Claudio Lomnitz

Claudio Lomnitz will lead our reading and com­mentary of Moshe Hal­bertal. On Sac­rifice. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. 

Claudio Lomnitz’ article is an analysis of the moral con­fig­u­ra­tions of the Knights Templar. It is embedded in the author’s mul­tiple inves­ti­ga­tions on what he calls Mexico’s ‘crisis of rep­re­sen­tation.’ ^[1] This term describes not only an extreme detachment between cit­izens and the various levels of gov­ernment that ought to rep­resent them but also names a general dis­con­nection within a society, in which popular demands have to find their own forms of artic­u­lation because pol­itics, media and academia seem unable to provide useful frame­works. As Lomnitz argues, effects of such a crisis can also be observed in France, the European Union or China. But in Mexico, there is a wide space open for exper­i­men­tation with dis­courses and cul­tural practices.

Lomnitz examines the structure of a spe­cific nor­mative framework as it was estab­lished by the Knights Templar. Main ele­ments are the use of rev­o­lu­tionary branding, Catholicism, the cre­ation of saints and a moral code. Fur­thermore, this crafted ethos draws heavily from the thought of John Eldredge and his Wild at Heart (2001). This book aims at restoring US-American mas­culinity within a familiar gen­dered dualism. This fact brings an inter­esting facet to the dis­cussion: the tran­scul­tural battle against fem­i­nization to rescue mas­culinity. Such a battle is grounded on a desta­bi­lized notion of the concept of family. Here, migration is a main point: The act of migrating intro­duces tension into the ideal of a stable family. This is espe­cially the case in Michoacán, a state in which, according to Lomnitz, about 40 percent of people born there have lived at least some time in the United States of America. Through migration, the family is thus divided into dif­ferent geo­graphical posi­tions. The migrant who has found a job in the United States has left family members behind, but at the same time becomes their financial guar­antor (or at least par­tially). For Lomnitz, this sit­u­ation includes “[…] a core paradox, which is that the migrant is at once a provider – or at least a key figure of hope as provider / and a person who is aban­doning the family. The migrant can thus be seen as at once self-sacrificing and selfish, nur­turing and neglectful.” ^[2]

This is one of the many pas­sages of Lomnitz’ essay that directly invite us to bring in Moshe Halbertal’s On Sac­rifice. In this book, the author dis­cusses two forms of sac­ri­fices and their impli­ca­tions in the for­ma­tions of state and religion. Hal­bertal departs from the Hebrew dis­tinction between ‘sac­ri­ficing to’ (minchah or korban) and ‘sac­ri­ficing for’ (matanah). The first one conveys the idea of ‘to offer’, the second one ‘to give’. Hal­bertal ana­lyzes the dif­fer­ences between these two forms of sac­rifice in the context of the Old Tes­tament. However, they are not com­pletely sep­a­rated (oth­erwise the same word would not be used for both).

In part one of his book, Hal­bertal explains the facets of ‘sac­ri­ficing to’. The act of sac­ri­ficing enables a gift cycle within the fixed form of ritual in order to guar­antee the success of the sac­rifice. Its pro­tocol helps to avoid rejection in the act of ‘sac­ri­ficing to’. But what happens in the case of rejection? “The exclusion from giving is a deeper source of vio­lence than the depri­vation that results from not getting,” Hal­bertal argues. ^[3]

But this is not the only form of vio­lence. I want to quote here a passage from the last part of Halbertal’s book that con­cludes his analysis : “In ‘sac­ri­ficing to’, three con­texts of vio­lence were iden­tified: the violent response to rejection that stems from the inherent gap between giving and receiving in the act of the offering; the tor­menting trial that emerges from the anxiety of instru­men­tality in the quest for love within the asym­metry of power; and most important, the vio­lence that is directed toward the essen­tially innocent sub­stitute at the basic structure of atonement.”^[4] With this, we are left with many ques­tions to start our discussion:

• What are the dif­ferent rela­tions between migration as a form of sac­rifice (to/for) and violence?
• How is the gift cycle estab­lished via migration and what are its pro­tocols (rituals)?
• What are the roles of various forms of borders? If migration is under­stood as a sac­rifice, the offer/gift is estab­lished through a border that is nec­es­sarily being crossed.
• What does it mean to be excluded from the gift cycle within the described framework of gender roles?
• How do we value the various ele­ments of the spe­cific ethos (mas­culinity, religion, aris­tocracy, the image of the ‘knight’) – in their tran­scul­tural manifestation?
• What are cul­tural prac­tices that could contain the crisis of rep­re­sen­tation in Mexico? With Lomnitz, we can under­stand culture as “[…] neither baggage, nor specter, nor glacier, and in no sense is it a ‘super­structure’ of an onto­log­i­cally prior ‘base’. It is the very terms in which social action unfolds.”^[5]