# David Graeber and the Economy of Sacrifice

Pierluigi Lanfranchi

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Pierluigi Lanfranchi. David Graeber and the Economy of Sacrifice. ASDIWAL, Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions, 2023, 18, pp.90-104. hal-04630058

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Pierluigi Lanfranchi,
Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, TDMAM, Aix-en-Provence, France

"David Graeber and the Economy of Sacrifice",
Asdiwal
Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions 18 (2023), pp. 90-104.

FR : « Ce travail a bénéficié d'une aide du gouvernement français au titre de France 2030, dans le cadre de l'Initiative d'Excellence d'Aix-Marseille Université - A*MIDEX - Institut d'archéologie méditerranéenne ARKAIA (AMX-19-IET-003). »

EN : « This work received support from the French government under the France 2030 investment plan, as part of the Initiative d'Excellence d'Aix-Marseille Université - A*MIDEX - I nstitute for Mediterranean Archaeology ARKAIA (AMX-19-IET-003). »
ASDIWAL

Revue genevoise d'anthropologie
et d'histoire des religions
# Sommaire

## Entretiens

WILLI BRAUN 7

ANN TAVES 19

## Études

CLAUDE CALAME Le concept de « religion » en question: entre paradigme christianocentré et relativisme anthropologique 27

BRUCE LINCOLN Reflexions on the Genre of Myth 47

## David Graeber and the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity

WILLIAM ARNAL et
EDUARD IRICINSCHI
Introduction: Thinking about the Past — and a Future?
— with David Graeber 67

THIBAUD NICOLAS
Inventing Money and Cancelling Debts: On Graeber's Use of
Mesopotamian Documentation in *Debt, the first 5000 years* 75

PIERLUIGI LANFRANCHI
David Graeber and the Economy of Sacrifice 89

CARLIN BARTON
The Governing Emotions of Humans in Society with Other Animals 105

ANDREA ANNESE
Jesus, Debt, and Society: Bringing David Graeber into Dialogue
with Social-Scientific Research into the Historical Jesus 127

WILLIAM ARNAL
An Anarchist Meets the Demiurge: Power and Utopia
in *Hypostasis of the Archons* 145

## Débats

BRUNO KARSENTI
La mission des juifs, d'hier à aujourd'hui.
Relire *Pax Nostra* de Gaston Fessard 165

CATHERINE
DARBO-PESCHANSKI
Jean-Louis Durand ou le carrefour en Y 175

Comptes rendus 181

MIRIAM BENFATTO, Gesù frainteso. La polemica ebraica anticristiana nel Sefer hizzuq emunah di Yişhaq ben Abraham Troqi (c. 1533-1594), Rome, Viella, 2022 (Daniel Barbul); YANN BERTHELET, BRUNO ROCHETTE éds., L'Astrologie et les empereurs romains. 150 ans après Cumont, Liège, Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2022 (Fabio Spadini); KATELL BERTHELOT, Jews and Their Roman Rivals. Pagan Rome's Challenge to Israel, Princeton, Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2021 (Michaël Girardin); MARINELLA CERAVOLO, L'historiola nella Mesopotamia antica. Mito, rito e performatività, Roma, Bulzoni, 2022 (Beatrice Baragli); ALEXANDRA DARDENAY, LAURENT BRICAULT éds., Gods in the House. Anthropology of Roman Housing - II, Turnhout, Brepols, 2023; (Beatriz Pañeda Murcia); SERGE DUNIS, L'ours, la vague et la lionne. Anthropologie de la mort en couches, Paris, CNRS éditions, 2022 (Christophe Lemardelé); CHRISTOPHE GRELLARD, La Possibilité dell'errore. Pensare la tolleranza nel Medioevo, Rome, Aracne, 2020 (Emily Corran); JASON ANANDA JOSEPHSON STORM, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2021 (Giulia Bertoli Miraglia); AARON J. KACHUCK, The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil, Oxford – New York, Oxford University Press, 2021 (Coralie Santomaso); BRUCE LINCOLN, Religion, Culture, and Politics in Pre-Islamic Iran: Collected Essays, Leiden – Boston, Brill, 2021 (Sepide Taheri); ALESSIA LIROSI, ALESSANDRO SAGGIORO éds., Religioni e parità di genere: percorsi accidentati, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2022 (Andrea Priori); TANYA LUHRMANN, Le feu de la présence. Aviver les expériences de l'invisible, Bruxelles, Vues de l'esprit, 2022 (Nicolas Meylan); NICOLAS MEYLAN, The Pagan Earl. Sigurdarson and the Medieval Construction of Old Norse Religion, Odense, University Press of South Denmark, 2022 (Chen Cui); SARA PETRELLA, Quand les dieux étaient des monstres. La Mythologie hybride de Natale Conti e Vincenzo Cartari, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2023 (Paola von Wyss-Giacosa); RADY ROLDÁN-FIGUEROA, The Martyrs of Japan: Publication History and Catholic Missions in the Spanish World (Spain, New Spain, and the Philippines, 1597-1700), Leiden – Boston, Brill, 2021 (Stefano Rodrigo Torres).
# David Graeber
and the Economy
of Sacrifice

