Sacrificial Gift Research Articles

Fenomén pútnických pohľadníc a ich náplň (Poznatky o zaniknutej pokladnici v Marianke)

The paper has the goal of informing on the phenomenon of Catholic pilgrimage treasuries that are set in significant pilgrimage locations. The tradition of creating collections of votive donations goes back to pre-Christian times. The bringing of sacrificial gifts has continued to this day in connection with pilgrimages, reaching its peak in the Baroque era. We will concentrate our attention on Marian pilgrimage treasures within the Central European environment, among which the defunct pilgrim and monastery treasury in Marianka also belonged. In the 18th century, Marianka enjoyed a versatile development that was also reflected in the frequency of treasury collections. Specific collections of the wide spectrum of devotional donations included objects of a sacral and worldly nature. Treasury collections were deposited in secured premises, where they were divided into groups according to their type. In some locations, the collections have survived until the present day and were transformed into museums. As a result of historic events, others were broken up and destroyed. We know about the extensive treasury in Marianka only on the basis of a register created during the destruction of the Paulist monastery. As a result of the reforms under Jozef II, the monastery’s property, along with the treasury collections, were sold at public auction in 1786. From an extensive register of briefly described items, we recognize several selected records, along with a translation of the original register in German. From the number of objects that, according to the register, were stored in the treasury, apparently nothing remained. In this paper, however, we present several objects of which we can say with confidence belonged to the destroyed treasury. Among them figures a rare monstrance, which at present resides in Stupava, along with small votive gifts resembling parts of the human body.

«Sacrificial» cups in burials of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age

It was established that in exploring the spiritual culture of ancient societies, an important place is occupied by the study of funeral rites, in particular special funeral ceramics, its functions in funeral rituals, and its symbolic meaning. It was found that in the ceramic complexes of several cultures of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Europe (Urnfield culture of the North Alpine and Middle Danube regions, Lusatian culture, culture of the Hallstatt period of the Northeast Alpine and Middle Danube regions, Villanova, Golasecca and Este in the Central and North Apennines, Bilozerska culture of the North-Western Black Sea region, Ulvivok-Rovantsi group) there was such a form of tableware as a cup (bowl, vase) on a leg. Cups on legs were discovered mainly in cemeteries, inhumation, and cremation burials. Taking into account the context in the burial objects and their unusual shape, they are interpreted as a special kind of funerary ceramics. It was observed that in many cases the bowls were placed in the burials of little girls or young women, less often – in the pair burials of an adult person and a child or a man and a woman. This feature was found in almost all the cultures mentioned in this work, which existed from the XII century BC till VII century BC, and therefore we can talk about stable religious traditions and social rules common to these cultures, which existed in a large area of Europe for about six centuries. It was established that the bowls in burials served as symbolic sacrificial gifts, connected possibly with the cult of «sacred fire». The sacral meaning of such a shape of a vessel as a cup on a leg is also traced in later times, for example, a chalice, which is the main attribute of the Eucharistic liturgical Christian service and a symbol of the Eucharist – an acceptance of the divine sacrifice. It is noted that protrusions on the rims of cups, which occur most often in the burials of women, may be related to astronomy. It is assumed that the cup from the Rovantsi cemetery, where the protrusions on the rims schematically, but quite accurately reflect the directions of the sunrise and sunset during the summer and winter solstices and the autumn equinox and the north-south direction, could serve as a primitive miniature observatory and be the subject of the paraphernalia of the solar cult. Key words: Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, funeral vessels, cup on the leg, sacrificial gift, Rovantsi cemetery.

THINGS IN THE SPACE OF UDMURT SACRIFICES: ON THE BORDER OF THE UTILITARIAN AND THE SACRED

The article examines the composition and functions of things used at the traditional sacrifices of the Trans-Kama Udmurts, the adherents of the ethnic religion from the Republic of Bashkortostan and the Perm Krai. Rites with sacrifices represent a vivid manifestation of the form of religious cult and involve an offering of sacrificial gifts (animals, things) to the deities and require the use of a wide range of objects of the material world like ritual dishes and utensils, working tools and devices, ritual clothing, textiles. The entire set of cult objects constitutes the material embodiment of ritual activity which clearly characterizes the worldview, evolution, and the current state of national culture. The results of the study show that the things used in the rituals are used for their utilitarian purpose while the ritual nature of their use endows them with symbolic functions, thereby preserving their sacred status. Comparison with historical data shows that the number, composition and functions of objects used for cult purposes have remained the same, but their types, shapes, material and manufacturing method have changed. The work was prepared on the basis of published and archival sources, the authors' own field ethnographic materials.

