Abstract
Feminist scholars cannot limit themselves to studying the participation of women in culture, society, or history, important as this is. Nor can we, like traditional scholars, take for granted the exclusion of women from vast areas of cultural life. Rather, we must subject these areas to critical analysis in order to disclose and to demystify the gender relations that underlie them.
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Notes
Louis Moulinier, Le Pur et l’Impure dans la Pensée des Grecs d’Homère à Aristote (Paris: Librarie C. Klincksieck, 1952), p. 70.
An interesting example of women sacrificers whose role is specifically non-childbearing but neither virginal nor postmenopausal is the Lovedu of Southern Africa. This is the only traditional society I know in which women are reported to be the major sacrificers. Even the idea of a married woman herself performing sacrifice, as Lovedu women do, would be an abomination in most societies. As is common elsewhere, Lovedu sacrifice is ordinarily performed within specific lineages. A Lovedu woman never sacrifices in her husband’s and children’s lineage, but only in her father’s and brother’s lineage. This is because she is recognized as the one who enabled the line of descent from father to son to continue—but notice it is not by bearing children that she performs this service. Her children are born for her husband’s lineage, in which she never sacrifices. She is responsible for lineage continuity because it is her marriage cattle, the bride wealth given by her husband’s lineage, that enabled her brother to acquire a wife, who will bear children to perpetuate his lineage. E. Jensen Krige and J. D. Krige, The Realm of a Rain-Queen: A Study of the Patterns of Lovedu Society (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1943).
Also, J. D. Krige and E. J. Krige, “The Lovedu of the Transvaal,” in Daryll Forde, ed., African Worlds: Studies of the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 55–84.
Robert Sutherland Rattray, Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 96.
Yakö social organization is called double descent. This is not like our own “bilateral descent” (in which we understand ourselves to be descended from all our ancestors, both female and male), but rather, each Yakö belongs to two distinct corporate lineages, through which quite different kinds of property are inherited, and whose members meet to perform certain rituals. One of these lineages comprises only persons related through their mother, their mother’s mother, and so on; the other, persons tracing their descent only through fathers and sons. Any lineage has both male and female members, but a woman cannot hand on to her children membership in her patrilineage, nor a man membership in his matrilineage. The matrilineages do not sacrifice, although when the two meet together, as at a funeral of a member of both, the matrilineage may provide a victim, such as a sheep, for the patrilineage to sacrifice. Daryll Forde, “Death and Succession: An Analysis of Yakö Mortuary Ceremonies,” in Max Gluckman, ed., Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962).
Also, Daryll Forde, Yakö Studies (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Robert H. Lowie, The Crow Indians (New York: Rinehart, 1956), p. 237.
Victor Turner, “Sacrifice as Quintessential Process: Prophylaxis or Abandonment?”, History of Religions 16 (February 1977): 189–215.
Victor Turner, Religion and Divination in Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 42–44.
Victor Turner, The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 276.
Meyer Fortes, “The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups,” American Anthropologist n.s. 55 (1953): 17–41, 24.
Meyer Fortes, “Some Reflections on Ancestor Worship in Africa,” in M. Fortes and G. Dieterlen, eds., African Systems of Thought (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 140.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 287.
Meyer Fortes, The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 197.
Melville Jean Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1983), p. 228.
N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, n.d.), pp. 58–59.
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 179.
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Cohen and West, 1964), pp. 20–21.
Robert Elwyn Bradbury, The Benin Kingdom and the Edo-speaking Peoples of South-western Nigeria (London: International African Institute, 1957), p. 59.
Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion. See Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), for more on Nuer communion sacrifice.
Marcel Detienne, Dionysos Slain, trans. Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, trans. J.E. Turner (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1967).
R.J. Thompson, Penitence and Sacrifice in Early Israel outside the Eevitical Law: An Examination of the Fellowship Theory of Early Israelite Sacrifice (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963), p. 67.
Raymond E. Brown, S.J., Priest and Bishop: Biblical Reflections (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1979), p. 55.
Robert J. Daly, Christian Sacrifice: The Judaeo-Christian Background before Origen (Washington, DC.: Catholic University of America Press, 1978), p. 313.
Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. 6 (New York: Dover, 1961), pp. 127ff.
The phrase mere spectators does not indicate that visual participation is meaningless. On the contrary, only those who are present, but not permitted to partake, can be fully aware of their exclusion. The differentiating work of expiatory sacrifice is associated everywhere with prohibitions, complete or partial, of alimentary participation. In contrast, in all traditions I know of, the integrating work of communion sacrifice as evidence of patrilineage membership requires actual alimentary participation. For a discussion of the power and meaning of visual participation, see Margaret Miles, Image as Insight (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
Francis Clark, S.J., Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation (Oxford: Basil Black-well, 1967), p. 15.
See, for example, Anne Elizabeth Carr, “The Church in Process: Engendering the Future,” in Anne Marie Gardiner, ed., Women and Catholic Priesthood: An Expanded Vision: Proceedings of the Detroit Ordination Conference (New York, Paramus, and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1976).
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© 2001 Elizabeth A. Castelli
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Jay, N. (2001). Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman. In: Castelli, E.A. (eds) Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04830-1_11
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