The Dark God: The Sacrifice of Sacrifice

The Frazerian question of murder turned into ritual sacrifice is foundational to cultural anthropology. Frazer described the antinomian figure of a king, who was, at once, a priest and a murderer. Generations of anthropologists have studied sacrifice in ethnographic contexts and theorized about its religious significance. But sacrifice itself may turn into a problem, and René Girard wrote about “the sacrificial crisis”, when the real issue is the failure of a sacrifice that goes wrong. The present paper addresses such a “sacrificial crisis” in the experience of my own Basque generation. I will argue that the crisis regarding sacrifice is pivotal. But my arguments will take advantage of the background of a more recent ethnography I wrote on the political and cultural transformations of this generation. This requires that I expand the notion of “sacrifice” from my initial approach of ethnographic parallels towards a more subjective and psychoanalytical perspective. As described in my first ethnography, the motivation behind the violence was originally and fundamentally sacrificial; when it finally stopped in 2011, many of those invested in the violence, actors as well as supporters, felt destitute and had to remodel their political identity. The argument of this paper is that the dismantling of sacrifice as its nuclear premise—the sacrifice of sacrifice—was a major obstacle stopping the violence from coming to an end.

Mimetic Desire and Professional Closure: Toward a Theory of Intra/Inter-Professional Aggression

The purpose of this article is to present a renewed way to theorize intra/inter-professional aggression in nursing. To this end, René Girard’s mimetic mechanism and Max Weber’s conception of professional closure will be explored. More specifically mimetic mechanism, summarized as a sequence of four distinct but interdependent phases including mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry, mimetic (sacrificial) crisis, and scapegoat, will serve to broaden the understanding of intra-professional aggression. For its part, professional closure, a strategy designed to limit and control the number of individuals admitted to a specific profession, will provide a fresh perspective to critically examine the issue of inter-professional aggression by drawing attention to hidden practices of dominance and control.