Sacrifice and violence in the marketplace

Sacrifice is central to the flourishing of human culture and is integral to everyday life through practices of gifting, abstinence, donation and substitution. Consumer studies have predominantly taken a theological view of consumption-based sacrifice as medium of self-transformation, purification and transcendence to the realms of the sacred. Yet, there is a darker side to marketplace sacrifice. An alternative reading of sacrifice acknowledges the violence that is also often present in sacrifice – a violence that is directed and ritualised through the sacrifice of the scapegoat. Violent sacrifice can unite and reconcile conflicting individuals into a cohesive community, the taking of a life – at least symbolically – to restore social order and the status quo. This violent turn is missing from accounts of sacrifice and sacrificial gift giving in marketing and consumer studies that do not account for the deep, visceral, human desire for violent sacrifice – in both non-blood and bloodletting forms. To address this gap, I first introduce René Girard’s perspectives on violence, sacrifice and scapegoating to conceive an ideology of violent sacrifice in markets and consumption. I then re-examine extant market and consumer studies that investigate acts of sacrifice to reveal dimensions of violence and expand conceptions of sacrifice as being both light and dark. Thus, acknowledging the dual nature of sacrifice: purifying sacrifice to transform through abstinence and giving; and, violent sacrifice through mechanisms of scapegoating. Understanding these two faces of sacrifice has significant implication for marketing scholarship and marketing practice.

Review: Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity, by Dana Robinson

“Virtue is a fruit, a sacrifice, a state of health” (5). In this excellent monograph, Dana Robinson unites case studies of three of the most influential authors of late ancient Mediterranean Christianity to reconstruct the ideological uses and social possibilities of food discourse in early Christian communities. John Chrysostom, Shenoute of Atripe, and Paulinus of Nola were engaged in transforming the religious landscape of the Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, and they did so to a substantial degree using the subject of food. Since they wrote from three sides of the Mediterranean and in three of its most important languages, Syria/Greek, Egypt/Coptic, and Italy/Latin, respectively, they form an especially representative triad. In Robinson’s analysis of Shenoute, virtue is a fruit, while ascesis is the labor of cooking and farming. In Paulinus, piety and ascesis are both sacrificial gifts embodied through the mouth as a threshold for eating and speech. In Chrysostom, virtue is health and ascesis medicine.Robinson’s approach to the subject of early Christian food discourse is robustly interdisciplinary. She makes use of three primary analytical tools: the concept of food as embodied material culture, taken from anthropology; cognitive metaphor theory, taken from linguistics and literary theory; and the idea of space and place as socially constructed entities, taken from cultural geography. Together these allow her to analyze a variety of food metaphors and practices of early Christianity in productive ways that delineate a social and religious world marked by a series of embodiments.She devotes two chapters to food discourse in the sermons of Chrysostom. In the first, she examines his treatment of elite food consumption from a medical, philosophical, and economic perspective with a focus on his multivalent, and sometimes rather elusive, understanding of moderation. Of particular interest to the social historian is a section in which Robinson reconstructs an elite Roman diet. She accomplishes this by subjecting the food purchased by Theophanes of Hermopolis, which he had recorded on a series of papyri during his sojourn at Antioch in 322 or 323, to rigorous economic and sociological analyses (53–65). The results allow her to contextualize Chrysostom’s admonitions to dietary moderation with a precision that would otherwise be impossible. In the second chapter, she focuses on Chrysostom’s project to make the late Roman dining room into a place where the correct relationships of human beings with God as well as with each other are enacted in the everyday rituals of food consumption.Robinson also devotes two chapters to food discourse in the sermons and canons of Shenoute, in particular the sermons “You, O Lord” and “Righteous Art Thou.” In the first chapter, she elucidates the duality of Shenoute’s imagery of fruit as virtue: the individual body is both the site that produces fruit and the final product that is consumed and assimilated into the communal body. In the second chapter, she again shifts the focus from metaphors of food production and consumption to locations and practices, demonstrating how Shenoute’s food discourse places the monastery, at the expense of the Christian household and martyr festival, at the center of the Christian landscape. The feeding of thousands of refugees for three months at Shenoute’s monastery during the 340s forms a social-historical parallel to the purchase history of Theophanes in its potential to connect words with experience (146–53). Unfortunately, Robinson leaves this episode underdeveloped by comparison. This is due in part to the nature of the sources, but this fascinating event should have been brought into clearer focus.Paulinus of Nola receives one chapter, rather than two, which Robinson focuses on his Natalicia, a series of poems he delivered on the feast days of St. Felix. Through his sacrificial poetics, Paulinus attempts nothing less than to assimilate Roman votive religion to Christian martyr piety and provide a framework for Christianization itself. Given the necessary abstractions of her largely theoretical analyses, Robinson’s reproduction of the plan of the shrine of St. Felix and accompanying discussion provide a welcome entry into the physical spaces created by Paulinus in conjunction with his verbal ones (208). This diagram, however, would have benefited from labeling specific to Robinson’s analyses, and a more thorough integration of visual evidence into the argument would have been welcome. The same holds for her reproductions of the excavations of Shenoute’s White Monastery (6, 173). Yet these concerns are minor, and Robinson has indeed demonstrated that food is “good to think with” (222) by modeling the incisive utilization of mutually reinforcing theoretical approaches to explicate the complexities of the apparently simple language of food and reminding us that “a meal is never just a meal” (225).

Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der Übersetzung des Wortes מִנְחָה in Gen 4,3–5a

At the end of 2016, a revised edition of the Catholic Bible translation (Einheitsübersetzung) was published. One of the many corrections introduced referred to the word מִנְחָה in Gen 4,3–5a. It was translated as “a gift” (Gabe). The previous translation (1980) read this word as “a sacrifice” (Opfer). This article examines the validity of a given correction, proposing to combine both translation traditions into one as “a sacrificial gift” (Opfergabe).

The Liberating Promise of Crucified Hope

The work of liberation theologians, notably Jon Sobrino, has sought to give expression to Christian hope and the eschatological promise of the Kingdom from the context of the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed of history. From these contexts develops an understanding of Christian hope as a distinctly ‘crucified hope,’ emerging from both the sacrificial gift and the scandal of the cross. Building on Sobrino, this article develops an understanding of ‘crucified hope’ from the context of the current migration crisis, arguing that this hope begins where human optimism ends. Trust in the promise of the resurrection to which the Christian community witnesses empowers the crucified to respond to radical injustice and suffering. ‘Crucified hope’ thus shifts the focus of hope from the larger Christian community, participating in taking the crucified down from their crosses, to the crucified themselves and their actions of self-liberation.

The Personal Rituals of the Finnic Peoples with Forest Trees

The article examines communication with trees in Votian and Vepsian folk culture. Two cases are discussed when a person gathering mushrooms and berries in the forest has made sacrificial gifts in the form of produce to a tree to request a good mushroom and berry harvest or for good health. In the Votian case, persons who have gone missing in the forest are memorialized. Trees are regarded as not only a conversation partner or a mediator, but in a broader religious (cosmogonic) and ritual context as well. These incidents are significant for how they reflect the animistic worldview of the Finnic peoples. A discussion of Finnic ontology is invited, suggesting that the cultural type centered on the folk healer [the-one-who-knows] came to replace the shamanic cultural type latest in the Iron Age.