Pierluigi Lanfranchi

Aix-Marseille Université

**Mots-clés:**

David Graeber;
sacrifice;
dette;
valeur;
critique du sacrifice

**Keywords:**

David Graeber;
sacrifice;
debt;
value;
critique of sacrifice

## Résumé:

David Graeber n'a pas développé une nouvelle théorie du sacrifice. Le sacrifice occupe néanmoins une place importante dans sa pensée anthropologique et dans le développement de ses théories de la valeur et de la dette. Dans mon article, j'analyse la présence du sacrifice dans certains travaux de Graeber, notamment dans *Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value* (2001) et *Debt: The First 5,000 Years* (2011). Je suggère également que ses idées sur le sacrifice peuvent contribuer à l'étude du sacrifice dans le monde antique et surtout à une meilleure compréhension des critiques du système sacrifiel développées par certains courants philosophiques et religieux.

## Abstract:

David Graeber has not developed a new theory of sacrifice. Sacrifice nevertheless occupies an important place in his anthropological thinking and in the development of his theories of value and debt. In my paper I analyze the presence of sacrifice in some of Graeber's works, notably in *Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value* (2001) and *Debt: The First 5,000 Years* (2011). I also suggest that his ideas on sacrifice can contribute to the study of sacrifice in the ancient world and especially to a better understanding of the critiques of the sacrificial system developed by certain philosophical and religious trends.
# David Graeber
## and the Economy
## of Sacrifice

Pierluigi Lanfranchi

### Anarchy and Academia

Anarchists do not abound in academia. This is not surprising: university with its hypertrophic bureaucracy, its continual struggle for power and dominance, and its highly hierarchical structure makes life impossible for those who try to lead their lives according to the principles of freedom, autonomy, and rejection of authority. There is, however, one exception: anthropologists. As a matter of fact, we find among them more anarchists than in any other discipline. One need only think of Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, Marshall Sahlins, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, to name but a few. David Graeber also belonged to this group, although he did not like to be called an «anarchist anthropologist», because for him anarchy was not so much a theoretical or philosophical posture as a practice.

Why are there so many anarchists among anthropologists? According to Graeber, this is not pure coincidence. In the xixth century anarchists and anthropologists moved in the same circles and their ideas influenced each other. In *Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology*, he writes: «There was something about anthropological thought in particular – its keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities – that gave it an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning»<fnref n="1" />. It is this awareness of the variety of human possibilities and the creativity of social organizations experienced throughout history that lies at the heart of Graeber's research and forms the basis of his political thought and action.

As an anthropologist, Graeber initially devoted himself to the study of the people of Madagascar, their political system, their local assemblies, and the relationship between the central government and rural areas. Of course, in describing Malagasy society, Graeber never loses sight of Western societies, and the ideas he developed in his early works have a general scope and help us to better understand not only «the other», the native, but also ourselves. In *Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar*, for example, Graeber parallels the situation in rural Madagascar and what anarchist circles call TAZ (temporary autonomous zones):

> The idea is that, while there may no longer be any place on earth entirely uncolonized by State and Capital, power is not completely monolithic: there are always temporary cracks and fissures, ephemeral spaces in which self-organized communities can and do continually emerge like eruptions, covert uprisings. Free spaces flicker into existence and then pass away. If nothing else, they provide constant testimony to the fact that alternatives are still conceivable, that human possibilities are never fixed.<fnref n="2" />

<footnote n="1">1. DAVID GRAEBER, *Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology*, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004, p. 13.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. DAVID GRAEBER, *Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar*, Bloomington – Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2007, p. 24.</footnote>
Graeber researched the possibilities (significantly, he chose the title *Possibilities* for his collection of essays published in 2007) and alternatives offered by human creativity both in contemporary native societies and in the history of ancient societies. His last and most ambitious work, *The Dawn of Everything*, written in collaboration with historian David Wengrow, aims precisely to offer a new vision of human history that can overcome standard narratives of world history. According to Graeber, these narratives « dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possibly even destroy, our sense of human possibilities »<fnref n="3" />. In this aspect of Graeber's work, one can perhaps discern the influence of his anarchism. Indeed, among the radical political movements that have emerged from the Enlightenment tradition, anarchism is the only one that does not project the « magnificent and progressive destinies » of humanity (to quote Leopardi) into a messianic future, but rather identifies in the past examples of non-authoritarian organization that can inspire projects for the transformation of today's society. In other words, anarchy as a manifestation of natural human impulses cannot be seen simply as a current phenomenon, but as a constant element in human history. Anarchists such as Pyotr Kropotkin, Max Nettlau, and Rudolf Rocker have devoted much of their efforts to highlight this constant but elusive element. Graeber continues in a sense this line of thought proper to the anarchist tradition. It is not a matter of taking up the ancient adage « *historia magistra vitae* » or idealizing the past. Rather, Graeber invites us to explore history without the teleological assumption that characterizes standard narratives and to consider anomalies or marginal phenomena as significant breakthroughs – for instance bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighborhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on caretaking rather than ownership and extraction.

