Maya Mayblin

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.

Learning Courage: Child Labour as Moral Practice in Northeast Brazil

This article explores the moral dimensions of child labour as cultural practice in Northeast Brazil. It reveals a link between childrens participation in labour and local constructions of childhood as a period of ontological uncertainty and impending transition. Through detailed ethnographic exegesis, the article reveals the symbolic dimensions surrounding childrens engagement in productive endeavours, and shows how the local opposition between ‘work’ and ‘play’ arises out of an encompassing moral process. The article critiques the tendency within protectionist influenced anthropological literature to acknowledge the important contribution that children make towards material survival, while denying that contribution any deeper cultural significance.

People Like Us: Intimacy, Distance, and the Gender of Saints

In Catholicism, the work of attributing gender to God, saints, and even humans who carry out sacred forms of labor is complex and unstable. The more intensely divine a sacred being is, the harder it is to gender them in any fixed, dyadic sense. Gendering the divine is part of a deeply held Catholic proclivity to familiarize the Godhead. Attributing gender to God or saints is inherently possible and indeed necessary, but it is also always open to contestation. In this paper I explore how gender ambiguity both indexes and resolves a double imperative in Catholic practice: to identify with and promote a sense of contiguity between human and divine forms and to maintain a sense of distance and unknowability between worldly and otherworldly forms.

The Way Blood Flows: the Sacrificial Value of Intravenous Drip Use in Northeast Brazil

This paper examines a preference among rural Catholics in Northeast Brazil to treat generalized forms of malaise with isotonic solution administered intravenously, even where such treatment goes against biomedical advice. It situates this practice within a nexus of local ideas about the value of blood and sacrifice, which emerge out of socio-historical and environmental factors particular to the region. In this context blood is merely one in a sequence of substances linked to the regenerative martyrdom of Jesus, to the agricultural cycle, and to the economic struggle for existence in a drought-affected region. The materialization of blood, sweat, and tears on the surface of the body indexes social relationships built on sacrifice. The appearance of such substances, often between categories of close kin, are ideally characterized by the loss or flow of substance in a single direction. In such contexts replenishing the blood with isotonics maintains a uni-directional flow, preserving the value of sacrifice.

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 ones mundane life of self-sacrifice visible whilst keeping ones 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.

The Lapsed and the Laity: Discipline and lenience in the study of religion

This article cautions against an ‘earnest turn’ within the anthropology of religion, pointing up the tendency for anthropologists of religion to over-emphasize the role of discipline in the construction of the religious subjecthood over mechanisms of leniency and compromise. Taking the Catholic Church as an example, I show how discipline and lenience have been co-constitutive of Christian subjectivities, as different movements in a gigantic choreography which have spanned and evolved over several centuries. By looking at certain technologies of lenience that have emerged over the course of Catholic history, I trace an alternative genealogy of ‘the Christian self’; one in which institutional growth, power, and survival depended not only upon the formation of disciplined bodies and interior dispositions but also upon a carefully managed division of labour between clergy and laity, as well as upon a battery of legal commutations and practical avoidances aimed at minimizing the effort and pain of the ascetic approach. Taking the concept of ‘lapsedness’ as cue, I ask to what extent the ‘lapsed Catholic’, rather than indexing an ever-increasing tendency towards secularism, might already be contained and accounted for within Catholicism as a living, evolving form.

The Way Blood Flows

This paper examines a preference among rural Catholics in Northeast Brazil to treat generalized forms of malaise with isotonic solution administered intravenously, even where such treatment goes against biomedical advice. It situates this practice within a nexus of local ideas about the value of blood and sacrifice, which emerge out of socio-historical and environmental factors particular to the region. In this context blood is merely one in a sequence of substances linked to the regenerative martyrdom of Jesus, to the agricultural cycle, and to the economic struggle for existence in a drought-affected region. The materialization of blood, sweat, and tears on the surface of the body indexes social relationships built on sacrifice. The appearance of such substances, often between categories of close kin, are ideally characterized by the loss or flow of substance in a single direction. In such contexts replenishing the blood with isotonics maintains a uni-directional flow, preserving the value of sacrifice.

People Like Us

In Catholicism, the work of attributing gender to God, saints, and even humans who carry out sacred forms of labor is complex and unstable. The more intensely divine a sacred being is, the harder it is to gender them in any fixed, dyadic sense. Gendering the divine is part of a deeply held Catholic proclivity to familiarize the Godhead. Attributing gender to God or saints is inherently possible and indeed necessary, but it is also always open to contestation. In this paper I explore how gender ambiguity both indexes and resolves a double imperative in Catholic practice: to identify with and promote a sense of contiguity between human and divine forms and to maintain a sense of distance and unknowability between worldly and otherworldly forms.

People Like Us: intimacy, distance, and androgyny of saints

In Catholicism, the work of attributing gender to God, saints, and even humans who carry out sacred forms of labor is complex and unstable. The more intensely divine a sacred being is, the harder it is to gender them in any fixed, dyadic sense. Gendering the divine is part of a deeply held Catholic proclivity to familiarize the Godhead. Attributing gender to God or saints is inherently possible and indeed necessary, but it is also always open to contestation. In this paper I explore how gender ambiguity both indexes and resolves a double imperative in Catholic practice: to identify with and promote a sense of contiguity between human and divine forms and to maintain a sense of distance and unknowability between worldly and otherworldly forms.