Anthropologists hold that destruction of the victim defines sacrifice

Evidence

Many anthropologists and other theorists of sacrifice insist that destruction of the victim is key to sacrifice. See, for example, Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, pp. 97–98; and René Girard, “Violence and the Sacred,” in Jeffrey Carter (ed.), Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 242. “The victim is sacred only because he is to be killed,” writes Girard. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 734

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reader’s published piece ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — Girard’s ‘the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed’ undergirds the argument about why real corpses matter to sacrifice.
• XREF: connects to: Sacrifice displaces a community’s internal violence onto an outside victim. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 428; Human sacrifice was rational necessity when groups could only survive by eating human flesh; Scapegoating follows an ancient ritual template of gendered communal sacrifice. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 374 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Human sacrifice was rational necessity when groups could only survive by eating human flesh #exemplifies (0.80)
• Sacrifice displaces a community’s internal violence onto an outside victim. #exemplifies (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 428
• Scapegoating follows an ancient ritual template of gendered communal sacrifice. #qualifies (0.72) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 374