large, which reflect the sacrificial paradigm as much as those of practices of pooling to which Godelier draws our attention.  

                Such evidence is not far to seek.  At the most fundamental level, redistribution in Pharaonic Egypt takes the form of a process termed the ‘reversion’ of the offering – by which is meant the recycling and consumption of the enormous quantities of provender assembled for the ostensible purpose of honouring the gods:

Long is the journey of the products ceremoniously brought to the sanctuary, for, after their ritual use on altar after altar, they are redistributed to the temple staff, and to families living around the sanctuary, according to a strict allocation of rights:  ‘we live off the provisions of the gods, but that is what we call anything that comes from the altar, after the god has had his fill of it’.  The mechanism of the offering from which the divine draws its substance thus governs not only the organisation of the temple but the life of the entire country. (B&F, p. 146)

The rights to such emoluments are determined by conditions specified in the acts of donation and reflect the will of the king and his predecessors.  Notwithstanding, B& F cite considerable evidence for the ongoing interference by the crown in the affairs of sanctuaries: their estates can, for example, be taken back for a limited time, ‘no doubt for the purposes of ensuring a more effective exploitation’ (p. 175).  Furthermore, evidence is not lacking for the redirection by Pharaohs of the foundations of their predecessors for the benefit their own cult.  The bounty of religious foundations is, in short, intimately associated with the expression of royal beneficence, and would seem to have been so regarded by the rulers themselves – as is attested by the proud enumeration of religious benefactions in the tombs of the Old Kingdom (p. 173), or in a document like the Harris Papyrus in which Ramses III details his largesse to gods and men (thanks to which figures can be placed on the economic value of temple property at the end of the New Kingdom) (p. 174).  Divine benevolence is thus indissociable from the exercise of royal patronage.

                What of the evidence for the association of royal benevolence specifically with the divine gift of life?   This is abundantly represented in the public monuments and inscriptions enunciating the political programmes of respective rulers, cited by B&F.  From the Middle Kingdom onwards, these give prominence to the nurturing role of the monarch as the one who feeds his people, often by associating him with divinities presiding over the harvest: thus Seti I is ‘the one who fills the store houses, enlarges the granaries and gives good things to the one who has nothing’ (p. 164). But it is above all the River Nile that embodies the divine flow of nature’s abundance.  No Pharaoh claims to be able to command its waters directly.  But there is a growing tendency for rulers to associate themselves with its life-giving powers – to the point that, by the time of Ramses II, epithets signifying the king’s role of nourisher of his people appear to be taken word for word from eulogies to Hapy (Nile divinity) (p. 166).  Amenophis IV/Akhenaton describes himself as ‘the great Hapy of the whole land, and the nourishment of the whole people’.  From the time of Amenemhat III, rulers portray themselves as offering-bearers, holding in their hands tables heaped with Nile fishes and aquatic plants.  In the words of B&F, the Pharaoh declares himself, equally with his god, responsible for the profusion of nature’.  Along with language of nurture there develops a morality of benevolent paternalism that presents the ruler and pious sacrificer as a benevolent father to his people.  ‘Like a father who cares for his children’, he assures the general well-being and brings aid to the disadvantaged.  Under the New Kingdom, this ethic of paternal benevolence combines with the role of creator that the Pharaoh derives from the divine demiurge, Khnoum (represented as a potter at his wheel): thus, Seti I declares himself the Khnoum of human beings who ‘forms/brings up’ the orphan, and ‘binds/enriches’ the poor. 

The ethical tone is one of paternal benevolence towards the inferior, which replicates in the sphere of the relationships of man to man, the paternal benevolence that the tutelary gods themselves are invited in the ritual sphere to show to their ‘son’.  Such paternal benevolence is the counterpart of the filial piety towards the superior which moves transactions passing in an opposite (i.e. upward) direction, the latter being, as we have seen, exemplified in the pious offerings of Pharaoh in temples throughout the realm, and replicated in the sphere of inter-human relationships by the countless acts in which Pharaoh’s subjects render their due.

