Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sacrifice is a ritual practice that includes the removal of goods (objects, vegetables, animals, human beings) from profane use or their destruction in relation to a supernatural sphere, but not necessarily with an offer or dedication. Sacrifices that involve the killing of a victim and the shedding of blood are called blood sacrifices. The issue of the definition of sacrifice, a focal point in contemporary debate, went so far as to deny the empirical existence of a ritual identifiable as a sacrifice. Marcel Detienne (Detienne & Vernant 1986) criticized the concept, claiming that it was an arbitrary category built on elements drawn from the Christian tradition and adopted in order to lump different phenomena together. The study of sacrifice should therefore be based on a historical analysis of the rituals within their own contexts. Thus, for instance, Grecian sacrifice turns out to be nothing but a culinary practice; there does not exist any ritual designated as a sacrifice, but simply a meat-eating mode of a historically determined human group. In Detienne's view, the concept of sacrifice should be dropped because it is a “category of yesterday's thought” that has no interpretive or descriptive value. Detienne hit the mark when he recognized the Christian inheritance underlying many theories of sacrifice, but many scholars felt that the dissolution of the concept of sacrifice ... log in or subscribe to read full text