Violent Origins: Walter Burkert Ren Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation

About this book

Burkert Girard and Smith hold important and contradictory theories about the nature and origin of ritual sacrifice and the role violence plays in religion and culture. These papers and conversations derive from a conference that pursued the possibility and utility of a general theory of religion and culture especially one based on violence. The special value of this volume is the conversations as suchthe real record of working scholars engaged with one anothers theories as they make and meet challenges and move and maneuver. Girard and Burkert present different versions of the same conviction: that a single theory can account for ritual and its social function a theory that posits original acts of group violence. Smith sharply questions both the possibility and the utility of such a general theory. Among the highlights of this stimulating interchange of ideas is a searching criticism of Girards theory of generative scapegoating which he answers with clarity and conviction and a challenging of Burkerts theory of the origin of sacrifice in the hunt by Smiths argument posed as a jeu desprit that sacrifice originates with the domestication of animals.