The Untold Sacrifice: The Monotony and Incompleteness of Self-Sacrifice in Northeast Brazil

Abstract

There is no such thing as an accidental sacrifice. Sacrifice is always pre-meditated, and if not entirely goal-oriented, at the very least inherently meaningful as a process in itself. This paper is about how we might begin to understand sacrifices that do not conform to these rules. It concerns the question: does sacrifice exist outside of its (often) dramatic, self-conscious elaboration? Within the Brazilian Catholic tradition everyday life – ideally characterised by monotonous, undramatic, acts of self-giving – is ‘true sacrifice’. For ordinary Catholics, the challenge is not how to self-sacrifice, but how to make one's mundane life of self-sacrifice visible whilst keeping one's gift of suffering ‘free’. In this paper I describe, ethnographically, the work entailed as one of ‘revelation’ and use the problems thrown up to reflect upon both the limits and advantages of Western philosophical versus anthropological understandings of Christian sacrificial practices to date.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• sacrifice
• gift
• ritual
• narrative
• silence

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was made possible by funding from the Economic and Research Council. The British Academy and the Wenner-Gren Foundation enabled the workshop that gave birth to this special issue. This article has been immensely helped along its way by comments from Richard Baxstrom, Ruy Blanes, Giovanni da Col, Magnus Course, Martin Holbraad, Clara Mafra, Rebecca Marsland, Michael Lambek, Knut Rio, Jonathan Spencer, Erica Weiss, Rane Willerslev and Ethnos' anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Joel Robbins for his support and Margaret Course and Carmen Miranda for their many ‘untold sacrifices’, involving babysitting and the like, so I could write in peace.

Notes

1. It is reported that Georges Bataille's fascination with the subject of sacrifice extended to a personal ambition to have himself ritually sacrificed. He presided over a secret society called Acéphale (which means headlessness), whose members apparently tried to recruit volunteers for execution (Surya 2010).

2. Earlier, Hegel had alluded to the ‘the life of spirit’ which ‘wins its truth when, only in utter dismemberment, it finds itself’ (1977: 19). For Bataille and Derrida, however, Hegel's radical negativity was not radical enough, being based, they claimed, upon a ‘restricted economy’ wherein every expenditure is ultimately useful and redeemable (Taylor 2002)

3. In ordinary speech it is not customary to differentiate between sacrifice (sacrifício) and self-sacrifice (auto sacrifício): all sacrifice is essentially self-sacrifice and this is what is understood when the term sacrifício is casually applied.

4. Irigaray's (2002, 1993) feminist exposition of the Eucharist develops a similar point. Irigaray interprets Eucharistic ritual as a means whereby a male dominant order controls a symbolic language of sacrifice, thus eclipsing the sacrifice of women's fertility. The sacrificial nature of female menstrual blood shed is denied and superseded by the sacrificial nature of the male Jesus' blood shed.

5. I use the term ‘revelation’ here, in the mundane rather than the theological sense, to denote the act of uncovering something that is hidden.

6. A similar point is made by Rogerson (1980) in relation to the Old Testament ritual of the Passover, which he asserts constitutes a sort of interpretation of the story of the Exodus deliverance, and one in which the recounting of the story was as important as the performance of the ritual. He argues that whatever the origins of sacrifice in ancient Israel, ‘when the Old Testament is taken as a whole, the context for understanding the sacrifices is the occasion when God set out the law that his people should obey in response to their deliverance from Egypt’ (1980: 57–58).