In order to avoid prejudicing the discussion of sacrifice by what it has come to mean in Christian theology, we will do better to use a concrete definition focusing on ritual practices rather than on exegesis. In his ethnography of a tribal religion in the Philippines, Gibson grouped a set of rituals under the heading of ‘sacrifice’ defined as ‘the ritual manipulation, killing and commensal consumption of a sacred animal’ (1986:151). When we turn to comparative ethnography, we find that a culture may emphasize one part of this sequence more than another. Thus the Nuer described by Evans-Pritchard elaborate the acts preliminary to the killing, such as the consecration of the animal by rubbing ashes on its back, whereby the sacrificer identitifes himself with the victim, and the invocation, whereby the sacrificer further identifies himself with the victim, through his speech, his right arm, and his spear. For the Nuer, sacrifice is thus a rich source of metaphors for expressing inner mental dispositions towards God by projecting the self into the victim (Evans-Pritchard 1956).
The Muslim Moroccans described by Combs-Schilling (1989), on the other hand, play up the act of killing itself, accomplished by piercing the animal’s (white) flesh, causing (red) blood to flow. This places it in the same field of meaning as other practices involving violence and blood, such as the defloration of a virgin bride and child-birth. For Moroccans, animal sacrifice is a rich source of metaphors for linking creation to patriarchal *violence and authority.
The Buid of Mindoro described by Gibson (1986) play down the consecration and slaughter of the animal and play up the different ways the cooked flesh can be surrendered to, exchanged with or shared with various human and spirit types. For the Buid, animal sacrifice is a rich source of metaphors for conceptualizing different forms of transaction. From the analyses of Greek sacrifice presented in the volume edited by Detienne and Vernant (1989), it would seem that the Greeks also preferred to focus on what happened to the cadaver rather than on the preparation and execution of the victim.
Animal sacrifice is, in short, a complex symbolic practice, different aspects of which may be elaborated in different social settings. Rather than recognizing that there may be no more than ‘family resemblances’ between sacrifice in different cultures, however, many authors have attempted to identify the ‘essential’ features of sacrifice, and to formulate general ‘theories’ to explain it. What pass as different ‘theories’ of sacrifice are often no more than differences in the degree to which different elements of this definition are elaborated in the culture studied by the ‘theorist’. The situation remains similar to the one surrounding the concept of totemism before *Lévi-Strauss’s critiques in the early 1960s. Sacrifice has continued in many quarters to be viewed as an identifiable phenomenon compounded of the elements of self-abnegation and victimization (cf. Girard 1972).
Bloch (1992) has recently attempted to overcome these difficulties by showing how many different instances of ‘animal sacrifice’ in the ethnographic literature share a common symbolic structure with a wide variety of other ritual practices such as initiations, *marriages and even *millenarian movements. In other words, he dissolves the category into a larger problematic concerning the the nature of *ideology and traditional authority.
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