APPENDIX D

Chapter 6

The place of violence in sacrificial rituals

I hope to show in the following paragraphs an alternative to Girard’s explanation that suggests itself on the basis of our accounts of sacrifice in Chapter 4.  This is close to the one that de Heusch himself proposes in his account of the Swazi Ncwala ritual.  I shall begin, however, with my own material.

The obviatory transactions, described in Chapter 4, envisage the exchange partner in the role of an outsider.  The social identity of one partner is established by an assertion of the independence of his/her identity from that of the other: this is, after all, what it means for a transaction to be obviatory.  From the religious perspective, the result is a kind of social identity that posits its origin and source of life outside itself.  This characteristic has an impact both on the definition of giver and recipient and the perception they have of each other (and the gods).  As regards the definition of giver and recipient, our case studies suggest that the obviatory gift crosses the boundaries of the primary socio-religious group.  For example, among the Daribi, it will be remembered, affinal payments establish a distinction between the identities of wife-giver and wife taker, both focussed around sibling sets.  Thus the payment is made to an outsider group, and the spirits appeased or propitiated are those of the recipient, not the donor.[90]  As for the perception that giver and recipient have of each other, this follows from the obviatory nature of the exchange, and causes the gods and spirits to assume a hostile aspect, as befits powers to whom payments resemble a do ut abeas.  This is reflected in the fear amongst the Daribi, as amongst those with obviatory socio-religious practices across the Melanesian region, of sorcery and witchcraft – a fear that finds expression in a constant mobilization on the part of the social group against their destructive effects.  The Daribi belief in the hold exercised over them by the pagebidi is typical, and resembles, it will be recalled, the power of an exuvial sorcerer with a limitless quantity of sorcery substance. 

Unidirectional transactions, on the other hand, seem to locate the ‘other’ of the collective social identity within the donor’s primary group, so that the separation implied by the exchange relation corresponds to a distinction of hierarchical level rather than a boundary between one’s own identity and its absolute outside.  For example, among the Merina, the Tikopia and the Bemba, the response to the state of cosmic debt is experienced in relation to a source of life within the primary group;  it is the donor’s own chiefs and ancestors who are propitiated, not someone else’s.  Accordingly, the upward flows of wealth take the form of a homage rendered rather than simply the aversion of a mortal threat.  What determines the role of donor and recipient in unidirectional transactions is not, as with Daribi sibling sets, belonging (donor), and not belonging (recipient), to the social group defined by the transaction, it is a question of relative position in a hierarchy that, for each transaction, makes one party a representative of ancestral power for the other.  Of course, an individual who is a donor at one hierarchical level may be a recipient at another level.  But, within each transaction, one party comes to represent the self/identity that both parties share – a kind of second or supra-self that only completely coincides with an individual at the apex of the hierarchy (e.g. in the person of the ancestor or chief).  Evidently, the kind of social self constituted by unidirectional transactions is more complex in nature than the one constituted through obviatory ones.  For to locate the source of self/identity at a point within that self/identity implies positions where social self/identity coincides with its source, and a positions where it does not – the positions, respectively, of the hierarchically superior and the hierarchically inferior. 

So far as the sacred is concerned, the supra-identity instituted through unidirectional reciprocity seems to assume, by comparison with the outsider source of identity characteristic of obviatory reciprocity, a relatively beneficent character – as benefits the recipient of homage rendered.  Nonetheless, to read de Heusch’s accounts of rituals of sacral kingship is to be reminded of precisely those themes of murder and incest that so much impressed Girard.  How is this violence to be accounted for? 

The explanation that I would propose on the basis of the above characterization of unidirectional reciprocity is that the supra-identity constituted through the location of the source of life within the primary social group retains something of the character of the ‘outsider’ – albeit an outsider naturalized within the group.  In other words, the character of that supra-identity while essentially beneficent retains a little of the fearsomeness associated with the outsider.  Consider, for example, the Vazimbas, as described in Bloch’s account of the rituals of the Merina.  The very source of the water of blessing and the civilizing bond uniting senior and junior at every hierarchical level, they are associated with nature and the peoples preceding the Merina in the occupation of the territory – with a wild and dangerious ‘vivacity’ that must be subjugated to royal authority.  Similarly, in Pharaonic Egypt the largely benign representations of sacral rule as a constantly renewed victory of cosmic order over chaos and violence, is shadowed by evocations of maleficent potential, such as we see embodied in the sinister lioness goddess Sekmet.  The characteristic affirmation of hope, ‘inherent in the Egyptian mentality’, which consigns maleficent forces to the past finds frequent expression in the invocation: ‘Sekhmet yesterday; Bastet (cat goddess) today’(B&F, p. 137).

This is essentially also the explanation that de Heusch himself offers in his analysis of Swazi rituals of sacral kingship – as becomes evident once we appreciate the equation of what we have termed the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the donor’s primary social group with de Heusch’s own Structuralist terminology of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ .  Thus de Heusch characterizes the ‘royal person’ (i.e. the ultimate instance of the outsider naturalized within the group) as the locus of ‘the comprehension of society’s union with nature’.  As such, he is:

A formidable magic force which abolishes the border between culture – from which the chief is separated when he is sacralised – and nature, of which he becomes the sovereign master.  In the end, the king is, in the Latin etymological sense, a sacred monster. (p. 101)

In the rituals here described, the Swazi social identity seeks, as it were, to contain its own boundary/source in the person of the king – who is associated with that boundary/source, and thus represented under the guise of the outsider (‘sacred monster’), even as he enacts the climax of the ritual that institutes his sacred status as the supreme representative of the supra-identity of the hierarchical group.  As the domestication of the outsider, he occasionally allows a glimpse of a side of his sacral character that reveals, like the Vazimbas or Sekhmet, the ‘nature’ that is elsewhere subjuguated to the rule of ‘culture’. 

In sum, an interpretation in line with what is proposed by de Heusch and Chapter 4 of this study seems to offer a more economic and a more comprehensive explanation even of those rituals of sacral royalty that constitute much of the ethnographic basis of Girard’s theory.  And that is to leave aside the additional problem for the Girardian of account of the diversity of apparently non-violent sacrificial rituals – which seem, at least, so far as sub-Saharan Africa is concerned, to constitute the larger part of the sacrificial phenomenon.

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pp. 35-56

 –– Economy of grace (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005)

Taylor, Mark C., ‘Capitalizing (on) Gifting’, in The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, ed. by Edith

Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux (New York:Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 50-73

Tcherkézoff, Serge, ‘Hierarchy is not Inequality’, in Hierarchy, ed. by Knut M. Rio and Olaf H.

Smedal (New York: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 299-329

Testart, Alain, ‘Uncertainties of the “obligation to reciprocate”’ in W. James & N.J. Allen (eds.),

Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, 1998

Toren, Christina, Making Sense of Hierarchy (London: Athlone Press, 1990)

Turner, James W., ‘The Water of Life’, Ethnology, 25.3 (July 1986), pp. 203-14

Tuzin, Donald, Social Complexity in the Making (London: Routledge, 2001)

de Vaux, Roland [1958-1960], Ancient Israel, trans. by John McHugh (London: Darton, Longman

and Todd, 1961)

Valeri , Valerio, Kingship and Sacrifice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

de Vaux, Roland [1958-1960], Ancient Israel, trans. by John McHugh (London: Darton,

Longman and Todd, 1961)

Verdier, Raymond, and others, La Vengeance, vol. 1 (of 4) (Paris: Cujas, 1981)

Volk, Miroslav, Free of Charge (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2005)

Wagner. Roy, The Curse of Souw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967)

–– Asiwinarong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)

Weiner, Annette B., ‘Reproduction: a Replacement for Reciprocity’, American Ethnologist, 7.1

