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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Human Sacrifice and Value: The Limits of Sacred Violence

Alternative title: Menneskeofring og verdi: Rammene for hellig vold

Awarded: NOK 9.8 mill.

Project Number:

275947

Application Type:

Project Period:

2018 - 2022

Subject Fields:

Partner countries:

Human sacrifice and value: the limits of sacred violence This project has explored the tensions and ambiguities between sacred and profane violence by examining questions of value in perceived acts of human sacrifice and related forms of violence. Relying on rigorous quantitative as well as qualitative data collection as empirical bases for research, the project has produced diverse and well-received in-depth studies related to this central topic. The project has incorporated interdisciplinary explorations including anthropology and ethnology, archaeology, numismatics, psychology and history of religion. The project findings illuminate both the complexity of the logics of human sacrifice and the need to critically engage - or perhaps re-engage - with the subject in varied and highly-relative contexts. Indeed, this project evolved from a starting ambition of answering "why sacrifice" into its final and mature iteration: a research agenda seeking to examine the wide range of motivations, values and underlying logics of sacralized violence. In this, it has gone beyond applying Eurocentric frameworks to complex social behaviours often categorized as "sacrifice", and instead arriving at better understands of the tensions between religious and profane violence and the composite agendas and sublimated motivations that lie beneath such acts when viewed from multiple angles. Ultimately, the project?s interdisciplinary research has explored diverse aspects of religion, ritual and violence and how those can be juxtaposed in light of highly variable values. The project employed a longue durée perspective with a primary focus on Scandinavia and Northern Europe. From this, research has focused on how sacrificial practices are subverted and transformed over time in different historical contexts. It has explored how different sacrificial practices involving humans have fulfilled different social functions in different societies. Recent project activities have made implicit and explicit contributions to the growing debates on the subjects of "deviance" in the archaeological record as well as on the contemporary legacy of colonial narratives that remain embedded in many sacrifice studies even today. Other project outputs have offered quantitative investigations of sacrificial practices ranging from the Late Neolithic to the Early Iron Age in Northern Europe and examinations of the formulation of personhood in relation to sacrifices reflected through fragmented bodies in Norwegian Iron Age wetlands. Studies have also engaged with discussions of agency, victimhood and interpretations of gendered sacrifice in the Viking Age. They have debated the terminology of sacrificial practices and offered a new theoretical approach to understanding rituals of violence. The research has also tested, e.g. through network-based exploration of sacrifice-related objects, as well as animals and persons in mortuary contexts, how ritually-charged offerings and individuals may have played important roles in funerary ritual. Combined, these studies offer novel insights into the ways in which ritualised human violence - and the ideologies behind them - have shaped different societies in very different ways, and continues to thus shape societies to this very day. A varied selection of media outputs have also covered the project?s engagement with contemporary notions of sacrificial logics.

The project has provided building blocks for further research collaborations internationally and cross-disciplinarily through a deeper and more nuanced understanding on the subject of human sacrifice and transformation of cultural values, especially in questions related to religious and sanctioned violence in long-durée perspectives. The study of human sacrifice though a specter of cultural contexts has provided a broader base for understanding cultural transmissions in general and more specifically through ritual sacrifice practices. The original plans for an exhibition on Human Sacrifice in Museum of Cultural History and a prolific dissemination program targeting secondary school education was cancelled due to the pandemic, and replaced with a series of NRK radio programs (8 in total) on the subject focused on a general public through the P2 and "Verdibørsen".

This project seeks answers to the question: why human sacrifice? It explores the slippery boundaries between so-called sacred acts of ritual human violence and more common forms of profane violence such as in homicide, suicide, warfare, and genocide. While sacrifice is understood as a sacred exchange of one thing for another, the substitution of an offering as a surrogate in place of a sacrificer, it cannot be understood in purely religious terms. Rather, human sacrifice must be studied in its relationship to the profane acts of violence into which it is inevitably transformed: the actually taking of a human life. Such violence is often explained by situating it within an overly-simplistic sacred vs. profane dichotomy, ignoring the historical co-dependence between the two. Through three transdisciplinary work packages the project examines human sacrifice from the point of view of values, examining what values are associated with human sacrifice and how those values change, circumstantially. The project uses cultural phylogenetics modeling as a heuristic to identify possible value shifts within genealogies of sacrificial traditions across time and place. This will provide a lens from which to observe when and how value shifts have occurred, in the short and long term. Further cross-cultural comparisons and text-based analyses will identify common denominator historical conditions that structure sacrificial violence. The project not only challenges conventional theories of human sacrifice with renewed analyses of why and how it has occurred throughout human history, but it also engages directly with the pervasive ramifications of human sacrificial practices today, often ultimately manifested in purely secular forms of violence. The project takes research findings into the domains of policy-making and law enforcement to offer deeper understandings of sacrificial tropes with a view toward positive solutions to real-world problems of sacrificial violence.

Publications from Cristin

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Funding scheme:

FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam