Narratives Of Sacrifice Research Articles

Obfuscation, the Rhetoric of Martyrdom, and the Emmett Till Statue in Greenwood, Mississippi

This article introduces the concept of obfuscation as a useful category for public memory scholarship that expands our understanding of the memory building practices associated with memorials to lynching victims. Using the Emmett Till Statue installed in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 2022 as its exemplar artifact, the article shows how its placement and form offer a comforting narrative of sacrifice and martyrdom that obfuscates the traumatic reality that Till was a victim whose short life ended when two white men lynched him.

‘Exodus’: The Serb flight from Sarajevo, its legacy, and its role in the political memory of Republika Srpska

AbstractThis study provides a conceptual and empirical explanation of how and why the leadership of Republika Srpska (RS), which is one of the entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, formed a specific discourse concerning the flight of Sarajevan Serbs after the 1992–1995 war. Undertaking an analysis of local media, it explores the ‘defensive’ and ‘cohesive’ strategies promulgated by the RS elite that have been pivotal in shaping the idea of Serbhood. The former accentuates victimhood through discursive dimensions of external enforcement, suffering and rupture. The latter channels a sense of collective identity and the notion of ‘statehood’ in RS through narratives of sacrifice and patriotism. These strategies help to advance the concept of Serbhood to counter the war's external near‐hegemonic understanding, fuelling denialism and promoting in‐group characteristics in the RS society. The legacy of the flight has contributed to moulding the political memory of RS.

Philosophy and Theology Based on the Philosopher Réne Girard: A Reflection

This study aims to examine in a simple way when talking about Réne Girard's mimetic desire to be connected with narratives of sacrifice that are synonymous with violence, especially—besides speaking in other scientific disciplines—theology in the narratives of the Judeo-Christian scripture tradition. This research uses qualitative research methods with literature study. Literature study by looking at the interplay of philosophy and theology through the lens of Réne Girard. The results of the research show that there is a rationalization/perpetuation of violence through narration to practice, both within the state, the church and in the holy texts themselves. Through the light of the mimetic desire in the narrative of Yusuf and his brothers and the narrative of King Solomon and his two wives who claim children born from their respective wombs, it shows that 2 of the many texts which are patterned on characterizing violence are identical to these praxis-narratives.

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

‘That deep underground savage instinct’ narratives of sacrifice and retribution in Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death

ABSTRACT Appointment with Death (1938) poses a challenge to the longstanding critical practice of highlighting Agatha Christie’s lack of literary sophistication: her ‘workmanlike’ style, stereotypical settings, two-dimensional characters and ludic conception of the plot as a game that the author plays with the reader. This challenge is due not only to the Middle Eastern setting or the novel’s detailed psychoanalytical reading of domestic abuse, but also, more importantly, to its textual and subtextual debates surrounding truth and justice and the articulation of both through narrative. Based on a detailed textual examination of the novel, drawing in part on Pierre Bayard’s ‘counterinvestigative’ approach to detective fiction, I argue that Appointment with Death presents readers with two competing narratives: Poirot’s standard narrative of criminal retribution and a mythical narrative that links the suppression of pre-civilisational savagery to the practice of human sacrifice. As suggested by way of conclusion, this dual narrative structure must be seen as an effect of place, specifically the relocation of an English murder mystery to a Middle Eastern rife with cultural and mythical meanings.

To Be or Not to Be a Hero

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in and around a so-called War Hero Village (Ranavirugama) in northwestern Sri Lanka, this article traces the social (un)becomings of Sri Lankan Army veterans injured during the civil war with the Tamil liberation front. It argues that such veterans have long been able to draw on a materially rewarding narrative of sacrifice and carnal capital—epitomized in the honorific ranaviru (war hero)—in order to produce a particular kind of veteran citizenship, let alone subjectivity, and thus to pursue socially meaningful post-injury existences. In the eyes of the veterans themselves, however, this celebratory narrative is eroding and a “collective narrative” characterized by a kind of social forgetting of the injured veteran is emerging. Material benefits notwithstanding, this narrative contestation entails a “struggle for recognition” that threatens to leave them not only disabled but also with no one to be, or become.

Suffering for Others While Making Others Suffer: Military Narratives of Sacrifice.