> What if we (...) look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell [a Native American culture that flourished from 100 BCE to 500 CE] not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: road not taken? After all, those things really did exist, even if our habitual ways of looking at the past seem designed to put them at the margins rather than at the centre of things. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating those scales; to reminding us that people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia. In some ways, such a perspective might seem even more tragic than our standard narrative of civilization as the inevitable fall from grace. It means we *could* have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labour never had to happen. But on the other hand, it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we're inclined to think.<fnref n="4" />

The passages quoted above show that for Graeber, academic activity and political engagement were never two separate realities; one was an extension of the other, one fed and nourished the other. As rich and stimulating as they are, it was not his books that made Graeber famous beyond academic circles. He became a public figure through his involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. His political militancy and radical positions led to his dismissal in 2005 from Yale University, where he was an associate professor. Having failed to find work in other

<footnote n="3">³ DAVID GRAEBER, DAVID WENGROW, *The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity*, London, Allen Lane, 2021, p. 21.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ *Ibid.*, p. 524.</footnote>
American universities, Graeber moved to England, where he taught at the London School of Economics. As the academy is appropriating Graeber's thought, the risk is to disassociate his theoretical contribution to social sciences and the study of history from the practical dimension of his political action. I think this would be the greatest wrong that can be done to Graeber and would constitute a misunderstanding and a betrayal of his very important intellectual legacy. In the following pages, I hope I will not make this mistake.

The Splendors and Miseries of Sacrifice

I would now like to turn to the subject of my contribution, namely sacrifice, one of the most studied anthropological issues since the birth of the discipline in the XIXth century. I intend to analyze the presence of this ritual in Graeber's works and to see if what he says about it can be useful for the study of ancient sacrifice. Among historians of ancient religions, there has been a tendency in recent decades to downplay the role of sacrifice in ancient religious systems and to challenge the very relevance of sacrifice as a conceptual category. The volume *Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World* (2017), which contains very important contributions on the issue, significantly opens with this sentence by the editors: «Animal sacrifice was not the most common ritual in the ancient world»<fnref n="5" />. Rather, it would be the more «spiritual» practice of prayer that holds this primacy. Even archaeologists have expressed their discomfort with the category of sacrifice. «The concept of sacrifice has perhaps turned into what may be called a black box, or (to use the words of Christopher Tilley), a frozen metaphor»<fnref n="6" />. According to Åsa Berggren, «sacrifice» is a homogenizing term that conceals the variation and ambiguity of archaeological material and would be best avoided.

Another trend in studies of the religions of the ancient world is a marked skepticism towards the theories of sacrifice developed in the past. I am thinking of Fred Naiden, *Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through the Roman Periods* (2013) and the volume edited by Fred Naiden and Christopher Faraone, *Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers* (2012). In his contribution to the volume Fritz Graf asks: «Where are the great theories?»<fnref n="7" />. His answer is simply: nowhere. Indeed, much critical energy has been expended to show the limitations and fallacies of the theories produced in the 1970s, those of Girard, Burkert, Vernant, and Detienne, but new theories are absent. Graf is right as far as historians are concerned. In fact, anthropologists have continued to produce general theories on sacrifice by attempting to generalize the conclusions drawn from the study of particular ethnographic cases. Here we need only recall, for example, that of René Bloch in his *Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience* (1991), or that of Nancy Jay, *Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity* (1992), or that, in my opinion more interesting, of Valerio Valeri in his *Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii* (1985). Discussing the age-old question of defining what a sacrifice is, Valeri argues that the solution to this problem lies not in replacing sacrifice with different categories,

<footnote n="5">5 SARAH HITCH, FRED NAIDEN, IAN RUTHERFORD eds., *Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 ÅSA BERGGREN in CARRIE ANN MURRAY ed., *Diversity of Sacrifice: Form and Function of Sacrificial Practices in the Ancient World and Beyond*, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2016, p. 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 FRITZ GRAF, «One Generation after Burkert and Girard. Where Are the Great Theories?», in FRED NAIDEN, CHRISTOPHER FARAONE eds., *Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice: Ancient Victims, Modern Observers*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 32-51.</footnote>
but in replacing a rigid definition with a more flexible, relativistic, and polythetic one. This is what Kathryn McClymond has proposed in her comparative study of biblical and Vedic sacrifice, *Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice* (2008).

In addition to post-modern distrust of grand theories, I believe that the attempt to minimize the importance of sacrifice in antiquity is also due to the fact that the majority of scholars dealing with the subject, as residents of urban areas in the secularized European or American West, have very seldom or never in their lives seen an animal killed. Animals in the experience of the average urbanized citizen are either pets, or those sliced up and packed in supermarkets. Cultural and religious biases in Western societies do not facilitate a fair assessment of the phenomenon of sacrifice in the ancient world. With a few exceptions, my impression is that for most scholars, sacrifice is something abstract, remote, I would say almost theoretical. Conversely, ethnographic practice confronts anthropologists with the living reality of rituals and not just with «frozen metaphors».

## Sacrifice, Money, and Power

Sacrifice is not one of Graeber's main interests, and in his works he does not propose a new theory of sacrifice. However, he brings sacrifice into the discussion of other issues around which his reflection and critique of economic and political institutions centers: power, value, consumption, and debt. Even before it becomes a theoretical issue, sacrifice is for Graeber an ethnographic fact with which he came in contact in fieldwork in Madagascar. In his ethnography of the Merina people in Madagascar, Graeber describes sacrificial practices associated with various occasions, showing an intimate link between sacrifice and money and sacrifice and power, whether governmental or local: according to him, the Malagasy attitude towards authority corresponds to the very logic of sacrifice, which is always presented in Madagascar as «a way of fobbing off the Divine Powers with a portion of what is rightfully theirs, so as to win the rest for living people»<fnref n="8" />.

He notes how Malagasy sacrificial rituals always require government permits, a circumstance that is explicitly mentioned during the ceremony. The government is represented as the force that makes sacrifice possible and at the same time as the recipient of the sacrifice together with the deity. Therefore, according to the same logic, administrative acts and taxes owed to the government can also be understood as forms of sacrifice: «Filling out forms, registering land, even paying taxes, might be considered the equivalents of sacrifice: little ritualized actions of propitiation by which one wins the autonomy to continue with one's life»<fnref n="9" />.

Graeber also discusses sacrifice with regard to the local gatherings (*fokon'olona*) and their functioning. Originally, the term *fokon'olona* meant any communal assembly that met with the aim of reaching agreement on issues concerning their members. Sometimes relations between members could be formalized through a sacrifice or the raising of stones, around which they would then hold assemblies, judge transgressions, or make a vow. The sacrifice and consecration of stones are rituals conferring *hasina* (power ensuring creativity, action, or growth through imperceptible means) to the stone, which can then act, like the ancestors, to punish transgressors. Sacrifices were also practiced to give the trees the power to protect the village.

Malagasy sacrifice reappears in theoretical terms in connection with value in Graeber's *Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value*, particularly in the chapter entitled «Action and

<footnote n="8">⁸ DAVID GRAEBER, *Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar*, p. 20.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ *Ibid.*, p. 21.</footnote>
Reflection, or Notes toward a Theory of Wealth and Power». The question he aims to answer here is why beads were used as a medium of exchange between individuals who knew neither the habits nor the tastes of their interlocutors. He begins by noting that in many regions of the world the objects that serve as currency are elements of personal adornment, that is, objects that exist to be seen. This is of particular interest to Graeber because according to him the categories of «visibility» and «invisibility» play an important role in the analysis of the process of value attribution, just as they do in the analysis of the mechanism of power.

He first gives a theoretical introduction. There are two types of power that coexist in every society: the power to define oneself so as to convince others to act in a certain way and the power to act directly on others. The former, called by Graeber «reflection», is based on ostentatious signs; the latter, called by Graeber «action», is based on dissimulation and the hiding of the body as well as on the potential for acting. Moreover, in the first case the power is conferred by past actions that made the individual what he/she is, in the second case by the individual's ability to act in the future. The same principle applies to the power of money. Graeber recalls the theory of trade formulated by Marx, for whom money and commodity perpetually oscillate between abstract «content» (corresponding to Graeber's «action») and concrete «form» (corresponding to Graeber's «reflection»), depending on the point of view of the actors. For the seller, to acquire money is the concrete form, the thing desired, while the commodity is the abstract means by which to obtain it. For the buyer the opposite happens: the commodity he intends to buy is the concrete, determinate element, while the money to buy it is the element without its own form and characteristics.

> In other words, it is always the object of action – the object of desire – that is concrete and particular in the eyes of the person who is acting or desiring. The means have no particular features of their own. Instead, they tend to be identified with the user's own powers of action.<fnref n="10" />

While the gifts Mauss talks about are embedded in the social identity of the giver and the receiver, that is, in their outward image, money is identified with the inner, generic and invisible power of a person.

Marx expresses the distinction between the abstract, almost mystical aspect and concrete aspect of money by calling the former «money» and the latter «coin». Coin becomes money only with hoarding, that is, when it is taken out of circulation and forms an invisible reserve fund for future action. In this sense, Engels argued that originally, when it was minted, coined money was not so much a medium of exchange as a kind of talisman susceptible to change into any desirable thing. Picking up on an article by Marc Shell, Graeber illustrates this «magical» aspect of money and the dialectic between visibility and invisibility through the story of Gyges, the king of Lydia in the viᵗʰ century BCE who possessed a ring that made him invisible. According to Herodotus (1,94), the Lydians were the first to mint coins. For Shell, the Greeks in Herodotus's time actually regarded money as a kind of invisible force, whose invisibility gave it politically dangerous power. The minting of coins by city states was not an economic measure designed to facilitate economic exchange, but a political measure to limit the private power of hoarded money by making it visible and therefore public and legitimate<fnref n="11" />.