(February 1988), pp. 71-85

––  Inalienable Possessions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

Yan, Yunxiang, ‘Unbalanced reciprocity’, in The Question of the Gift, ed. by Mark Osteen

(London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 67-82

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---

[1] Jan van Baal, ‘Offering, Sacrifice and Gift’, in Understanding Religious Sacrifice, ed. by Jeffrey Carter (London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 276-91, pp. 277-8

[2] Maurice Bloch, ‘The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process’, in Ritual, History and Power (RHP) (London: Athlone, 1989), pp. 46-88, p. 68

[3] One could name a succession of sociological studies characterized by a strongly anti-capitalist slant: Karl Polanyi [1944], The Great Transformation; Marshall Sahlins [1974], Stone Age Economics; Chris Gregory [1982], Gifts and Commodities; Godbout and Caillé [1992], The World of the Gift; David Graebner [2011], Debt: the First 5000 Years

[4] See Andrew Strathern, ‘Kinship, Descent and Locality’ in The Character of Kinship, ed. by Jack R. Goody (Cambridge: CUP, 1973), pp. 21-31

[5] Claude Lévi-Strauss [1950], Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. by Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987); Marshall Sahlins, op.cit., pp.139-236

[6] Alain Testart, ‘Uncertainties of the “obligation to reciprocate”’ in W. James & N.J. Allen (eds.), Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, 1998, pp. 98-99

[7] Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, ‘Exchange and Sacrifice’ in Exchange and Sacrifice, ed. by Stewart and Strathern (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), pp. 229-245, p. 229

[8] Chilton, Temple, p. 13; Moses, p. 63

[9] Especially: Détienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant [78], The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks; Madeleine Biardeau [1981], Hinduism, trans. by Richard Nice (Oxford: OUP, 1989); Madeleine Biardeau and Charles Malamoud, Le Sacrifice dans l’Inde Ancienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976); de Heusch [1985], Sacrifice in Africa

[10] Marie-Ange Bonhême and Annie Forgeau, Pharaon: Les Secrets du Pourvoir (Paris: Armand-Colin, 1988); Richard Gordon, ‘From Republic to Principate’;’The Veil of Power’; ‘Religion in the Roman Empire’, in Pagan Priests, ed. by Mary Beard and John North (London: Duckworth, 1990); Jean Bottéro, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia [1998], trans. by Teresa Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Roberte Hamayon, La Chasse à l’Âme (Nanterre: Société d’Ethnologie, 1990)

[11] See Annette B. Weiner, ‘Reproduction: a Replacement for Reciprocity’, American Ethnologist, 7.1 (February 1980, pp. 71-85

[12] Shirley Lindenbaum, ‘The Mystification of Female Labors’ in Gender and Kinship, ed. by Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987),  p. 222

[13] Marilyn Strathern, Gender of the Gift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 161

[14] Marcel Hénaff [2002], The Price of Truth, trans. by Jean-Louis Morhange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)

[15] Knut M. Rio: The Power of Perspective (New York: Berghahn, 2007); ‘Denying the Gift’, in Anthropological Theory, 7.4 (December 2007), pp. 449-70; ‘Hierarchy and its Alternatives’, in Hierarchy, ed. by Knut M. Rio and Olaf H. Smedal  (New York:Berghahn, 2009), pp. 1-63

[16] Charles Malamoud, ‘Cuire le Monde’ in Purusartha, Recherches de Science Sociale de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (1975), pp. 91-135, p. 98-9, as cited by de Heusch, p. 194

[17] Erik Schwimmer, Exchange in the Social Structure of the Orokaiva (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973 ), p. 151

[18] Simon Harrison, The Mask of War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 107-8

[19] Susan McKinnon, From a Shattered Sun (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 84-5

[20] James J. Fox (ed.), The Flow of Life (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)

[21] Roy Wagner, The Curse of Souw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967)

[22] See ‘An Unfinished Attempt’, in Big Men and Great Men, ed. by Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), pp. 275-304

