The Other Side of Sacrifice: Introduction

While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally ‘sacrificed sacrifice,’ for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice – whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between – remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environment, sacrificial tropes frequently emerge as key means of mediating and propagating various forms of power, moral discourse, and cultural identity. This paper lays out reasons for retaining sacrifice as an analytical concept within anthropology, and argues for the importance of a renewed focus on the ‘other side of sacrifice’, as a means of understanding better how sacrifice emerges beyond ritual and enters into the full gamut of social life.     

The prizefighter's three bodies

Based on three years of participant observation and apprenticeship in a black boxing gym on Chicago's South Side, this article reconstructs the prizefighter's lived sense and experience of corporeal instrumentality, aesthetics, and ethics ‐ the ‘three bodies’ that together define the distinctive, ‘aisthesis’ of pugilistic practice as corporeal craft and ghetto trade. This serves to argue that professional boxing offers not so much an opportunity for economic betterment as the promise of social difference and even transcendence: the professional ethic of sacrifice enables boxers to tear themselvesfrom the everyday world and to create a moral and sensual universe ‘sui generis’ wherein a transcendent masculine self may be constructed.     

The Untold Sacrifice: The Monotony and Incompleteness of Self-Sacrifice in Northeast Brazil

There is no such thing as an accidental sacrifice. Sacrifice is always pre-meditated, and if not entirely goal-oriented, at the very least inherently meaningful as a process in itself. This paper is about how we might begin to understand sacrifices that do not conform to these rules. It concerns the question: does sacrifice exist outside of its (often) dramatic, self-conscious elaboration? Within the Brazilian Catholic tradition everyday life – ideally characterised by monotonous, undramatic, acts of self-giving – is ‘true sacrifice’. For ordinary Catholics, the challenge is not how to self-sacrifice, but how to make one's mundane life of self-sacrifice visible whilst keeping one's gift of suffering ‘free’. In this paper I describe, ethnographically, the work entailed as one of ‘revelation’ and use the problems thrown up to reflect upon both the limits and advantages of Western philosophical versus anthropological understandings of Christian sacrificial practices to date.     

Damp Rooms and Saying ‘Please’: Mimesis and Alterity in the Host Family Space in Study-Abroad Experiences

Study-abroad programs are a ‘globalizing project’ developed at the intersection of educational institutions seeking new income sources and the ideologies that the world is comprised of a mosaic of cultures and that ‘intercultural experience’ is valuable. While research on study-abroad programs often focuses on their effect on the students’ ‘global competence’ and language proficiency, this article focuses on the space, the space of host family in particular, produced in study-abroad programs. Study-abroad programs here are perceived in a wide sense to include various programs for students to go to another country to study.

Study-abroad guidebooks and researchers portray the host family's life as constituting a quintessential ‘native life’, in which study-abroad students should be immersed. However, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Aotearoa/New Zealand, this article argues that the distinction between ‘cultural difference’ and ‘cultural sameness’ is a construction, resulting in mutual accommodation and intolerant judgments, respectively. That is, when host parents recognised the ‘cultural difference’ of the foreign students’ behaviour, they often sought to understand meanings behind the behaviour, resulting in mutual accommodation. It turned the space into what Michael Taussig calls the ‘space between’, in which it is unclear who is imitating whom. When the host parents recognised ‘cultural sameness’ based on superficial similarity, however, their efforts to understand meanings behind behaviour was halted and, when the behaviour was considered problematic, led to the student being asked to move out. This article details an ironic space of study abroad where alterity inspired tolerance and similarity inspired intolerance.     

Fishing,thieving, witchcraft: apprehension and mistrust in maritime West Africa

This article explores the ‘apprehension’ that permeates life in coastal Sierra Leone as fisherfolk struggle to navigate a precarious economy of overfished waters and overstrained relationships. In a context of deepening uncertainty, social vigilance has come to be regarded as a key survival skill. At sea, even as fishermen strain their senses for evidence of shoaling fish, they remain equally vigilant to rival crews, who may seek to deceive them in their competition for the same depleted resource. When crews return home with empty nets, again, exchange partners regard them with suspicion, watchful for clues that they could have sold their catch covertly in another coastal town. When businesses founder or savings evaporate, people are quick to assume their fortunes must have been invisibly robbed ‘in a witch way’ by one of their neighbours. And yet, despite the deep mistrust and apprehension through which people regard their social world, moral discourses about this supposedly rampant trickery are nuanced. Despair at believing themselves to have been grifted in some unseen way is often tempered by a weary empathy for their antagonists’ poverty, and even grudging respect for their skills of dissimulation.     

