Rane Willerslev (Aarhus University)
The Enigma of Distance in
Sacrifice
As in the case of the gift, about which Marcel Mauss wrote his famous essay, there is an inherent tension in sacrifice between understanding it as a form of exchange or barter - in Robertson Smith’s formula, do ut des, ‘I give in order that you may give’ – that is, within an economic circuit, and also as something that is not exhausted by a process of economic exchange. This paper seeks to resolve this paradox through a study of ritual blood sacrifice among the Siberian Chukchi. It will be shown that according to the official cosmological rhetoric of the Chukchi, no ontological distance exists between the living and the dead, between humanity and the divine – that is, a situation of uneconomic, mimetic and excessive identification with one’s ancestor. However, this situation of sameness or coincidence is ultimately unsustainable and indeed self-destructive as it brings madness and death, rather than fullness of life. Distance to the divine, therefore, has to be constantly created and ritual blood sacrifice is above all such display of distance. Sacrifice is no less than the condition of possibility for the human-divine sociality to occur - a curious condition which founds sociality by undoing its primordial origin in sameness or proximity. The sacrificial logic of substitution - which effectively displaces the real act of sacrificing oneself - allows for this strikingly necessary distance. This, however, is not to be understood as if humanity and divinity are at either side of a continuum. Distance is no necessarily equivalent to separation. Rather, distance enables the manifestation of the divine. Indeed, distance is in a very literal sense the divine. But it is also the condition which makes human proximity with the divine possible: Sacrifice serves to put humanity at a distance from the distance that is the condition of all relationships with the divine. The distance of sacrifice is, so to speak, the spacing in which proximity with the divine occurs.