From the ancient Mediterranean, Graeber moves on to analyze the use of beads as a medium of exchange in Madagascar, where they circulated until the xviiiᵗʰ century in conjunction

<footnote n="10">10 DAVID GRAEBER, *Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Dreams*, New York, Palgrave, p. 100.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 MARC SHELL, «The Ring of Gyges», *Mississippi Review* 17.1/2 (1989), pp. 21-84.</footnote>
with the beginning of the slave trade, when beads were replaced by coins. But the monetary economy was unstable because of the tendency on the part of Malagasy people to melt down Spanish silver dollars in order to make silver chains and other ornaments. Only the nobility could display these expensive chains, while the poor were not allowed to do so and used them instead to adorn the dead. During the xixth century this custom was abandoned, and silver beads and chains were used only for making amulets, a practice which continues up to this day. There are two types of amulets in Madagascar: *ody*, for personal use and specific purposes, and *sampy*, which offer more global protection to larger groups. The common characteristic of both is that they are not parade objects, but are kept mostly hidden and invisible. The ingredients with which they are prepared also remain secret. What makes an amulet effective is its *hasina*, which comes from the relationship between the magical ingredients of the amulet and a given class of spirits. In Malagasy cosmology, the spiritual forces of the cosmos are generic entities, lacking a specific form, which acquire an individual identity only by the objects through which people come into contact with them. It is the spirits that give amulets their power of action, which is then transferred to their possessor. Graeber concludes thus: « Like Marx's hoards of hidden gold, or Engels' talisman, the hidden elements of charms were, in effect, identified with their owners' ability to act upon the world »<fnref n="12" />.

The same logic is found in other Malagasy rituals, particularly *sorona*, which is traditionally translated as «sacrifice», but indicates any religious ceremony practiced to obtain something from the one being addressed. *Sorona* also denotes objects that represent the benefit expected from the unseen powers. The rituals involve two moments, the consecration of the *sorona* accompanied by a vow, and the casting away and destruction of the *feditra*, objects representing evil to be avoided. Once the vow is fulfilled, *sorona*, that is, visible propitiatory symbols, can be transformed into *ody*, amulets that are kept hidden. These are, for example, parts of sacrificial animals or silver chains or beads worn by people performing the sacrifice. We again find the distinction between ostentation that aims to persuade an abstract, invisible power on the one hand, and power to act directly that depends on a force kept hidden, in this case the amulet, on the other hand. Graeber explains the power of the *sorona* to transform into *ody* in these terms:

> Once proven effective, however, it followed from the logic of Malagasy ritual that these same objects – these *sorona* – should become identified with the powers that had answered the appeal, and so be hidden away. They became *ody*, with the power to draw wealth to the bearer on a regular basis. And even today, this is precisely the function of beads and silver ornaments. When they appear as ingredients in magic charms, they almost always act, directly or indirectly, to draw wealth to the owner.<fnref n="13" />

Graeber thus applies the dialectic of visibility/invisibility, concrete/abstract that for Marx characterizes money and its power to the Malagasy sacrificial ritual and to the amulets created through sacrifice.

Ritual also possesses a political dimension. The silver coins that had to be given as tribute to the king during his public appearances were called *hasina*. Also, because of their round shape, silver coins represented the integrity of the kingdom, and giving them to the king meant attributing to him the power by which he unified the kingdom. In a way, the *hasina* of coins

<footnote n="12">12 DAVID GRAEBER, *Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value*, p. 111.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 *Ibid*., p. 113.</footnote>
created the king. This took place during the annual ceremony of the Royal Bath; the king would receive tribute in the form of silver coins and then take a bath hidden from view behind a screen. Afterwards he would sprinkle the people with the bath water. In this sense, Graeber can refer to the taxes as ritual sacrifices and see the silver coins as the same mechanism as the sorona/ody: « an object, displayed to represent the desires of the kingdom, becomes an invisible charm regularly capable of bringing those desires to fruition »<fnref n="14" />.

## Sacrifice, Consumption and Debt

The relationship between desire and sacrifice is also addressed by Graeber in an essay entitled «The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aesthetics of Destruction from Medieval Times to the Present»<fnref n="15" />. Graeber’s aim is to understand why the word «consumption» designates in economic theory everything that is not «production», and what kind of cosmology and what kind of theory of desire lie behind the use of the word «consumption». He begins by presenting a rapid overview of theories of desire from ancient to contemporary philosophy: desire as lack and absence (Plato), desire as self-preservation (Spinoza), desire as energy knitting everything together (Deleuze and Guattari). Despite the differences between the various theories, there is one element common to all of them: desire necessarily involves the imagination. «Objects of desire are always imaginary objects, and usually, imaginary totalities of some sort – since most totalities are themselves imaginary objects»<fnref n="16" />. Moreover, unlike needs, urges and intentions, desire possesses a social dimension, real or imaginary (desire of recognition).