Blood,War, and Ritual: Religious Ecology, ‘Strong’ Culture,and Human Sacrifice in the Premodern World

What social factors predict human sacrifice in premodern societies? After summarising key insights from competing theoretical perspectives that seek to explain the presence of human sacrifice in premodern societies, we empirically assess the explanatory utility of each theory. We draw from Stark's ‘moral communities’ argument and Alexander and Smith's insights regarding cultural autonomy to highlight how the macro-level organisation of premodern societies impacted the practice of human sacrifice. Using data from Murdock and White's Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, logistic regression models suggest that premodern societies that expressed community ties through religious ceremonies were more likely to engage in human sacrifice, while beliefs in spirit aggression are correlated with lower likelihood of human sacrifice. In terms of non-religious factors, societies that experienced frequent famine were slightly less likely to activity in the ancient world are partly a function of societal complexity. We conclude by specifying the theoretical implications of these findings.     

Doing the City from the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Urban Marginality*

ABSTRACT

This special issue focuses on urban marginality in diverse contexts across the world (Africa, Latin America, Arab States and Europe) and proposes anthropological perspectives on contemporary urbanity that take into account the complexity of the social positions of those city dwellers that are on the margins. Three aspects of urban margins come to the fore. First, urbanites respond to increasing marginalisation through the production of alternative meanings and narratives about the city. While grand, powerful narratives may present cities as ‘divided’, ‘dual’ or ‘conflicted’, urban dwellers may carve out symbolic space through discourses of the non-spectacular and non-political, emerging out of lived space. Second, the cuts and frictions constituting urban margins do not only limit urban dwellers capacities, but can also provide spaces of agentic possibilities. As it is well known, the absence of state control can be turned by versatile urbanites into opportunities of the ‘informal’ economy. Third, urban dwellers engage in manifold practices that connect and entangle their marginalised position with spaces of power and resources. Through their practices urban margins become a relation to, not a disconnection from the ‘centre’. In this special issue we understand ‘urban margins’ not as essence or entities, but as forms of relations between urban dwellers shaped by processes of political, economic, spatial and social marginalisation. Seen in this way, urban margins constitute a perspective on the urban: a lens to entice comparisons of urban agency in the world of cities [Robinson, J. 2011. “Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (1): 1–23. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00982.x]].     

Sacrifice as Social Capital among Israeli Conscientious Objectors

This article considers counterhegemonic sacrifices as a means of social intervention, and in doing so explores the social efficacy of non-ritual sacrifice in the modern era. Ethnographically, this article examines the way Israeli conscientious objectors succeed in having their refusal of military service and the social costs they incur understood as sacrifices by the Israeli public. Ex-soldiers accumulate social capital in light of public perception that they have ‘paid the price’ for their beliefs. Other ethnographic contexts that further elucidate the ability of socially abject to use sacrifice to counterhegemonic effect are presented. I claim that the recognition of sacrifice depends on an intersubjective combination of sacrificial intention and community recognition. This article suggests that the meaning of sacrifice is determined by how sacrifice is used and understood in social context, and as such breaks ranks with literatures on sacrifice concerned with the intrinsic coherence of ritual sacrifice.     

Time for Self-Sacrifice: Temporal Narratives,Politics and Ideals in African Prophetism

In this article I propose an approach to sacrifice through notions of time, memory and expectation, moving away from classical formalist definitions that highlight the ‘nature and function’ of sacrifice, and into ideas of meaning and experience and their insertion in particular ideologies of time. I will argue that sacrifice entails particular temporalities, participating in political and experiential realms of memory and expectation. For this, I will invoke a particular regime of sacrifice: the notion of self-sacrifice, as it circulates among a prophetic and messianic Christian movement of Angolan origin, the Tokoist Church.     

Sacrifice as the ideal hunt: a cosmological explanation for the origin of reindeer domestication

The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrifice, and for the domestication of the reindeer as the result of hunters' efforts to use sacrifice to control the accidental variables of the hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of ‘trust’ with prey only through highly controlled ritual enactments. We describe two: the famous bear festival of the Amur Gulf region and the consecrated reindeer of the Eveny. Both express the same overall logic by which sacrifice functions as an ideal hunt. The animal is involved in a relation not of domination but of trust, while also undergoing a process of taming. We therefore suggest that the reindeer's domestication may be based not only on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.     

Group behaviour in physical,chemical and biological systems

Groups exhibit properties that either are not perceived to exist, or perhaps cannot exist, at the individual level. Such ‘emergent’ properties depend on how individuals interact, both among themselves and with their surroundings. The world of everyday objects consists of material entities. These are, ultimately, groups of elementary particles that organize themselves into atoms and molecules, occupy space, and so on. It turns out that an explanation of even the most commonplace features of this world requires relativistic quantum field theory and the fact that Planck’s constant is discrete, not zero. Groups of molecules in solution, in particular polymers (‘sols’), can form viscous clusters that behave like elastic solids (‘gels’). Sol-gel transitions are examples of cooperative phenomena. Their occurrence is explained by modelling the statistics of inter-unit interactions: the likelihood of either state varies sharply as a critical parameter crosses a threshold value. Group behaviour among cells or organisms is often heritable and therefore can evolve. This permits an additional, typically biological, explanation for it in terms of reproductive advantage, whether of the individual or of the group. There is no general agreement on the appropriate explanatory framework for understanding group-level phenomena in biology.     

