The Broken World of Sacrifice.

• Author: Minkowski, C.

Readers of J. C. Heesterman's earlier writings will not be surprised by the central thesis of this book. The author has already devoted much work to the reconstruction of a hypothetical pre-Vedic sacrificial religion centered around such insoluble cultural paradoxes as life and death, giver and receiver, enemy and ally, paradoxes that are played out in a catastrophic cycle of conflict and resolution, loss and gain, sacrificer and victim.

In this important, yet problematic book, H's idea is presented in its fully developed form and stated in generalized terms. Attention is given to the work of other theorists of ritual and to non-Indic ritual traditions. Readers may accept all of H's interpretations of particular ritual points, but their main problem will still be to decide whether the thesis of this work is, in the end, convincing.

The book moves in a cyclical style, advancing the whole thesis in the preface, then again in more detail in the first two chapters, then again, through the examination of a selection of Vedic srauta rites, in the remaining chapters. In its first appearance, and at its most concise, H's thesis is this: The prehistory of Vedic religion is one of "sacrifice" being reduced to "ritual." While "sacrifice" is a dualistic, agonistic, competitive process, with life and the "goods of life" always at risk, "ritual" is monistic, predictable, even solipsistic - and therefore divorced from any connection with the great issues of human existence that "sacrifice" constantly confronts. It is the brahmin priesthood that has reformulated the unstable, dangerous, perpetually broken world of "sacrifice" into the stable, well-regulated, monotonous world of "ritual." The reformation of "sacrifice" by brahmin ritualists has entailed consequences that continue to the present, in that it has generated the operative ideas of high Sanskritic culture - those of the transcendent, the internal, the changeless, and the "one."

H's intriguing opening claim is developed in two chapters, one on "Sacrifice," and one on "Ritual." In the first, H sets out a definition of "sacrifice" as comprising three elements: killing, destruction of an offering, and distribution of food. These elements, especially the last two, are found to be internally inconsistent, and this leads H to an examination of the various theories of the origins of sacrifice. For H the domestication of fire is central to the institution and is related to the domestication of the animals who serve as the victims. He finds the whole realm of "sacrifice" to be a realm of paradoxical conflict, in which sacrificer and victim share the same sort of identity/rivalry relationship as do the sacrificer and his priests. Conflict becomes H's fourth, encompassing, element of sacrifice. "Sacrifice has conflict built in.... It is conflict writ large" (p. 40). This conflict is necessary "to play out the riddle of life and death in ever-recurring rounds of an ambiguous game of qui perd, gagne" (p. 44). Thus the world of sacrifice is "broken at its very...