Malaysia. The Hakkas of Sarawak: Sacrificial gifts in Cold War era Malaysia By Kee Howe Yong Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 242. Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The Hakkas of Sarawak: Sacrificial gifts in Cold War era Malaysia By KEE HOWE YONG Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 242. Notes, Bibliography, Index. Readers who expect a conventional ethnography of 'The Hakkas of Sarawak' (a la Ju-K'ang Tien's The Chinese of Sarawak) will be disappointed by this monograph, but anthropologists, historians, and political scientists interested in the intersections of global, national and local histories, in the historical memory of ethnic minorities marginalised and victimised by the nation-state, and in how such communities cope with collective trauma should focus on its subtitle (Sacrificial gifts in Cold War era Malaysia) and will find this an intellectually engaging--and politically engaged--ethnography that combines committed scholarship with deep, reflective analysis. The Hakkas have a long history of social exclusion and resistance to state authority. Sometimes mislabelled as the 'gypsies of China', they are believed to have migrated from northern China into the south where they were regarded as outsiders (their name means 'guest families') and played a leading role in the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion against the Qing dynasty. The Hakkas were also prominent among the Chinese pioneers who migrated to Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The earliest Chinese settlements in the archipelago date back to 1777 when the Sultan of Sambas in West Borneo invited Hakkas to work in his gold mines. It did not take long for them to make themselves independent of the Sultan and set up their own government, the Lanfang Republic, sometimes disparaged as a secret society kongsi, and sometimes idealised as Asia's first modern republic. When the Dutch began to assert control over this part of Borneo in the mid-nineteenth century, many Hakkas migrated northwards to areas beyond Dutch control where they continued mining gold as well as antimony in Sarawak. After the Sarawak Raja James Brooke imposed taxes on the lucrative opium trade and set up a mining company to take over the mining operation, they rebelled in 1857 and attacked his capital Kuching. The Raja made a narrow escape and managed to rally local Iban warriors to counterattack and massacre many Hakkas. A century later the Hakkas of Sarawak once again appear in historical accounts of the time as dangerous outsiders, this time as communist collaborators and sympathisers during the 1960s Konfrontasi, the Cold War front in Borneo. That is how the Hakkas conventionally appear in historical accounts, but Kee Howe Yong is an anthropologist endeavouring to write their unwritten history based on the living memories of the trauma of simultaneous inclusion in (through forced resettlement) and exclusion from (as suspected communists) the nation-state. Rather than dwelling on the history of the Hakkas, Yong seeks to convey an understanding of what it feels like to live in today's Malaysia with the historical baggage of past exclusion and victimisation. Yong conducted fieldwork mainly at bus stations, coffee shops and in buses among drivers, conductors and other employees of the local bus company. That may sound like the beginning of most anthropological fieldwork, but in this book it is also its end. He chose the Sarawak Omnibus Company as his fieldwork site not only because of the pioneering role that Chinese traders and transport operators played in connecting Sarawak, but also because it came into existence when small-scale Chinese bus operators who had competed against each other merged their operations and formed the first and biggest bus company in Sarawak. …

Dogs in the traditional worldview of the chuvash people

The dog has undergone a long process of domestication and in the mind of man has become a positive fi gure: people swore to dogs, composed eulogies to dogs and have created rules concerning the handling of dogs; dogs were even considered a means of delivering sacrifi cial gifts to the recipients. Etymologists associate a number of corresponding Turkic words with the Chuvash word jytă (dog). However, it is also possible that the etymology of the word jytă goes back to the Sanskrit idā, the name for food that modern Zoroastrians in Iran still feed dogs after the death of a relative. The dog is one of the most symbolic characters in the traditional beliefs of the Chuvash. It is believed that the dog is directly connected with the supreme deity Tură. At the semantic level, it has much in common with the wolf and man. The dog may be used as a sacrifi ce. According to traditional beliefs, the dog can also serve as a substitute for ancestral spirits and can communication with the other world.

"Kill One, he becomes one hundred": Martyrdom as Generative Sacrifice in the Nepal People's War

In Nepal, war is a sacrifice. The warrior maintains a direct and unique relationship with the divine, since in warfare he makes a sacrificial gift of his own person, the bali dân—a gift that results in a 'noble death'. The warrior can offer the sacrifice or be offered in sacrifice. In Maoist ideology, death loses its character of reciprocity since the inter-changeability of victims who die honorably on either side of the battle has been eliminated. The asymmetry of death, the one-sided sacrificial nature of the war, is one of the features that distinguishes the People's War from those that preceded it. Through Maoist poetry and Maoist warriors' diaries, this article explores the shift introduced by the People's War from the figure of the 'hero', traditionally attached to the warlike realm, to the new figure of the 'martyr', and shows the apocalyptic nature of the Maoist cultural production.

Euripides' Hekabe and the Somatics of Dionysiac Drama

The stage setting of Euripides'Hekabeis a sinister place. Its denizen is an ogre-like king who masquerades as an ally of the Greeks and a friend of the Trojans. He is a host who takes in axenos(‘stranger/guest’) along with his golden hoard, both of which he promises to keep safe within his house. Site of death, site of thesaurization, Polymestor's locale bears an uncanny and parodic resemblance to the house of Hades and he to the form of that death god called Plouton. Paradoxically, the names of the victims who die there, the one he killed (Polydoros) and the one whom others sacrificed (Polyxena), sound like those ironic and euphemistic epithets of that underworld deity, who both gives and receives. This is also a place haunted by ghosts, one of whom appears on stage and speaks the prologue (Polydoros) and the other, Achilleus, who transmits his demand for the sacrificial gift of a ‘bride of death’ (Polyxena). In the end, there is a ‘house of Hades’, but it will be Hekabe's and not Polymestor's, and it is Polymestor and his children who will be lured into her secluded tent, following a path, as the chorus says, that leadsthanasimon pros Haidan(‘to deadly Hades’, 1031f.; cf. 1021f.). He will later call the avengers (Hekabe and her women) Bacchants of Hades (1077).