The contemporary notion of consumption, which developed at the time of the Industrial Revolution, presupposes a view of the fulfillment of human desire as a form of destruction and incorporation of products. It is very different from the medieval pneumatic notion of desire according to which the desire of human beings is essentially directed towards erotic-phantasmatic representations. For example, in the erotic process the lover does not so much love the real woman, but her image, which, detached from the real woman, circulates as a kind of ghost in the lover’s pneumatic system. In modern times, there has been a shift from the erotic paradigm of desire whose object is a human being, proper to medieval culture, to the one whose main metaphor is that of eating food and whose object is an endlessly increasing number of consumer products.

The modern food metaphor presupposes a world in which everything, all human relations, are imagined as matters of property. At the same time, modern consumerist theories of desire recover the imaginative dimension attached to it in the Middle Ages by combining «the popular materialist emphasis on consumption with the notion of the ephemeral, ungraspable image as the driving force of maximization of production»<fnref n="17" />. The consumer society is, at least from the perspective of its critics, a society of sacrifice and destruction that casts aside enduring values in favor of a perpetual cycle of ephemeral things. This is why, with perhaps a slightly too abrupt transition, Graeber suggests that in order to understand the mechanism of consumption one must relate it to sacrificial ideology: «If one were to write a complete genealogy of the idea [of

<footnote n="14">14 *Ibid.*, p. 114.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 DAVID GRAEBER, «The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aesthetics of Destruction from Medieval Times to the Present», in *Id.*, *Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire*, Oakland, CA, AK Press, 2007, pp. 57-84.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 *Ibid.*, p. 63.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 *Ibid.*, p. 70.</footnote>
consumption], I suspect, one would probably best begin with the anthropological and historical literature on animal sacrifice »<fnref n="18" />. Already at the beginning of the essay, he points out that the fascination that *potlatch* and other forms of ritual destruction exert on our imagination can be explained by the fact that these practices reflect a not too hidden truth about our consumer society. Referring to the work of Godfrey Lienhardt on the religion of the Dinka and Valerio Valeri's work on sacrifice in ancient Hawaii, Graeber argues that for these anthropologists the main purpose of sacrificial rituals is « the creation of transcendental images of desired states through the destruction of desirable goods »<fnref n="19" />. The killing of the sacrificial animal purges the permanent, transcendental image from its material and profane aspects. The sacrificial idea thus perfectly illustrates the principle of having your cake and eating it too.

Graeber resumes the discussion of the link between sacrifice and economy in his book *Debt: The First 5,000 Years* (2011). He argues against the myth formulated by classical economics that first there was barter and then currency, and only later did debt develop. Convinced that the myth of barter has no historical basis and is disproven by anthropological observations, Graeber explores alternative theories of the emergence of money that take into account the role of the state in creating markets and assume that credit predates the invention of money.

Credit theories of money are not new, but have been taken up in recent decades by French economists such as Michel Aglietta and Bruno Théret. These economists assume that there is a primordial debt or « life debt », which human beings contracted with the cosmos and the gods. The idea that human existence itself is a form of debt is found in the ancient Vedic poems that consider sacrifice as the only form of redemption. The only real price for settling the primordial debt would be life itself and thus annihilation. In this sense, the « tribute » of bloody sacrifice could be seen as a kind of interest, where the life of the animal is the temporary substitute for the life of the sacrificer.

Bernhard Laum's well-known thesis on the sacred origins of money and on sacrifice as the matrix of all further notions of exchange, is also based on this idea:

> Animal sacrifice comes from the human sacrifice; animal sacrifice develops into the payment with animals as « man price » (*Wergeld*). The « man price » is the ransom with which man buys his life. Ransom is therefore a substitute for sacrifice; he who gives ransom frees his own body from being sacrificed.<fnref n="20" />

This would also explain why money seems to have emerged from the most appropriate things to offer to the gods. In the case of the Homeric world, the sacrificial victim *par excellence* was the ox, which served as a measure of value for everything, be it a ship or armor.

But that still doesn't explain how we go from the idea of primordial debt to the birth of money. In order for money to arise as a means of settling debts, there must be a monarchical power that presents itself as representative of the cosmos and guarantor of the primordial debt. As Bruno Théret, quoted by Graeber, writes:

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ *Ibid.*, p. 74.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ *Ibid.*, p. 74. In interpreting sacrifice, Graeber draws on the classics of anthropological literature on the subject, from Marcel Mauss to Luc de Heusch. Many of these theories have been criticized or have fallen out of favor in current scholarship, especially in religious studies. I do not believe that the fact that Graeber uses outdated theories is enough to invalidate the stimulating and original nature of his thinking.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ BERNHARD LAUM, *Heiliges Geld. Eine historische Untersuchung über den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes*, Tübingen, Mohr-Siebeck, 1924, p. 81.</footnote>
Pierluigi Lanfranchi

And it is these powers [i.e., sovereign powers] that invented money as a means of settling debts – a means whose abstraction makes it possible to resolve the sacrificial paradox by which putting to death becomes the permanent means of protecting life. Through this institution, belief is in turn transferred to a currency stamped with the effigy of the sovereign – a money put in circulation but whose return is organized by this other institution which is the tax/settlement of the life debt. So money also takes the function of a means of payment.<fnref n="21" />

According to primordial-debt theorists, fiscal relations are something like modern-day versions of life debt that connect individuals to the sovereign and therefore to society (not only with contemporaries but also with the generations that came before us). Adult individuals honor this debt in the form of taxes and paying taxes means honoring the elderly and the life debt. In a sense, taxes are a secularized form of sacrifice.

