C. Requisitos técnicos necesarios para ser evaluados
V. Anexos
Sacrifi ce, I argue, plays out the paradox of the affi rmation of life through its destruction. Th rough death life is affi rmed. Th e dead animal in the Vedas is only sleeping, and not really dead but ready to awaken. Likewise, the ritual patron will awaken from his own death to the realm of the ghosts ( pretaloka ) and thence to the realm of the ancestors ( pitṛloka ) where sacrifi ce will ensure that he does not undergo a second death ( punarmrtyu ). In turn, the renouncer will awaken to the cognition ( jñāna ) that his self is immortal. In both cases there is the recognition of the transcendence of death and of death as a kind of birth: both sacrifi ce and renunciation affi rm the paradoxical idea that birth follows destruction and this immortality is assured for both sacrifi cer and renouncer.
4. INTERPRETATION AND EXPLANATION
As we have seen with the example from vedic India, sacrifi ce gives order to the world in cosmological societies. Th e claim about sacrifi ce as refusal would need to be corroborated through being ‘tested’ on other sacrifi cial societies, but its fi ttingness for vedic culture is highly signifi cant: any general theory of sacrifi ce needs to take the vedic material into account simply because of the large scale of the vedic literature devoted to sacrifi ce and its interpretation, and because for many hundreds of years the Indic tradition has itself already refl ected on the meaning of its sacrifi cial practices. Drawing an analogy with the Aztecs, Bataille could read this material in terms of his thesis, that vedic sacrifi ce is the consumption of surplus, of excess, whose violent expression restores order to the group. Th is is clearly a possibility but this is to ignore the indigenous ascetic understanding of sacrifi ce and to allow cultural function (the bringing about of equilibrium, the restoring of energy balance) to take precedence over existential expression. What is important about sacrifi ce is
that it is a performance of the ambiguity of the affi rmation of life through its negation and that this is a sacrifi cial community’s confrontation with the bare life of being born and dying.
Gift exchange and catharsis models of sacrifi ce are not wrong but operate at one cultural level—a level of energy balance and expression in a community. Th ere is, however, a deeper or more fundamental function of sacrifi ce as a practice and a metaphor that lays bare the reality of life. Sacrifi ce brings us into the world through creating a cosmos in which the meaning of human life, of a community, can be located. Sacrifi ce takes place at a more visceral cultural level and is the pre-philosophical articulation of problems that can be articulated philosophically but that can only be resolved or expressed through action. Th e existential level of sacrifi ce shows us something about ourselves. It points to mortality and it points to the human aspiration for transcending mortality and negating death and nothingness. It says that death is not fi nal and all-consuming but that death can affi rm life.
Because of the existential nature of sacrifi ce it requires an approach from the human sciences that accepts its multi-layered complexity. A hermeneuti- cal approach is better suited to gaining a fuller understanding of sacrifi ce than a scientifi c approach that seeks causal explanations (such as those off ered by cultural functionalist models). Sacrifi ce is a very ancient human institution and needs to be understood as operating at diff erent cultural levels. Ricoeur off ered an interesting approach to social phenomena. If human society displays certain characteristics that are analogous to a text, then we can ‘read’ human social action in ways analogous to reading a text. Th us sacrifi cial practices as social action can be ‘read’ and the reading I have presented here seeks to understand the complex phenomenon of sacrifi ce in terms of human existential reality, in terms of the refusal of death and the affi rmation of life—concerns that have been fundamental to all human societies throughout history.
Th e phenomenon of sacrifi ce is truly complex and resists explanation in terms of any single paradigm. Th e causal terms that the social sciences or brain science could develop are clearly insuffi cient, and so we must pursue other approaches. In the study or inquiry into sacrifi ce, especially across cultures, we arguably need, fi rstly, a phenomenology that allows sacrifi ce to show itself, as it were, and that allows what shows itself to be seen. Th is is essentially an ethnographic or descriptive account (of the kind that I have briefl y referred to above). We, secondly, need a hermeneutical account that generates theory from description or, rather, that uses description to off er particular interpreta- tive angles. In one sense, of course, these kinds of understanding are also expla- nations, as Ricoeur has pointed out. 25 I have tried to do this here within the
general thesis of sacrifi ce as refusal. Lastly, in our modern Western economies
where literal kinds of sacrifi ce are not performed (unless we count the mil- lions of animals slaughtered in industrial meat production) we have grown unaccustomed to, and horrifi ed by sacrifi ce. Th e world of sacrifi ce for us is, in Heesterman’s phrase, a broken world. As David Brown argues in Chapter 12 of this volume, we need therefore a kind of human empathy or something like Heidegger’s formal indication, using the fact of my being to understand the being of others, in order to partially step into the world of sacrifi ce. We can understand sacrifi ce as renunciation as a feature of all our lives that can become a formal indication of a pre-modern sense of sacrifi ce. Th e patron of the sacrifi ce is a sign for the community and in refusing death is affi rming life for all. Th e existential aporia of human life, facing death, seems to be resolved; although perhaps in truth it is not.