Voices from theology seldom participate in a contemporary conversation on military cultures and identities; this article attempts to stimulate this conversation from such a perspective. The article combines a literature review with narratives of sacrifice from real-life cases. It presents a reflective perspective on the formation of military identities with regard to responsibilities and sacrifices. Forgiveness and atonement are discussed as pathways to cultivate growth which can lessen feelings of guilt and regret.

Return to Mecca: Balik-Islam among Filipino migrants in Singapore

Abstract The narrative of the globalization of labour and the demands of the labour market dominates most of the scholarship on Filipino migration, emphasizing their contribution to the Philippine economy via remittances even while these migrants endure difficulties working in forbidding terrain – a companion narrative of sacrifice and endurance. What remains below the surface, however, is the enchantment with the discovery of a new world-view among them. Balik-Islam, the ‘return’ to Islam, is part of the imaginary among Filipinos who have travelled, lived and worked across territories, connecting them to Mecca, both physically and spiritually. While their labour skills brought them to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries, their journey expanded into the discovery of meanings beyond their labour value. In this article, I regard Mecca as an imaginary among Filipino travellers who have somehow bridged the connection between their lost Islamic heritage and their labour, the latter allowing them to reclaim this heritage as authentic to their identity. In this article, I discuss the reconfiguration of Mecca as ‘home’, ‘redemption’ and ‘resurrection’ among itinerant Filipinos: first, as a salve to constant dislocations in an impersonal and aggressive global economy, second, as a source of salvation from indulgence in otherwise forbidden behaviour in foreign territories where the codes of behaviour back home have been transgressed (e.g., adultery) and third, as a spiritual resurrection in which a return to Mecca erases the past and provides a new path, a new identity and a rebirth. However, a more instrumentalist view of conversion, one that depicts conversion as part of a rational strategy to ease the tensions in intimate relations between Catholics and Muslims, also forms part of this article. In this latter dimension, Mecca is an ‘absent’ place bereft of spiritual meaning and serves to reinforce the homelessness of the migration experience.

Everyday Practices of Sacrifice: A Case Study of Palestinian Women

In this article, I explore how ‘narratives of sacrifice’ shape the lives of Palestinian women living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in exile in Lebanon and affect the choices they make. By focusing on women’s ‘everyday practice’, I argue that, in response to the dangers and apparent hopelessness of their situation, Palestinians have adopted sacrifice as a conscious mode of struggle; it also offers a way to bring meaning to senseless events. There is a tendency to identify sacrificial acts as male, but such assumptions need to be reconsidered. The concept of sacrifice is complex and is also gendered. I investigate inadvertent sacrifice – the role of the victim or resister – and deliberate sacrifice, as a way of protecting the community. The notion of sacrifice is closely linked to practices of resistance. As well, it has a strong affinity with the preservation of identity and should therefore not be interpreted solely as a symptom of powerlessness.

From Binding to Crucifixion: The Political Role of Christian Motifs in Israeli Cinema

This essay examines the integration of the Christian narrative of sacrifice—the Crucifixion—into contemporary Israeli cinema. This story has gradually seeped into the more dominant narrative of sacrifice in Israeli culture: that of the biblical Binding of Isaac. The article draws particular attention to a significant transition in the representation of human sacrifice in Israeli political cinema dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and examines the significant political impact of this transition on the Israeli national narrative. The article questions the ways these narratives of self-sacrifice are incorporated in the films and what the Israeli cinematic perspective on the conflict gains from this use of Christian themes as a way to obtain public penance, forgiveness, and redemption.

Motherhood, Agency and Sacrifice in Narratives on Female Migration for Care Work

In this article, I address the stigma associated with female migration in many regions of large-scale female mobility. Showing the use of and the relationship between different narratives of female migration in Western Ukraine, I challenge some of the assumptions of the care drain perspective, and show how this perspective implies a risk of losing sight of female agency in descriptions of female migrants. In many communities of origin for female migrants there is widespread criticism in the media and popular discourse of mothers who leave behind children and enjoy the good life abroad, with claims that female migration happens at the cost of family and children. Due to the stigma produced by this discourse, female migrants who are also mothers often prefer to speak of their decision to migrate as an act of sacrifice. Studies that frame female migrants as mothers tend to reproduce these narratives of sacrifice at the cost of understanding female migration where women go abroad to improve their own lives. As a result, the focus is shifted from the women’s agency and reasons for leaving, to the consequences of their absence.