Are ant supercolonies crucibles of a new major transition in evolution?

The biological hierarchy of genes, cells, organisms and societies is a fundamental reality in the living world. This hierarchy of entities did not arise ex nihilo at the origin of life, but rather has been serially generated by a succession of critical events known as ‘evolutionary transitions in individuality’ (ETIs). Given the sequential nature of ETIs, it is natural to look for candidates to form the next hierarchical tier. We analyse claims that these candidates are found among ‘supercolonies’, ant populations in which discrete nests cooperate as part of a wider collective, in ways redolent of cells in a multicellular organism. Examining earlier empirical work and new data within the recently proposed ‘Darwinian space’ framework, we offer a novel analysis of the evolutionary status of supercolonies and show how certain key conditions might be satisfied in any future process transforming these collaborative networks into true Darwinian individuals.     

Three-channel Lissajous′ trajectories of auditory event-related potentials to target stimuli

Three orthogonal recordings (‘X’, ‘Y’ and ‘Z’) of event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by auditory target stimuli were represented in 3-dimensional voltage-space, to produce 3-channel Lissajous′ trajectories (3-CLTs). Stimuli were verbal or non-verbal and were differentiated by their pitch, phonemic or phonetic attributes. Visual inspection and quantitative evaluations unexpectedly revealed that the 3-CLT of these ERPs strongly resembles a ‘hair-pin’ trajectory. This trajectory tilted in space at characteristic angles with each of the analysis axes: 133° with the ‘X’ axis, 87° with the ‘Y’ axis, and 54° with the ‘Z’ axis. The relatively small inter-subject variability observed in the geometrical measures, particularly in orientation, may be attributed to the slight variation in the underlying generators. 3-CLT analysis could be useful in future clinical as well as source studies of ERP generators.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Beyond V40.31</Emphasis>: Narrative Phenomenology of Wandering in Autism and Dementia

Research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and other types of dementia describes a behaviour called ‘wandering’, a term that denotes movement through space lacking intention or exact destination, as when a person is disoriented or not self-aware. In the U.S., ‘wandering’ in both ASD and AD has been examined mostly from a management and prevention perspective. It prioritizes safety while primarily overlooking personal experiences of those who ‘wander’ and their families, thus limiting the range of potentially effective strategies to address this issue. Communicative challenges faced by many people diagnosed with ASD and AD further obscure the experiential, existential aspects of ‘wandering’. This article reflects an increasing concern of social science scholars interested in whether and how the conceptual and practical strategies to address ‘wandering’ are informed by the situated experiences of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities and their families. We examine ‘wandering’ at the intersections of personal experience, family life, clinical practice, public health policy, and legislation, as a conceptually rich site where notions of personhood, subjectivity, intentionality, and quality of life powerfully and consequentially converge to impact the lives of many people with ASD and AD, and their families. We draw upon critical autism studies describing how attributions of personhood, subjectivity, intentionality, rational agency, and moral autonomy of people with ASD have been contingent upon the norms and conventions governing movement of the human body through space (Hilton, Afr Am Rev 50(2):221–235, 2017). When this movement is deemed aberrant, the person may be construed as irrational, a danger to self because of a lack of self-awareness, and a danger to others because of a lack of empathy. These attributions put the person at risk of being excluded from the considerations and, more importantly, the obligations of the ‘moral community’ to ensure that he or she has a ‘good human life’ (Barnbaum, The Ethics of Autism: Among Them but not of Them. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2008; Silvers and Francis, Metaphilosophy 40(3/4):475–498, 2009). Using ethnographic, narrative phenomenological (Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), and medical humanities (Charon, JAMA 286:1897–1902, 2001; Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) approaches, we examine multiple perspectives on ‘wandering’ in ASD and AD across narrative discourse genres, institutional contexts, and media of representation. We argue for an extension of the prevention and management view to focus not only on safety but also on what phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1962) called “having a world” (p. 146). The analysis is intended to inform clinical practice, policy and public health efforts to enhance understanding of first and second person perspectives on ‘wandering’ in order to improve the participation and quality of life of people with ASD and AD who ‘wander’, and their families.     

