Sacrifice as Remainder and Concept

Poststructuralist ethnology in Lowland South America can be said, without exaggeration, to be founded on the twin rejections of “sacrifice” and “gift exchange.” These concepts are not merely considered empirically absent; they are taken to express logics of hierarchy that are actively refused. By contrast, anthropologists of Mesoamerica see in sacrifice the foundation for the unification of political and cosmic authority. In this presentation, I take up Amerindian sacrifice alternately as a political remainder and as a political concept. Beginning with Pierre Clastres' argument that Amerindian political hierarchy historically emerges from religion, I then compare the religious and political dimensions of captive-taking in South America and Mesoamerica. Beneath superficial similarities in the killing of war captives lie different political functions and religious leadership, such that sacrifice operates as a plastic political technology for organizing the relation between cosmology, violence, and sovereignty, working with and against state formations.