Beyond Sacred Violence

Among the many predecessors she acknowledges, the work that Kathryn McClymond's Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice most closely resembles, and to which it must be favorably compared, is Hubert and Mauss's 1898 classic, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Like her French forebears in the theorization of sacrifice, McClymond focuses her comparative analysis on the authoritative textual and commentarial traditions of Vedic Hinduism and biblical/mishnaic Judaism. And like Hubert and Mauss, she mines the striking structural parallels in the sacrificial systems described in the literature of these two very disparate religious cultures for clues about their “nature and function.” She departs from Hubert and Mauss in several important respects, two of which she explicitly highlights. First, she argues against the chief objective of their influential study, namely, the discernment of an essential, core impulse or logic that motivates sacrificial acts across cultures. Secondly, as the title pointedly declares, McClymond aims to undermine one of the foundations of the prevailing scholarly consensus about sacrifice as a cross-cultural phenomenon, one that Hubert and Mauss helped to lay: the idea that it is founded on real or imagined violence.

Discernment · Epistemology · Hinduism · Parallels · Phenomenon · Sacrifice · Sociology · Theology · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy