"The Optimal Sacrifice": A Study of Voluntary Death among the Siberian Chukchi": A presentation by Rane Willerslev
Rane Willerslev is Associate Professor in the Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He is also the author of Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (2007) and Hunting and Trapping in Siberia (2000).
The "voluntary death" of a person, who - often due to illness and old age - requests to die at the hands of close relatives, has traditionally been explained as a form of suicide, resulting from the harsh living conditions in the Siberian North. This paper suggests an alternative interpretation. Drawing on ethnographic data collected among the Chukchi of northern Kamchatka, it is argued that voluntary death is effectively a ritual blood sacrifice. In making this argument, the paper recasts long standing debates about sacrifice by suggesting that behind the triangular relationship of "sacrificer," "deity" and "victim lies a structure of the ideal sacrifice, which is the impossible real act of self-sacrifice. This in turn makes it possible to conceive of voluntary death as categorically different from suicide - indeed, as a ritual inversion of suicide.
Question and Answer