198), the aim of my ethnography was to show the cultural, performative and religious dimensions of the violence. Following Roy Rappaport’s statement that “Morality, like social contract, is implicit in ritual’s very structure” ( Rappaport 1979, p. I applied this ritual model, in which sacrifice and murder substitute reciprocally, in my own study of the Basque political violence of the 1970s. Based on the principle that violence and the sacred are inseparable, sacrificial rites assume essential functions in restoring social control. Maurice Bloch examined how ritual achieves transcendence by the sacrifice of the participants, thus affirming through symbolic violence the timeless truth that binds a community to a belief or a cause ( Bloch 1992, 2013). René Girard argued that, given the absence of a judicial system in primitive societies, sacrifice was a key form to restrain vengeance-“an instrument of prevention in the struggle against violence” ( Girard 1977, p. Recently, Sahlins and Graeber ( 2017) have revisited and updated the theoretical foundations of kingship and sovereignty. Evans-Pritchard expanded this ritual complex to the study of Shilluk regicide ( Evans-Pritchard 1963). Thus, he was, at once, “a priest and a murderer” ( Frazer 1963, p. Frazer addressed it while reporting on the institution of divine kingship found in many ethnographic societies typically, when a king became old and feeble, the future monarch would challenge him to a duel, kill him, and take over the priestly and political powers of the dead king. Sacrifice is a central topic in modern anthropology. The argument of this paper is that the dismantling of sacrifice as its nuclear premise-the sacrifice of sacrifice-was a major obstacle stopping the violence from coming to an end. As described in my first ethnography, the motivation behind the violence was originally and fundamentally sacrificial when it finally stopped in 2011, many of those invested in the violence, actors as well as supporters, felt destitute and had to remodel their political identity. This requires that I expand the notion of “sacrifice” from my initial approach of ethnographic parallels towards a more subjective and psychoanalytical perspective. But my arguments will take advantage of the background of a more recent ethnography I wrote on the political and cultural transformations of this generation. I will argue that the crisis regarding sacrifice is pivotal. The present paper addresses such a “sacrificial crisis” in the experience of my own Basque generation. But sacrifice itself may turn into a problem, and René Girard wrote about “the sacrificial crisis”, when the real issue is the failure of a sacrifice that goes wrong. Generations of anthropologists have studied sacrifice in ethnographic contexts and theorized about its religious significance. Frazer described the antinomian figure of a king, who was, at once, a priest and a murderer. The Frazerian question of murder turned into ritual sacrifice is foundational to cultural anthropology.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |