Michael Stausberg

This presentation offers some chips from a workshop on the history of human sacrifice. Its observations relate to four interrelated levels: conceptual, theoretical, cross-cultural, and historiographical. Human sacrifice is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of phenomena studied by different academic disciplines. Theories tend to build on specific cases and focus on presumed origins and functions. Cross-cultural comparison exhibits recurrent topics. Even where there is no direct archaeological/material evidence of the practice of human sacrifices, they are real as a cultural trope. On the historiographical level, then, this presentation will deal with narratives of replacement and substitution. Instead of speculating on beginnings, it will address campaigns against human sacrifice. Like the official abolition of slavery, eliminating human sacrifices indexes an axial shift in bioaxiology--the values and sacredness ascribed to human lives.