The Power of Sacrifice: Contexts and Representations
Evidence for the practice and cultural interpretations of ritual sacrifice is both vast and hugely diverse, including material culture, anthropological observation, practice manuals, literary epics, drama, biography, and contemporary literature and film. Sacrifice has therefore been a focus of scholarly study in myriad period, language and area studies not only within the study of religion, but also in the humanities more broadly, including history, archaeology, ancient history and classical studies, anthropology, and literature. Moreover, sacrifice has not merely been an object of study. It plays a prominent role in the formation of numerous theoretical positions and approaches, including Freudian psychology, Durkheimian sociology, Structuralism, conflict theories, and approaches that focus on the dynamics of gender. The aim of this project therefore, is to bring fresh insights to the study of ritual sacrifice by bringing together scholars of different disciplinary, area, language and period specialisms, with scholars whose focus is social, psychological, or philosophical analysis to explore in some depth ways in which sacrifice is received, reported and understood in a number of cultural contexts, including the academy itself.
Whether or not sacrifice is actually practiced in a given culture, the theme of sacrifice, and in particular blood sacrifice, is often associated with powerful images and contentious debates. The ways in which contemporary media have utilized storylines that include sacrifice to create ambiguous portrayals of African or Celtic religions provide stark, if unsophisticated examples. However, the use of tales of sacrifice to de-fame other religious traditions is neither new nor confined to western or Christian perspectives. In the Late Antique context, for example, the study of sacrifice highlights complex political, religious, and social interactions between social groups (or more precisely social actions) that assumed Pagan, Jewish, or Christian identities across geographical areas including Greece, Rome, Africa and Asia Minor, and has implications for our understanding of the fluidity and contestation of these identities. Debates and divergences of practice are not only evident between religious traditions but also arise within them. When South Asian mythology explains a sacrifice to a goddess of a coconut as a substitute for a human head, for example, it does so in the context of debates about the ethics of blood sacrifice and symbolic substitution that reverberate through tensions within South Asian politics and society, between local and textual religion, between castes and classes that identify themselves through notions of purity and pollution, and in relation to gender.
Sacrifice is also often at the centre of systems of reciprocal exchange and obligation that encompassed both the relationship between persons and gods, but also the wider social structures. However, as Greek tragedy demonstrates, tensions within this wider social system also have powerful implications for the individual passions, and it can be argued that bringing together themes of sacrifice with familial murder (a perversion of the sacrifice) is a strategy to bring immediacy to, and passionate engagement with, the social energies of the wider civic and political world, conceived of and expressed through the gods. Further to this, the project utilizes, and is potentially attractive to, recent scholarship that is revising Freudian theory in light of a shift in emphasis from sacrifice as portrayed in Oedipus (or in Freud’s imaginary primal hoard), and towards a re-examination of familial sacrifice and murder more widely in Greek tragedy. This theoretical literature is in turn being applied to the study of literature and film.
Core project team
Crystal Addey (The relationship between ritual and philosophy in Late Antiquity, anthropological theories of divination and spirit possession)
Nic Baker-Brian (Late Antique Christianities including Manichaeism, the role of ritual and myth in both the construction of religious systems and their deformation by others)
Simon Brodbeck (South Asian Epic Literature, ethics and power in religious and political systems, gender and lineage)
Louise Child (Altered states of consciousness and ritualized sexuality in tantric Buddhism, social theory and psychology, contemporary film and serial drama)
CONFERENCE
A two day interdisciplinary conference in relation to the project was held in the Humanities Building of Cardiff University on the 18th and 19th of January 2012.
Speakers
Dr. Crystal Addey (Trinity St. David, University of Wales and Cardiff University)
Professor Miranda Aldhouse-Green (Cardiff University)
Dr. Nicholas Baker-Brian (Cardiff University)
Dr. Simon Brodbeck (Cardiff University)
Dr. Louise Child (Cardiff University)
Dr. Fabrizio Ferrari (University of Chester)
Dr. Douglas Hedley (University of Cambridge)
Dr. Sarah Hitch (University of Bristol)
Dr. Bettina Schmidt (Trinity St. David, University of Wales)
Professor Guy Stroumsa (University of Oxford)
Dr. Juliette Wood (Cardiff University)
Contact information
Dr. Louise Child, Lecturer in Religious Studies, Department of Religious Studies and Theology, Cardiff University. Humanities Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff. CF10 3EU
e-mail: Childl@cardiff.ac.uk