The Problem Field of the Anthropology of Sacrifice: A Research Experience

Abstract

The article formulates the main issues that form the research field of the anthropology of sacrifice. The first group of problems is associated with a description of the fundamental anthropological nature of the phenomenon of sacrifice and answering the question of whether sacrifice is a cultural universal, and if so, what this universality can be based on, what prototypical forms of sacrifice can be identified and how they can be described. The second group of problems is associated with the task of understanding how the phenomenon of sacrifice is changing today and what anthropological meaning these changes have. In a situation where explicit human sacrifice is taboo, one can speak of the emergence of substitute practices and the emergence of analogs in which the structural elements of the classical ritual are distributed in space and time and are presented in a different order. As a result, in modern society, victims-sufferers are analogous to classical sacrificial victims and therefore often go through sacralizing rituals and practices. However, a fundamentally important question is whether a structure change in distributed sacrifice incurs a change in social functions? And if these changes exist, how essential they are, how much they affect the very semantic core of the anthropology of sacrifice. The third group of problems is associated with the sphere of praxis in its classical understanding, i.e., it represents issues related to political, economic, and ethical implications associated with the phenomenon of sacrifice and analogs of the ritual of sacrifice in modern societies. Here it is also impossible to avoid relating modern discourses and practices to archaic prototypes and identifying similarities and differences, and most importantly, describing transformations and problematizing their anthropological meaning. Since modern society is immersed in the media environment, it is extremely important to discuss the influence of the media on these processes. In general, the anthropology of sacrifice as a research project allows us to look at many of the most pressing social issues of our time from a new angle.