Graeber believes, however, that the primordial debt theory is a myth based on faulty premises. First, he disputes that the idea of sacrifice as payment is a common feature of all ancient civilizations. He also questions the idea that debts owed to the gods were later appropriated by the states and became the basis for taxation systems. In fact, in ancient states, taxes were imposed only on conquered populations, while free citizens were exempt (at least from direct taxes). Instead of focusing only on Vedic texts, primordial-debt theorists should, according to Graeber, have studied ancient Mesopotamia, where the earliest forms of interest-bearing loans seem to be attested. The practice of lending at interest generated as a side effect the indebtedness of peasants and the degradation of their status to debt-peons. To prevent the flight of these indebted peasants, Sumerian and Babylonian kings periodically proclaimed amnesties that provided for the cancellation of debts and the return of the debt-peons to their estates and families. In this sense the Mesopotamian kings were not the guarantors of the cosmic debt, but rather embodied the power to cancel ancient moral obligations and recreate human society.

Graeber's critique of the primordial debt theory does not stop there. He criticizes the very idea of a debt of the individual to the so-called «society». For him, one cannot really talk about society when it comes to ancient civilizations. For contemporaries, the notion of society seems to work because it coincides with that of the modern nation-state born with the French Revolution. The «fault» of primordial debt theorists is that they have projected the modern notion of the nation-state into ancient contexts in which it is not relevant. Graeber's conclusion is rather harsh:

> One might even say that what we really have, in the idea of primordial debt, is the ultimate nationalist myth. Once we owed our lives to gods that created us, paid interest in the form of animal sacrifice, and ultimately paid back the principal with our lives. Now we owe it to the Nation that formed us, pay interest in the form of taxes, and when it comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, to offer to pay it with our lives. This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay.<fnref n="22" />

> Is it really possible to escape from this trap ?

<footnote n="21">21 BRUNO THÉRET, « The Socio-Cultural Dimensions of the Currency: Implication for the Transition to Euro », *Journal of Consumer Policy* 22 (1999), pp. 59-71, here pp. 60-61.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 DAVID GRAEBER, *Debt: The First 5,000 Years*, Brooklyn, NY, Melville House, 2011, p. 71.</footnote>
Nietzsche and the Inuit Hunter

Just as the reduction of human relations to a question of property has locked us into a
mechanism of perpetual consumption and destruction, capitalism seems to have imprisoned
us in this other double trap: the extreme individualism of the market and the collective tyranny
of debt. The history of this trap is much older than capitalism and begins at the moment when
human beings conceive human life as a series of commercial relationships. It then becomes
impossible to escape the logic of the market and the logic of debt, which are but sides of the
same coin. And once one accepts the logic of primordial debt or life debt, one cannot escape
the logic of sacrifice.

No one, according to Graeber, was able to grasp the full implications of this logic better than Nietzsche. Nietzsche sees in the relationship between seller and buyer, between creditor and debtor, an essential and primordial element of the human being: the ability to measure values, to establish equivalences, to exchange things. The debtor/creditor relationship is at the origin of human morality itself and predates the birth of society. When human beings began to associate in communities, they subsequently conceived social relations in terms of trade relations: society ensures peace and security for the individual who is therefore its debtor. Sacrifice is a way of repaying this debt to ancestors who over time became powerful spirits able to provide the group with benefits and power:

> Do they [i.e., the ancestors] do this for free? But there is no «for free» for those raw and «spiritual destitute» ages. What can people give back to them? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely), festivals, chapels, signs of honor, above all, obedience – for all customs, as work of one’s ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows.<fnref n="23" />

With the development of kingdoms and then of universal empires, the feeling of indebtedness takes on ever greater proportions until it becomes overwhelming with Christianity, which introduces the notion of the impossibility of removing debt, and thus of eternal punishment, and at the same time devises a paradoxical expedient to get out of this situation: «God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem – the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of *love* (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! »<fnref n="24" />. Of course, for Graeber, Nietzsche’s is not a historically grounded reconstruction of how things actually happened. Rather, it is a thought experiment that consists in taking to extremes the premise that human nature is based on the calculation of self-interest, that human beings are calculating machines, that business relations precede the emergence of society, and that society is a way of regulating inevitable conflicts. But this premise, Graeber argues, is wrong.