[23] Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

[24] See Weiner, ‘Reproduction’; Frederick H. Damon, ‘Muyuw Kinship and the Metamorphosis of Gender Labour’, Man, New Series, 18.2 (June 1983), pp. 305-326; Nancy D. Munn, The Fame of Gawa (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992); Debbora Battaglia, On the Bones of the Serpent (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990)

[25] Louis Dumont [1966], Homo Hierarchicus, trans. by Sainsbury and Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Postface

[26] In French: englober (e.g. André Itéanu, La Ronde des Échanges (Cambridge: CUP, 1983), pp. 176, 178, 285)

[27] Especially in Roy Wagner, Asiwinarong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)

[28] See also Marilyn Strathern, ‘Making Incomplete’, in Carved Flesh, Cast Selves, ed. by Tone Bleie and Vigdis Broch-Due (Oxford: Berg, 1993), pp. 41–51

[29] Maurice Bloch, ‘The Royal Bath in Madagascar’, in Rituals of Royalty (RR), ed. by David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1987), pp. 271-97

[30] Douglas Davies, ‘Rebounding Vitality: Resurrection and Spirit in Luke-Acts’ in (ed.) M.D. Carroll, D. Clines and P. Davies, The Bible in Human Society (Sheffeild Academic Press, 1995) pp. 205-223

[31] Christina Toren, Making Sense of Hierarchy (London: Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 100-18; Serge Tcherkézoff, ‘Hierarchy is not Inequality’, in Hierarchy, pp. 299-329

[32] Valerio Valeri, Kingship and Sacrifice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

[33] Raymond Firth [1936], We, the Tikopia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 376-7

[34] See Raymond Firth [1940], The Work of the Gods in Tikopia (London: Athlone Press, 1967); James W. Turner, ‘The Water of Life’, Ethnology, 25.3 (July 1986), pp. 203-14

[35] Raymond Firth [1939], Primitive Polynesian Economy (London: Routledge, 1965), pp. 212-31

[36] Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969); Raymond Jamous, ‘Honour and Baraka’, in Of Relations and the Dead, ed. by Cécile Barraud and others, trans. Stephen J. Suffern (London: Berg, 1994)

[37] Bruce Chilton, Abraham’s Curse (New York: Doubleday, 2008), pp. 143-224

[38] M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances (New York: Columbia U.P., 1990)

[39] Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

[40] Ilana Friedrich Silber, ‘Entre Marcel Mauss et Paul Veyne’, Sociologie et sociétés, 36, no. 2 (2004), pp. 189-205, (p. 201)

[41] Yunxiang Yan, ‘Unbalanced reciprocity’, in The Question of the Gift, ed. by Mark Osteen (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 67-82

[42] Jonathan Parry, ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift’’, Man, n.s., 21, no. 3 (September 1986), pp. 453-473

[43] Alain Testart, op.cit., pp. 97-110

[44] Ilana Friedrich Silber, Virtuosity, Charisma and the Social Order (CUP, 1995)

[45] Biardeau [1981], op.cit.; Biardeau and Malamoud [1976], op.cit. 

[46] Douglas Davies, Meaning and Salvation in Religious Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1984)

[47] Anthropology and Theology, pp. 163-165

[48] Richard F. Gombrich, Buddhist Precept and Practice (Oxford: OUP, 1971); Theravada Buddhism (London: Routledge, 1988); Stanley J. Tambiah, World conqueror and world renouncer (Cambridge: CUP, 1976); Frank L. Reynolds, ‘The Two Wheels of Dhamma’, in The Two Wheels of Dhamma, ed. by Frank L. Reynolds and Bardwell L. Smith (Montana: American Academy of Religion, 1972), 6-30

[49] John S. Strong, ‘Rich Man, Poor Man, Bhikkhu, King’, in Ethics, Wealth and Salvation, ed. by Russell F. Sizemore and Donald K. Swearer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 107-123

