Excerpts from the Prologue to “Sacrifice”: That time René Girard Pre-canceled his Cancelers

Because it doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else on the internet

René Girard (1923–2015), one of “les immortels” of the Académie Française and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, Girard is known in Europe as the Einstein of Social Science but is virtually unknown in the English speaking world and rarely discussed, even in the broad academic circles to which he’s contributed so much.

Published in 2012, “Sacrifice” is part of the six volume “Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory” publication, a collaborative deep-dive into Mimetic Theory[1]; a theory realised by French polymath René Girard that explains the desires that motivate human behaviour as the driving forces behind the innovation of culture. Though identified as a Critical theorist, Girard’s prologue almost seems a non sequitur to the rest of the content of the book as he begins everything with diagnoses of some of the detrimental effects Critical theory has had on the basic spirit of academic inquiry.

The following excerpt is interesting to me because it reveals the extent to which Girard had early identified what this intellectual trend was doing to the social sciences in general and most strikingly in the field of anthropology and in this work — a Mimetic analysis of the role of sacrifice within the Hindu (Vedic) traditions — he felt it necessary to preface this paper by pre-emptively addressing the ideas he knew were going to be used to attack him for even exploring the questions he was asking.

He was pre-canceling his cancelers.

After some hesitation, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, anthropology turned resolutely to the study of individual cultures. Researchers began to take very seriously the differences between cultures but without renouncing the great theoretical questions that presuppose the unity of man.

[Both by way of example and introduction to his thesis for ‘mimetic theory’, Girard then gets into some detail about the importance of understanding the distinction between humanity’s various ‘cults’ and the importance of still tackling the concept of religion, mainly in its obsession with sacrifice, as a pre-modern cultural universal and still strive to answer the question of what religion ‘as such’ is. By the end of the book, Girard actually applies ‘Mimetic theory’ to find evidence in source documents in the Vedic texts (he’s done it for Abrahamic religions in previous work) and answers the question of the role of religion in the Human Experience with startling lucidity- ES]

After a century of aborted attempts, in the middle of the 20th century, anthropologists began to wonder, quite legitimately, whether they were doomed to failure by a premise implicit in their efforts; the unity of religion, which presupposes that of human culture. They wondered if ‘anthropology’ had not been the victim of ‘Western ethnocentrism’. Nothing is more praiseworthy than mistrust of ethnocentrism. How could it fail to threaten us when all modern anthropological concepts come from the West, including that of ethnocentrism, a charge that is brandished by the West alone and against itself exclusively?[2]

Mistrust of ethnocentrism is more than legitimate, it is indispensable and yet we must not make of it the prehistoric bludgeon that false progressivism and false radicalism made of it in the second half of the 20th century. The notion of ethnocentrism was made to serve a poorly disguised anti-intellectualism that reduced to silence the most legitimate anthropological curiosity.

For several years, the frenzy of deconstruction [post-structuralism, Critical theory] and demolition sustained an intense excitement in research that today has collapsed, killed by its own success. It is not extensive ambition that threatens us now, but bureaucratisation, and provincialisation as research is more and more limited to the local and particular. Once the great questions are discredited, for want of intellectual stimulation, anthropology languishes. Still quite lively in the area of Durkheim and the early Levi Strauss, the discipline has since tended to settle into a rather disappointing academic routine.

If it were clear that the celebrated differences are alone real, that they override resemblances and identities in every case, we would gladly resign ourselves to this situation but the dogmatic nihilism of the last quarter century, is little more than an avant-garde slogan doubling as flagrant logical absurdity. Research is brought to heal with the intimidation ‘post-colonialist’ and this can not last forever.

… A science begins by flouting common sense does so at its own peril. We must return to the modest realism of fledgling disciplines, we must rekindle the curiosity that is the true impetus of anthropology that is more and more intimidated by the snobbery of the void.

…Classical anthropology asks the right questions. If the answers fail to come, it is not necessarily because they do not exist. It might be because we refuse to seek them where they may be found.

Upon Girard’s passing, the CBC show Ideas with Paul Kennedy delivered an amazing four part homage you can hear by clicking the link here.

1. I deliberately linked the wikipedia entry to exhibit just the general dearth of info on Girard there is on the internet, especially in English and, obviously, with this entry I’m hoping to increase Girard’s digital footprint. If you’ve come this far and you’re actually interested in a decent more thorough and coherent introduction to Mimetic theory…
2. It isn’t entirely accurate that it is Western cultures ‘exclusively’ that explore the intellectually debilitating and socially caustic effects of its own ethnocentrism. The notion of Han Chauvinism (大汉族主义), was described by Mao as ‘an intolerable situation’ where the ethnic Han Chinese have historically viewed China’s ethnic minorities as lesser people. Dr. Lu Guangxing, Chief Surgeon of the Wenshan Orthopedic Hospital and member of the Zhuang nation describes this, in his lived experience, as Han Chinese seeing he and his people as “backward, less cultured and addressing them with airs of arrogance and superiority, like we are children who require a real education or animals that need to be trained.” The term even exists in the Constitution of the People’s Republic but, in an informal survey conducted with students from the PRC studying in Canada, not one of dozens of students (all born after 1990) asked had ever even heard of the concept and the current Chinese State vehemently denies the existence of any racist attitudes toward indigenous ethnic minorities, or foreigners in today’s China.