Sacrifice

A couple of nights ago, during dinner with some friends, Helena wasn't interested in eating.  She wanted to get on the floor, chase the cats, and explore a new house, and not just eat, which is something she could do anywhere.  Our collective solution?  We fed her doll first, and then passed the doll's food on to Helena.  By the end of the meal, she had eaten quite well.


Though most people know about the role that animal sacrifice plays in most religions, I never spent much time thinking about who would really eat the goat or bull that was killed "for god."  They burnt to whole thing, right?  There's all of that language in the Old Testament about how Yahweh loves the smell of meat sacrificed to him, and Greek myths have the same sort of language.  So it was quite a surprise, when I studied classical history, to find out that the meat from a sacrifice was not, in fact, sacrificed.  People ate it: different people according to the values of different cultures (the Hebrews gave it to the poor and landless, the priests ate it in many Phoenician cults, the community as a whole in the worship of many Greek gods), but this meet sacrificed to the gods was really used for parties among flesh and blood people.

What doe these stories have to do with each other?  Helena had to "give" her food to her doll before she would eat it herself.  The Greeks "gave" their meat to the gods before they ate it.  Though the parallel isn't exact, it seems to at least merit some thinking-through.

Now, it seems that the logic of sacrifice in antiquity was that the gods, and not people deserved the best food.  They were, after all, gods.  But when the gods didn't eat the food, well, someone had too, so it might as well be the people.  The word "sacrifice" come from the Latin "to make holy," but the real process was rather the inverse: by offering the food to the gods, people de-sacralized, reduced its importance enough that they felt themselves worthy to eat good food like a bull.  In the same way that we cook food as a way to take it out of the realm of nature and make it part of culture, sacrificing the animal to the gods paradoxically made it available for human consumption.

Might Helena have been doing something similar?  We were at the home of other adults, eating adult food out of adult place-settings.  By giving the food to her baby, might she have been "de-adulting" it, bringing it into the world of play and childhood?  Then, since the doll couldn't possibly eat the food, it became open to her eating.

Maybe.  Or maybe kids just like to play with their food.

The gift

For at least a month, Helena Iara has been obsessed with giving things to Rita and me.  She wants to give us her toys, feed us her food, give us her clothes and her books...  Now, lest one think that we have been successful in creating a truly altruistic baby, I have to add that several seconds afterward, she wants those things back, which created some minor complications when she offered us food, at least until we understood what was going on.

Reflecting on this giving of gifts, as Helena and I sat in the hammock today, watching the monkeys play in the trees, I told her a little bit about how different anthropologists have looked at the gift.  She wasn't entirely interested in the differences in the way that Claude Levi-Stauss or Marcel Mauss or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro understand gift giving, but I think that she understood the basic idea: we give gifts to establish and strengthen social relations.  Whether we're talking about the formal gift-giving that happens in diplomatic meetings, the gifts exchanged between tribes when they encounter in the Amazon basin, or birthday gifts for babies, when we give a present, we get back trust.

Every Christmas, you'll see an article in the Times or some newsmagazine, in which a famous economist talks about the failure of the marginal utility of gift-giving.  My mother gives me a sweater; she paid $75 for it, but I would not have paid more than $30, so according to these orthodox (and Scrooge-y) economists, there is a $45 inefficiency in the market.  Their lesson, of course, is that we should all just give each other cash.

Gift-giving, fortunately, is not a capitalist activity, for all of the attempts to make it one.  It's a process of creating trust, building relationships.  I give a friend a birthday gift, he gives one to me, and we become better friends in the process, more mutually engaged, more willing to trust and depend on each other.  

What Helena has done, as I tried to explain to her, is short circuit the process.  She gives me her toy and then wants it back right away.  In the process, she built something like trust (she knows she will get it back) and something more than just "like" love.  We laugh, she smiles, and a family grows from it.