[50] The debate goes back to Weber, and opposes scholars on the issue of merit transference (Gombrich, ’”Merit Transference” in Sinhalese Buddhism’, History of Religions, 11, no. 2 (November, 1971), pp. 203-219, pp. 204-206; Charles F. Keyes, ‘Kammic Theory of Popular Theravada Buddhism’, in Karma, ed. by Charles F. Keyes and E. Valentine Daniel, pp. 261-286, pp. 281-284: versus Tambiah, ‘The Ideology of Merit’, in Dialectic in Practical Religion, ed. by E. R. Leach (Cambridge: CUP, 1968), pp. 41-121, pp. 42-45).  Also on the issue of the existence of an authentically Buddhist polity (Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism, pp. 15-18; Charles F. Keyes, ‘Structure and History in the Study of the Relationship between Theravada Buddhism and Political Order’, Numen, 25, no. 2 (1978): versus Tambiah, World Conqueror, pp. 8-72)

[51] Walpola Sri Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (Oxford: Oneworld, 1959), p. 55

[52] Digha Nikaya 16 (Maha-parinibbana Sutta) 101, Dialogues of the Buddha, Part II, trans. by T. W. Rhys Davids and C. A. F. Davids (London: Luzac, for the Pali Text Society, 1971), pp. 78-191, p. 109

[53] Different accounts of what M. Carrithers has called the ‘domestication’ of Buddhism are summed up in Ivan Strenski, ‘On Generalized Exchange and the Domestication of the Sangha’, Man, n.s., 18, no. 3 (September 1983), pp. 463-466, pp. 463-470

[54] Ganath Obeyesekere, ‘Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon’, in The Two Wheels of Dhamma, p. 62

[55] Frank Reynolds, ‘The Two Wheels of Dhamma’, in The Two Wheels of Dhamma, pp. 6-30

[56] Bardwell L. Smith, ‘Sinhalese Buddhism and the Dilemmas of Reinterpretation’, in The Two Wheels of Dhamma, pp. 79-106

[57] John S. Strong, op.cit., pp. 107-123

[58] Digha Nikaya 26 (Cakkavatti-Sihanada Suttanta) 6, in Dialogues of the Buddha, Part III, trans. by T.W and C. A. F. Rhys Davids (London: Luzac for the Pali Text Society, 1971), pp. 59-66, pp. 63-64

[59] Mahavagga 1.5, Vinaya Texts, Part 1, trans. by T. W. Rhys-Davids and Hermann Oldenberg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881), pp. 84-88

[60] Jataka 547, The Jātaka, Vol. VI, ed. by E. B. Cowell (Cambridge: CUP, 1907), pp. 246-305

[61] Guillaume Rozenberg, ‘How Giving Sanctifies: the Birthday of Thamanya Hsayadaw in Burma’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 10, no. 3 (September 2004), 495-515

[62] Digha Nikaya 5 (Kutadanta Sutta) 11, Dialogues of the Buddha, Part I, trans. by T. W. Rhys Davids (London: Routledge, 1973), pp. 173-185

[63] ‘Sacrifice’, in John L. Esposito, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (Oxford: OUP, 1995), vol. IV, p. 447

[64] ‘SunnahOnline.com – Qurbani (Sacrifice) for Non-Pilgrims’, www.sunnahonline.com/library/Hajj-umrah-and-the-islamic-calendar/326-qurbani-sacrifice-for-non-pilgrims (accessed 6^th February, 2016)

[65] S. 22 (Al-Hajj), 37

[66] Maulana Muhammed Ali, The Religion of Islam (Ripon: Ripon Printing Press, 1973), p. 363; ‘Virtues of Qurbani – Central Mosque’, < www.central-mosque.com/fiqh/VIRqurbani.htm> (accessed

6^th February, 2016)

[67] ‘The Saudi Project for the Utilization of Sacrificial Animals (ADAHI)’, <http://www.isdb.org/irj/go/km/docs/documents/IDBDevelopments/Internet/English/IDB/CM/ADAHI/AboutADAHIProject.html˃ (accessed 6th February, 2016)

