4. Human Sacrifice in the Mesoamerican Cultures

Professor Gavin Flood talks to Tim Howles about his chapter 'Sacrifice as Refusal' In this interview, Professor Gavin Flood (Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion, University of Oxford) considers a number of theorists of sacrifice, including Freud, Girard and Georges Bataille, in a comparative study of the idea of 'sacrifice as refusal' in the Vedic religions.

Dr Laura Rival talks to Tim Howles about her chapter 'The Aztec Sacrificial Complex' In this interview, Dr Laura Rival (Lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford) considers the phenomenon of human sacrifice in the Mesoamerican pre-modern cultures. Her claim is that such a study contrasts with and ultimately challenges some of the theorising of sacrifice that is based on Judeo-Christian culture.

Dr Nick Allen talks to Tim Howles about his chapter 'Using Hubert and Mauss to think about Sacrifice' In this interview, Dr Nick Allen (formerly Reader in the Social Anthropology of South Asia, University of Oxford) focuses on a short essay written in 1899 by two French scholars, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, representing the thinking of the emerging field of Durkheimian sociologie in the latter years of the nineteenth-century.

Dr Pamela Sue Anderson talks to Tim Howles about her chapter 'Sacrifice as Self-Destructive Love: Why Autonomy should still matter to Feminists' In this interview, Dr Pamela Sue Anderson (Reader in Philosophy of Religion, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford) considers the concept of sacrifice through the eyes of ‘gender’, seeking to expose some of the psychological, ethical and political dangers for women in acts of sacrifice.

Dr Johannes Zachhuber talks to Tim Howles about his chapter 'Modern Discourse on Sacrifice and its Theological Background’ In this interview, Dr Johannes Zachhuber (Reader in Theology at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford) explains how modern, secular discourse about sacrifice still draws on theological ideas and, in fact, needs this background in order to be properly understood. The interview includes a wide-ranging survey of the history of sacrifice, covering the advent of Christianity, the writings of Augustine, the Reformation and counter-Reformation, nineteenth-century Protestant German theology and the thought of contemporary French anthropologist Rene Girard.