The Question of Sacrifice

1. A Genealogy of Theories of Sacrifice: A History of Economics, Sexism,and Christo-centric Evolutionism

1 A Genealogy of Theories of Sacrifice A History of Economics, Sexism, and Christo-centric Evolutionism The history of the theories of sacrifice has been subtly (and not so subtly) influenced by economics, sexism, and Christo-centric evolutionism. Most theories of sacrifice are predicated on an economy of debts and credits in which one gets a return on one’s sacrificial investment. One particular economy of sacrifice—the Christian doctrine of sacrifice—has subtly worked its way into the very heart of (particularly as the telos of) numerous late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century theories of sacrifice. But even when social anthropologists and historians of religion concentrated less on Christo-centric evolutionary sequences and more on investigations of sacrifice within particular cultures, the construction of worldwide typologies was still prevalent. And even in those theories that attentively attempted to avoid the construction of worldwide typologies, two things remained constant: an economic understanding of sacrifice and a persistently pervasive sexism. Sacrifice has come to be understood as a necessary passage through suffering and/or death (of either oneself or someone else) on the way to a supreme moment of transcendent truth. Sacrifice effects the revelation of truth. Sacrifice is the price to be paid for this gain. This economic understanding of sacrifice plays an important role in sociological theory at the turn of the twentieth century. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), Max Weber explores the role that one form of sacrifice—asceticism—plays in the relationship between religion and the economic and social life of modern culture. The Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and of a calling to act in a disciplined, ascetic manner A Genealogy of Theories of Sacrifice 11 encouraged the view that worldly success was a confirmation that one was acting as an instrument of God’s will and a sign that one had been predestined to an elite salvational status. This Protestant ethic was instrumental, Weber argues, to the rise of the spirit of modern capitalism, which is a form of economic life involving rational conduct in the form of disciplined work, careful calculation, and a willingness to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term gains. Sacrifice also plays an important role in Georg Simmel’s central theory of economic exchange. In The Philosophy of Money (1900; 2nd ed. 1907), Simmel writes that “economic exchange [ . . . ] always signifies the sacrifice [Opfer] of an otherwise useful good, however much eudaemonistic gain is involved” (PG 35/PM 83). Simmel interprets economic life as an exchange of sacrifices. Simmel writes: The sacrifice [Opfer] does not in the least belong in the category of what ought not to be, as superficiality and avarice would have us believe. Sacrifice is not only the condition of specific values, but the condition of value as such; with reference to economic behavior, which concerns us here, it is not only the price to be paid for particular established values, but the price through which alone values can be established. (PG 38/PM 85) It is interesting to note that money itself has a sacrificial origin. According to Gerardus van der Leeuw, the oldest Greek measure of value was the sacred sacrificial ox, the tribute that was to be paid to the deity. “Thus the sacrificial meal, in the course of which the meat was equally divided, was the ‘germ of public financial administration’. Later, coin appeared instead of the sacrifice; but that the coin was money, that is valid, was also due to its originating in the sphere of sacrifice and bringing with it its powerfulness, or as we should say, its credit” (PR 398/REM 353). The Greek work drachma (the name of a common coin) once was used to designate a handful of sacrificial meat (oblos). The Latin word pecunia, which is the root of the English word pecuniary, derives from pecus (cattle) (CCS 150). The English word money derives from Juno Moneta, the sister and wife of the Roman god Jupiter. “The oldest altar to Moneta was located at Mons Albanus, where a bull sacrifice, the central ritual of the Latin confederacy, was annually held” (MMM 124). Roman coins were first minted in the Temple of Juno Moneta (the association of money with cattle extends to Wall Street, where the bull is a familiar...