Sacrifice in Goethe’s Faust

Analyses of sacrifice in literature treated it for a long time as a unified phenomenon, in which sacrifice is always the manifestation of a particular kind of violence. The most prominent example of this approach is that of Rene Girard, whose idea that every sacrifice is an example of a universal scapegoat mechanism has inspired many readings of sacrifice in literature. As in Freud's discussion of the death drive in Civilization and Its Discontents, Girard assumes that and aggression naturally build up in human society in the form of the mimetic violence that arises through uncontrollably escalating rivalry. Mimetic ends only when all aggression is channeled against one innocent scapegoat, who is sacrificed.1 While this approach has maintained a sense of the continuing importance of sacrifice for all human cultures, the focus on sacrifice as itself an expression of rather than an attempt to structure the human relationship to has meant that this theory has tended to read all sacrifice as both irrationally violent and structurally identical.More recent theories of sacrifice have attempted to offer a more nuanced perspective, first by recognizing the positive aspects of sacrifice and second by differentiating between various structures of sacrifice in the separate manifestations. Jan-Melissa Schramm's study of Victorian fiction sees stories of sacrifice as examples of the attempt to construct an ideology of the nation and at the same time a basis for creating a general substitution of the self for the victim in a way that creates a bond of empathy.2 Describing the notion of sacrifice in France, Ivan Strenski contends that there can be no durable social life-much less a 'nation'-without sacrifice and the transcendent sanctions embodied in it,3 and he demonstrates that Catholic understandings of sacrifice in France were not eliminated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but were revised to fit into nationalist conceptions of collective identity. Similarly, Yael Feldman shows how narratives of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible were transformed in the twentieth century through secular interpretations that linked them to a new Israeli nationalism.4 These studies move toward a theory of sacrifice that treats it, not so much as an affirmation of violence, as a means of establishing a collective understanding of the human relationship to death. For Derek Hughes, for instance, [a]ll communities need rituals and systems of exchange to make sense of death; it must fit into an intelligible system of circulation, even if it is the end of the road for the dead individual.5 The focus, then, is not on demonstrating the irrationality of notions of sacrifice but on tracing how these notions supersede each other over time in a particular tradition.In one of the most emphatic attempts to rehabilitate the notion of sacrifice, Douglas Hedley argues that sacrifice must be understood as a Christian structure that is to be opposed to the deficiencies of a secular culture. His approach is most relevant for the discussion of sacrifice in Goethe because it considers the opposition between Christian submission to a transcendent order and the primacy of the individual, an opposition that becomes a key theme in Faust. As Hedley writes, [m] any of the critics of the idea of sacrifice are anti-Platonic and so is Nietzsche's odd retrieval of sacrifice, where sacrifice is an expression of the Will to Power and not the slave morality that encourages sacrifice of self for the sake of metaphysical values. Nietzsche is very telling in this reversal of the idea of sacrifice. The increasing emphasis upon individual freedoms and rights and the horizontal web of beliefs and commitments: dimension of family, friends, and contracts has been combined in occidental culture with an erosion of vertical sense of a mediated transcendent order6 The opposition between metaphysical values and human freedom lies at the heart of the Faust story, and Goethe's Faust is significant in that it marks the boundary between a Christian notion of sacrifice and the Nietzschean modern one. …

Maternity, Mortality and Mourning in the Trench Poetry of World War I

This investigation of the ways in which Italian poet soldiers represented mothers and motherhood seeks to shed light on the relationship between gender and war in early-twentieth-century Italy by exploring the intersections and divergences between the official discourses on motherhood and the Madre-patria, represented here by D'Annuzio's “Il rinato,” and the counter-discourses offered in the poetry of Ugo Betti and Corrado Alvaro. In order to illustrate a fundamental difference in the way D'Annunzio, on the one hand, and Betti and Alvaro, on the other, portray mothers, I will focus on their various depictions of maternal grief. I argue that Betti's and Alvaro's representations of melancholic mothers constitute an ethical choice that runs counter to the nationalist narrative of sacrifice and regeneration, but in the end I also question whether their melancholic mothers can be viewed as a new kind of model of womanhood or if she is just another iteration of the mater dolorosa projected onto women by both Catholicism and pseudo-science.

Islamically informed Soviet patriotism in postwar Kyrgyzstan

AbstractFew analyses of the broader impact of World War II upon Soviet society have turned to Islam or Central Asia. Yet the conflict marked a critical turning point in the encounter between the region’s Muslims and the Soviet state. This paper examines attempts by Central Asian Muslims to position Islam at the center of their identification with the Soviet Union. It argues that the war created a new field of possibilities for the region’s population to place religion squarely within the broader Soviet narrative of sacrifice, with significant ramifications for political and social life.