[68]Ali, p.363

[69] Esposito, vol. 4, p.447

[70] Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Qu’ran: Translation and Commentary (Birmingham: Islamic Propagation Centre, 1946), p. 861

[71] Sayyid Qutb, Tafsir Fi Zilalil Quran, S. 22 (Al–Hajj), https://tafsirzilal.wordpress.com/, pp. 103-104; Ali, p.377: ‘And this (communion with the Unseen through prayer) is meaningless if it does not lead to acts of benevolence’; Amin Ahsan Islahi, Tadabbur-e-Qur’an, trans. by Mohammad Saleem Kayani (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2007), pp. 114-5 

[72] ‘Virtues of Qurbani – Central Mosque’, < http://www.central-mosque.com/fiqh/VIRqurbani.htm> (accessed

6^th February, 2016)

[73] ‘RITUAL SLAUGHTER (UDHIYYAH/QURBANI) – HMC www.halalhmc.org/userfiles/file/RIUAL%20SLAUGHTER.pdf

(last accessed 6^th Febrary, 2016)

[74] Ali Shariati, Hajj [1970s?], trans. by Ali A. Behzadnia and Najla Denny (Houston: Free Islamic Literatures, 1994), p. 64: ‘You are shoulder to shoulder with the people but simultaneously alone!’

[75] Ali, p. 299

[76] The following account of ‘sadaka’ is based on the entry in H. A. R. Gibb and others, The Encyclopedia of Islam, 12 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1960), vol. 8, pp. 708-715

[77] Shariati, p.98

[78] Comparison has been made between ‘big men’ (exchange) and ‘great men’ (sacrifice) societies in PNG.  Neither, absolute size and nor degree of violence are among the distinctive features that emerge from this comparative analysis.  (Ed. Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, Big Men and Great Men [1991] (Cambridge: CUP, 2008)) Tuzin’s fascinating longitudinal study of the development of a one of the few relatively large indigenous polities among the Ilahita Arapesh (Donald Tuzin, Social Complexity in the Making (London: Routledge, 2001)

[79] ESS: ‘Such a logic elevates as supreme the abstract notion of the perpetually abiding nation-state, outlasting its citizens and being more valued than the lives of individual humans’; SS, p. 52; John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), p. 194

[80] Talal Assad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington D.C.: Center Contemporary for Arab Studies, 1986)

[81] Douglas Davies, ‘Purity, Spirit and Reciprocity in the Acts of the Apostles’, in Louise Lawrence and Mario Aguilar (ed.), Anthropology and Biblical Studies (Leiden: Deo Publishing, 2004), pp. 259-280; Anthropology and Theology, pp. 106-109

[82] Daly, op.cit., p. 6

[83] John Milbank [1990], Theology and Social Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006)

[84] Paul Ricoeur [1960], The Symbolism of Evil, trans. by Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)

[85] Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976)

[86] Mary Douglas [1966], Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 1

[87] Françoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche [2002], Gods and Men in Egypt, trans. by David Lorton (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004)

[88] For the daily ritual, see D&Z, pp. 90-93; B&F, pp. 144-5, Paul Derchain, ‘Rituels Égyptiens’ in Dictionnaire des mythologies, ed. by Y. Bonnefoy, (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), pp. 942-7.  These seem to be drawing to some extent on a work based on Egyptian texts, Alexandre Moret, Le Rituel du Culte Divin Journalier en Égypte, Annales du Musée Guiment, Bibliothèque d’Études, tome 14 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1902)

[89] Patrick Vinton Kirch, The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms (Cambridge: CUP, 1984), pp. 258-63

[90] Further ethnography of obviatory reciprocity not included because of limitations of space: the Are’are, as described by Daniel de Coppet, Cosmos and Society in Oceania (Oxford: Berg, 1995), pp. 235-274; the Avatip, in Simon Harrison, op.cit.