Trusting and Transcending. Sacrifice at the Source of the Nile

• Autores: Parker Shipton
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. Extra 9, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy), págs. 51-61
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay describes commonalities between religious and economic thought from an independent cultural perspective concentrating on sacrifice as practiced among Luo speakers and others in and around western Kenya. Several features appear in common, including concepts of flow, of giving to gain, and of surrogacy. As a response to crisis and to perennial uncertainties, animals have been offered to spirits and divinity for diverse motives and reasons and with varied evident functions. Some explicitly involve notions of conditional exchange, as in entrustment and indebtedness. These can be likened to gambling, investment, or insurance. But the acts that get called sacrifice have other dimensions, behavioral and emotional, that economic terms and quantification hardly reflect. More basically, sacrifice is a polythetic class (or family resemblance without a single core feature) and an idea without simple, direct translation into the Luo language. Nor, indeed, can economy or religion easily be translated either as naturally discrete domains. Under demographic and ideological pressure and amid concerns about rights, animal sacrifice has been supplemented and supplanted by other forms. Remaining unanswered questions concern the origins and future of sacrificial custom, the neural overlapping of religious and economic thought, and ways to balance human and animal sentiments.