Islamically informed Soviet patriotism in postwar Kyrgyzstan

AbstractFew analyses of the broader impact of World War II upon Soviet society have turned to Islam or Central Asia. Yet the conflict marked a critical turning point in the encounter between the region’s Muslims and the Soviet state. This paper examines attempts by Central Asian Muslims to position Islam at the center of their identification with the Soviet Union. It argues that the war created a new field of possibilities for the region’s population to place religion squarely within the broader Soviet narrative of sacrifice, with significant ramifications for political and social life.

The Representation of Mother and the Narrative of Sacrifice in Korean Contemporary Literature

The Representation of Mother and the Narrative of Sacrifice in Korean Contemporary Literature

Urban space, ethnic community, and national belonging: the political landscape of memory in Little Tokyo

The “Little Tokyo” neighborhood of Los Angeles was the center of pre-internment community life for Japanese immigrants and their children and is still considered the symbolic home of later generations of Japanese Americans in Southern California. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in Little Tokyo, I explore in this article how contemporary Japanese Americans have used and transformed this ancestral landscape in order to express, contest, and formalize collective memories of the Japanese American experience, particularly with regard to their place in the national body politic. Historical narratives inscribed at many places in Little Tokyo, both informal and institutional, project a narrative of sacrifice, suffering, and redemption in the context of internment and military service, articulating neatly with mainstream American tropes of overcoming hardship as a process of ‘earning’ citizenship and its benefits. However, such narratives are also contested by alternative interpretations and representations of these spaces that describe a special role for Japanese Americans in making demands of their government, rather than just sacrifices to it. The resulting debates, disagreements, and even occasional consensus around constructions of nation, identity, community, and belonging are rooted in the ‘sacred ground’ of Little Tokyo, gathering meaning and persuasive power through their connection to a symbolically dense site of shared memory. The multiple memory projects of this landscape reveal how Japanese Americans have envisioned their relationship to the concept of America, to each other, and to other communities with shared experiences in a diverse metropolis.

Faqir or faker?: The Pakpattan tragedy and the politics of Sufism in Pakistan

On the night of April 1, 2001, over a hundred devotees were crushed to death in a mob stampede during the annual pilgrimage at the shrine of Pakistan's most famous Sufi saint, Baba Farid ad-Din Ganj-i Shakkar. This article explores this tragedy as a case study of the politics of Sufism. In today's Pakistan, Sufism remains an emotive, multi-valent and highly contested symbol—a lightning rod in the contestation over Islamic identity, authority and authenticity. While most Pakistanis view Sufi saints as the embodiment of Islamic virtue—true faqirs (‘impoverished ones’) committed to a life of piety, self-sacrifice and public service—the detractors of the tradition dismiss them as fakers. Faqir or faker? The opposing answers to this question reveal how the Sufi tradition is argued and debated in Pakistan and throughout the modern Muslim world. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the differing responses of the state, the shrine custodians and a group of Chishti Sabiri Sufi disciples to the Pakpattan tragedy of 2001. Focusing on the response of Sufi participants, I trace how a story of personal loss and national trauma was transformed into a narrative of sacrifice and sacralisation, with Sufism framed as Islamic orthodoxy.

Rituals of Rhetoric and Nationhood: The Liberal Anti-Deficit Campaign (1994-1998)

In 1993, the Liberals came to power on a platform of job creation. Yet soon after their ascendancy, their election promise to invest in more jobs faded; deficit reduction became their foremost preoccupation. In spite of their altered political priorities, and in spite of their announcement that deep cuts in government expenditures were imminent, the Liberals won substantial public support for their fiscal actions. Like all moments of crisis, Canada’s accruing debt in 1994/1995 was potentially double edged; it could well have incurred a political disaster for the Liberals. Instead, it was exploited as an opportunity. The deficit crisis of the 1990s became a significant moment of Canadian consensus-building in which the Liberal Party, once known for its Keynesian posture, sought to redefine the national economic psyche in function of a rising monetarist trend. This essay seeks to account for the success of this ideological venture, and argues that the Liberals’ “marketing strategy" can be analysed in terms of a symbolic language of nationalism—a discourse whose persuasive power resides in its archetypal narrative of sacrifice and redemption.