Everyone agrees that the 1899 article by Hubert and Mauss is a milestone in the history of theories on sacrifice. The purpose of this paper is to assess its strengths and weaknesses and then turn to the 1925 article on the gift to suggest new avenues of thought.
Essai sur la nature et fonction du sacrifice[1] has five major strengths.
I see a first problem in the vague notion of offering. How valuable must it be? There has been a tendency in some forms of religion to assume that the offering is better when more costly, thereby taking apparently the point of view of a very materialistic recipient of the offering. I propose to maintain a quiet and sober view of “offering”. (Se défaire de quelque chose, se départir.) The Indian woman who pours some oil on a statue is not exposing her family to under-nourishment. Neither does the Jew who brings a flour cake to the altar (Leviticus 2). Indian sacrificial rites have been defined as lubricating the cosmic machinery or cooking the world.[2]. Putting wood in the fire under the pot is not giving up something dear. One has something, and then one does not have it any more. But one has a hot meal. I suspect that the tendency of some theoreticians to pay great attention to the cost and pain of sacrifice has something to do with the influence of some forms of Christian theology.
I see three major weaknesses in the 1898 essay.
1. The essay does not make a clear differentiation between two major types of sacrifice. Some require a live victim to put it to death (sacrifice sanglant). Others find the necessary matter usually in some vegetarian food. His pages on agrarian sacrifices focus quickly on those involving animal (or human) victims. It seems that many French authors on sacrifice seem mesmerized by sacrifices sanglants and establish essential links between sacrifice and violence. René Girard has done monumental work on sacrifice and intra-specific violence. Before him George Bataille was fascinated by extreme forms of expense, by torturous self-sacrifice, ecstatic sufferings and frenzied deaths. The inquiries of these authors get into the world of unconscious motivations. They also force us to ask whether sacrifice is what it pretends to be. Clearly when victims are put to death, one can observe a tendency to euphemize the dying or mask the killing. Resisting the trend to let Christian models dominate the theorizing on sacrifice, Marcel Detienne and J. Z. Smith argue that Greek sacrifices are a reasonable way of procuring a meat diet. The butchered animal is divided into portions for gods and portions for humans: the latter get all the red meat. And the Greeks butcher young male animals and old females, which is sound economics.
Susan Sered brought a fresh look when she persuasively argued that sacrifices done with vegetarian food are mostly done by women. While those requiring the shedding of blood are ordinarily performed by men. She adds that when women give their own substance it is milk for babies, while men, when they give of their own substance, shed blood to defend the tribe. I add that wars also have a way of masking what they really are, since warriors commonly advance some form of the claim they go to battle for the sake of peace. (Can culture exist without denegation?)
2. The pages on the god as victim, “the highest expression of the notion of sacrifice” (283-300) repeat the views of J. G. Frazer on the death of the fertility god. The concluding pages return to the theme by examining notions common among the “more civilised peoples” and make an obvious allusion to Christians and to the notion of “complete abnegation” (305). But the pages miss what is a distinctive feature of the death on Golgotha, namely that the victim was a voluntary one and freely consented (with terror) to what was about to be done to him. We have something here very different from the cajoling of the animal victim to which Hubert and Mauss refer when they write about the animal victim being incited to let itself be peacefully sacrificed (230). And if one points out to the evidence of consent from the human victims of the Aztec sacrifice, I am inclined to retort that we have here two different notions of person and two different bases for the understanding of morality. A 1938 article by Mauss “Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de “moi” strengthens my argument by stating that the strong metaphysical basis for the notion of person came with Christianity (356).[3] I should add that the New Testament comes centuries after the Psalms, of which 90 out of 150 speak in the first person.[4] Free consent is a notoriously difficult notion, but it has been made operational since Roman law and its legal meaning keep being refined.
The growing centrality of the notion of free moral choice in the history of some religions can be shown by pointing to the numerous rabbinic discussions of Genesis 22 who stress that Isaac, being pious, consented to his role in the rite. So says also the Q’uran about Ishmael. And in Christian history we have the interesting shift in the history of the Early Church. At first it is said that Christians must seek to escape persecution and flee. Bishop Polycarp did just that at first. By the second century we hear of believers yearning for martyrdom and running toward it.[5] Their sacrifice is praised because entirely voluntary. And, when persecutions have ceased, saint John Damascene argues that monks impose on themselves severe mortifications because they cannot be martyred like of old.[6] Self-sacrifice has become ritualised and its praise commonplace for obvious theological reasons. I saw in Salvador de Bahia statues of women martyrs of the ancient Church dressed as dominican nuns and nailed on a cross.
3. Hubert and Mauss give no attention whatsoever to those cases where the so-called matter of the sacrifice is not substantial, as is the case when it is language. Writing on prayer, Mauss spoke of oral rituals, a notion he unfortunately did not pursue. Prayer was to be the topic of his thesis but he abandoned work on it. (The pages which were written in 1903 were posthumously published.) What can a sociologist do with the great penitential psalm attributed to David (Ps. 51), which contrasts the offering of animal sacrifices with that of a contrite heart ? In Ps. 106 and 116 we hear of the pious person offering a sacrifice of praise and of thanksgiving. These are offering of words – which are said to come from the heart. (Can one make it a rule that while the formulas that accompany the manipulation of matter in sacrifice need not be said “sincerely”, this tends to be the case with purely oral rites?)[7] The practise of spiritualization and the stress on intention has been present in Judaism and Christianity for a very long time. Vatican II theology has shifted attention from the sacrificial aspect of the Mass. Catholics now are taught to speak not of the Mass but of the Eucharist – thanksgiving in Greek.
To conclude. The 1899 article is part of the programme for a sociology of religion then being launched by Durkheim and his students and collaborators. To sacrifice is to make something sacred (200-201). Mauss maintained in his 1902-1903 article on magic that sacrifice is the typically religious act.[8] He echoes in these years an older view (common since the 16th century in a whole line of authors) that there is no religion without sacrifice. The essay he wrote with Hubert is conceived to bring water to a specific mill; Durkheim’s theory of the sacred (306-307), and, I may add, of the social sources of morality.
Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques[9] (1925) opens with the citation of an old poem from the Scandinavian Edda. The speaker talks of the joy there is in exchanging gifts and making friends. The text is in the first person, and thus gives a sense of personal motivation and presents giving as a voluntary act. Mauss is quick to point out that the recipient (donataire) is under an obligation of some sort to accept the gift and reciprocate in time. He thus speaks of a threefold obligation: to give, to receive and to return the gift (the counter-gift) (205). His use of the accounts of the potlatch leads him to speak of the well-attested agonistic gift. In a context of rivalry rather than in that of hoped for friendship, the gift is made to confront the other with the alternative of either returning a more impressive gift or losing face for ever.
His analyses of the processes set in motion by giving lead Mauss to claim he has found a general theory of socialisation, or to have found the total social act (which encompasses the others), or to have identified the fugitive moment where society gels. There is indeed something stunning in having found a behaviour which is both disinterested and interested, with entails both spontaneity and social obligation. His authorship thus takes a turn.. He now provides a broader basis for understanding the basic human and social action and shows sensitivity to the quality of the subjective involvement in action. One can also see now a contrast from the earlier tendency to see all social institutions emerging from religion. So the gift is well positioned to displace sacrifice as the foundational act and a key ingredient in moral behaviour. (Mauss thereby shows signs of accepting the points made by Aristotle in his discussion of the liberal and the magnanimous persons.[10])
Many authors, among whom I will refer to Alain Caillé and Jacques Godbout, have recently explored the claim of giving being the most original social act. They have also extended the reflections of Mauss beyond the worlds of archaic societies. They focussed on the modern increasing differentiation between gift and exchange caused by the rise of the market and probed into the historical transformation of gift practises. One can also point out that with the expansion of markets as regulating mechanisms, the obligations to give, to accept and to return have become softer ones. Natalie Zeman Davies clearly finds that giving does not have in contemporary France the place it had in the Sixteenth Century; when it was the major ground for the working out of rivalries.[11] Caillé has opened polemics against the modern bias that sees all social transactions as utilitarian.[12] Godbout found empirical evidence that monetary economics and bureaucratic control are far from taking up as much place in social life as most economists and sociologists assume.[13]
Of major interest is the contrast between gift and sacrifice. Giving requires a subjective condition, of good will, benevolence, interest, or whatever, which must be perceivable by the donataire. Whether this disposition is understood by the second person is a matter that can be to some extent empirically and quickly verified. This is hardly the case with sacrifice. There is a further important distinctive characteristic of giving: while the giver has a reasonable expectation of some return, there remains an element of risk. The philosopher might say that the act of the donateur is rooted in his or her freedom – and so are the acts of the donataire in accepting and returning. Mopreoever, that the return is expected not immediately but later indicates that the risk is taken in some trust. This means that a bond surviving in time is being intended and perhaps created. But this does not abolish the dimension of risk as an everyday social reality. The ideology of sacrifice commonly stresses that the universe is such that sacrifice will work. In 1898 Hubert and Mauss stated that sacrifice is accomplished with a religious thought (227). Sacrifice seems to carry with it the notion that the universe is such that sacrifices ought to be performed and that they will be efficacious, sooner or later. (Is the inflationary tendency to more extreme sacrifices rooted in some anxiety about the promptness of the results?) Is giving necessary and efficacious in the same way? Aristotle does not think so, who states that to live one needs to make exchanges but to live well one needs to make gifts.[14] To him living well is an ethical act and entails enduring the trials of time.[15]
Thus in 1925 Mauss significantly departed from his earlier durkheimian bases. He never used his teacher and uncle’s notion of conscience collective and now he clearly states that there is much in society that is not obligatory – and not less important for all that.[16] And to the determination of creating a science that will treat social facts as things, he has added an ear and an eye for symbols. A key phrase in his analysis of the gift is that le lien importe plus que le bien. As Jacques Godbout puts it, les biens sont au service des liens[17]. The thing that changes hands becomes a symbol as it changes hands. In the potlatch the object that circulates has no commercial value. (The object that circulates through giving is often inaliénable, i.e. it cannot be sold.) The value it has is symbolic, and not less meaningful for that. Theories of symbols may well begin to be in position to replace theories of the sacred as basic tool for the study of religions.
Recent readers of Mauss have also gained from him the notion that solid and durable social bonds can be generated horizontally, from below, so to speak. They can consist of networks generated and regenerated in smaller groups .– and not necessarily born in vast unitive and foundational effervescence. They may well prosper in the absence of cosmic unity or cosmic truth. In the wake of this realisation come the utopia of a society where all bonds are joyful and voluntary, and the hope of one where more will have that quality.
[1] Oeuvres, 1. Les fonctions sociales du sacré
[2] Bernard Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1996).
[3] For a look at the originalities in the ancient Mediterranean world, in Israel, Greek historiography and Roman law, see The caregory of the person. Anthropology, philoosphy, history, edited by M. Carrithers, S. Collins, S. Lukes (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
[4] Commentators speak often of a corporate personality and argue that the first person stands for Israel. Some make too much of that.
[5] Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God. Martyrdom and the Making of Christianitry and Judaism (Stanford University Press, 1999).
[6] Barlaam and Ioasaph, Introduction.
[7] The piece Mauss wrote for the collected articles in honour of his teacher Sylvain Lévy examine the texts where the Vedas speak of songs that nourish the gods (Oeuvres II, pages 593-600). He stresses that the value of these songs rests on the their particular meter: three meters of ten syllables each. His few book reviews on works on the Psalms do not show the same competence as his writings on Indian matters.
[8] Sociologie et anthropologie, 138.
[9] Sociologie et anthropologie
[10] Nicomachean Ethics Book IV.
[11] The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (The University of Chicago Press, 2003).
[12] Critique de la Raison utilitaire (La Découverte, 1989). He directs a review entitled M.A.U.S.S. The acronym stand for Mouvement anti-utilitariste en sciences sciences sociales.
[13] L’esprit du don (Boréal 1992, 1995), Le don, la dette, l’identité. Homo donator vs homo oeconomicus.(Boréal, 2000)
[14] Dominique Temple et Mireille Chabal, La réciprocité et la naissance des valeurs humaines (L’Harmattan 1995) 187-291.
[15] Martha Nussbaum has put this point in a particularly clear light.
[16] Camille Tarot, Sociologie et anthropologie de Marcel Mauss (La Découverte, 2003) 18, 24.
[17] L’esprit du don, 29-33.
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