Sexual Cannibalism in the Brown Widow Spider (Latrodectus geometricus)

Sexual cannibalism may represent an extreme form of male monogamy. According to this view, males gain reproductive success by sacrificing themselves to females. We studied the occurrence and timing of sexual cannibalism in the brown widow spider Latrodectus geometricus and compared male courtship and mating behavior with virgin and with previously mated females. We found that events of sexual cannibalism are frequent, that they occur during copulation and that males initiate cannibalism by placing the abdomen in front of the female’s mouth‐parts during copulation (somersault behavior). Both the somersaults and mating occurred more frequently with virgins than with previously mated females. Our results support the hypothesis that sexual cannibalism is a male strategy in this species. The somersault behavior was previously known only from the redback spider, Latrodectus hasselti. It is as yet unknown whether self‐sacrifice has evolved more than once in this genus.     

From ‘Norwegian citizens’ via ‘citizens plus’ to ‘dual political membership’? Status,aspirations, and challenges ahead

The Norwegian citizenship regime has gradually changed to accommodate some of the demands voiced by or on behalf of the Sami. This article describes and analyses these changes in terms of changing citizenship status for the Sami as a gradual move from ‘Norwegian citizens’ via ‘citizens plus’ to ‘dual citizens’. Sami who are registered in the electoral roster for elections to the Sami Parliament possess political rights connected to two different political systems in Norway: one with membership based on territoriality, the other with membership based on descent. The author argues that the ‘people-to-people’ approach that currently seems to guide Sami aspirations for the political future ignores the condition of dual political membership and is thus ill-suited as a point of departure for discussions of the desirable scope of the future constitutional space of the Sami Parliament in Norway.     

Negotiating belonging: plants,people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.     

Intermarriage and Jewish identity: The implications for pluralism and assimilation in American society*

Born across racial lines, Cedric Dover and Barack Obama both came to identify with the African American community. By contrasting the lives and ideas of two mixed-race individuals, one born in Calcutta and the other in Hawaii, this article examines cosmopolitanism, racial formation and the promise of the ‘post-racial’. A ‘Eurasian’ intellectual born in Calcutta in 1904, Dover developed a coloured cosmopolitanism that mirrors in revealing ways Obama's approach to race. Both men embraced blackness while transcending the boundaries of race and nation. Dover and Obama developed a conception of race as freedom – not freedom from race or of a particular race, but the freedom to embrace race without sacrificing other affiliations.     

‘Feeding the Caregiver’: Internal and External Relations in a Matrilineal Life-Cycle Ritual,West Gao

ABSTRACT

Due to the rule of matriclan exogamy, a West Gao father belongs to a different matriclan to that of his wife and children. During a feast known as fangamu taego, children present their father with gifts to acknowledge his care. Acting as a pivot within the sequence of life-cycle rituals in West Gao, fangamu taego provides a ritual space in which two opposed modes of relationality are brought together. During the exchanges that constitute the feast, relationships flowing internally to each matriclan are weighed against external relationships forged between matriclans. The relational interplay elaborated during fangamu taego is predicated upon ancestrally mediated relationships of emplacement with regard to a specific territory. This comes into focus during a further set of transactions instigated by the feast involving use rights in land and its organic products. The ‘matter’ of these exchanges participate in two distinct relational modes simultaneously: they both activate pre-existing internal relationships and figure as ‘terms’ in the temporary construction of external relationships. Ultimately, fangamu taego captures an interplay between the relative permanence and impermanence of different relational configurations in the West Gao lived world.     

CORRECTION FACTORS FOR ‘BINDING’ STUDIES; MODEL SYSTEMS FOR GABA BINDING TO A SYNAPTOSOMAL–MITOCHONDRIAL FRACTION OF RAT CEREBRAL CORTEX1

Correction methods currently used in ‘binding’ experiments have been compared and a new approach is proposed. These methods have been applied to data on the ‘binding’ of GABA to a ‘synaptosomal-mitochondrial’ fraction of rat cerebral cortex under various conditions. Results indicated that values for ‘corrected binding’ can differ greatly, depending upon the method employed. Calculations based on data obtained when using a high concentration of unlabelled GABA to displace ‘specific’ binding of [³H]GABA (‘cold ligand method’) under-estimated the binding, because this method neglects the existence of a biochemically-inert space which exists within the pellet even at 0°C and which traps labelled ligand. The other correction method, in which an inert labelled substance (e.g. sucrose) is used to measure the portion of the pellet occupied by trapped supernatant fluid (‘sucrose space method’), is more accurate, but does not take into account the amount of ligand that may be non-specifically bound to the particulate portion of the pellet. The error with this method is small for ‘high-affinity’ ligand-receptor systems, but may be quite large for lower affinity systems. A method which takes into consideration both the inert space of the pellet and ligand that is non-specifically bound to the pellet (‘fully corrected method’) is proposed. The three correction methods have been applied to a study of the kinetic parameters of GABA binding to a ‘synaptosomal-mitochondrial’ fraction of rat cerebral cortex in the presence and absence of the GABA inhibitor, bicuculline-methiodide. In some cases, the results showed qualitative as well as large quantitative differences, depending on the correction method employed.