Once again, anthropology shows us that there is an alternative to the logic of self-interest. To illustrate the alternative, egalitarian, way of conceiving relationships between individuals, Graeber quotes the response that an Inuit hunter from Greenland gave to the Danish writer Peter Freuchen. The hunter, who was returning from a successful hunt, had donated meat to Freuchen, who had been unlucky in the hunt and therefore had nothing to eat. To the Dane, who

<footnote n="23">23 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, *On the Genealogy of Morals*, 2,8.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ *Ibid*.</footnote>
thanked him profusely, the hunter replied indignantly: « Up in our country we are human! (...)
And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that.
What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by
whips one makes dogs »<fnref n="25" />. For Graeber, this does not mean that individuals in egalitarian hunter
societies ignore debt and credit and calculation more generally, but rather that they refuse to
do economic calculations, to measure and remember who gave to whom. For these societies,
what makes us human is not the ability to calculate and find equivalences, but the ability to
escape the logic of calculation.

Is it therefore also possible to escape the logic of debt of life and its consequences? Graeber thinks that even primordial debt theorists start from wrong premises. In fact, for him, sacrifice is not so much the willingness to repay a debt that cannot really be repaid. For there to be a relationship of debt and credit, the two parties involved must be on the same level. It is absurd to think that human beings and the universe (or the gods) are on the same level. «The closest you can come to repayment is to simply recognize that fact. Such recognition is the true meaning of sacrifice. (...) A sacrificial offering is not a way to pay a debt, but a way to acknowledge the impossibility of the idea that there could ever be repayment»<fnref n="26" />. One can understand why Graeber as an anarchist is hostile to the idea of primordial debt and sacrifice as a means of payment of this potentially unquenchable debt. Indeed, the idea of primordial debt deprives human individuals of their freedom, which should consist in their ability to decide for themselves how and to what extent they repay a part of this debt.

Contesting Animal Sacrifice

The relationship between gods and men cannot be the same as between creditors and debtors
because gods possess everything and have no needs. This type of argument is found in the
Hebrew Bible, for example in Psalm 50,9-13:

I have no need of a bull from your stall
or of goats from your pens,
for every animal of the forest is mine,
and the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know every bird in the mountains,
and the insects in the fields are mine.
If I were hungry I would not tell you,
for the world is mine, and all that is in it.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?<fnref n="27" />

Socrates also expresses the same kind of criticism very lucidly when arguing with the priest Euthyphro in the Platonic dialogue of the same name. Towards the end of the dialogue, Socrates makes his interlocutor define holiness (τὸ ὁσιον) as the ability to ask and give to the gods.

<footnote n="25">25 Quoted in DAVID GRAEBER, *Debt*, p. 79.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 *Ibid*., p. 267.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Trans. *New International Version Bible*.</footnote>
S. But tell me, what is this service to the gods? You say it's both asking them for things and giving to them?

E. I do.

S. Then wouldn't the right way to ask be asking for things we need from them?

E. Well, what else would it be?

S. And again the right way to give would be to give them the things they actually want from us in return? I don't think it would be very clever for a donor to give someone something he has no need of.

E. You're right, Socrates.

S. Then holiness would be a sort of skill of mutual trading, Euthyphro, between gods and men.

E. Trading, if you prefer to call it that.

S. Well nothing is preferable to me, unless it's actually true. But tell me, what benefit do the gods actually get from the gifts they receive from us? For what they give is clear to everyone, for nothing is good for us that they themselves do not give. But in what way do they benefit from what they receive from us? Or do we gain so great an advantage over them in our dealings that we get all good things from them, but they get nothing from us?<fnref n="28" />

The provocative character of Socrates's definition of holiness consists precisely in placing human beings and gods on the same level, as if the city of gods and the city of men were two political entities linked by trade relations. It is the same economic conceptualization of sacrifice that Aristophanes ridicules in *Birds* 185-193²⁹. Although Euthyphro seems to grant Socrates the use of the expression ἐμπορικὴ τέχνη to define sacrifice, he actually conceives of it quite differently. For him, sacrifice falls within the scope of χάρις, which is the exact opposite of the interest that presides over commercial exchange:

> If one understands how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods in prayer and sacrifice, these activities are holy and such practices keep private households as well as the common affairs of our cities safe, while those activities that are the opposite of what is pleasing are impious, which indeed overthrow and destroy everything.<fnref n="30" />

Taking up Euthyphro's definition, Socrates distorts it by reversing χάρις into its opposite, ἐμπορία, a commercial transaction, moreover asymmetrical, in which one of the two partners has everything to gain and the other everything to lose.

As Cristiano Grottanelli noted, Plato's *Euthyphro* bears fundamental evidence of the crisis of the ideology of exchange between gods and humans and of a critical attitude towards sacrifice. For Grottanelli, this crisis was the corollary of a new, more transcendent conception of divinity<fnref n="31" />. While this is certainly true, we can perhaps find other factors that can explain the development of anti-sacrificial tendencies in Greece and ancient Israel. For this purpose, Graeber's reflections on sacrifice can be of great help to historians of religions of the ancient world.

<footnote n="28">²⁸ PLATO, *Euthyphro* 14d-15a, translated by CHRIS EMLYN-JONES, in *Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo*, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ See PRZEMYSLAW BIERNAT, «Sacrifice in *Euthyphro* 14a-15b», *Classical Philology* 113.3 (2018), pp. 330-340.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ PLATO, *Euthyphro* 14b, translated by CHRIS EMLYN-JONES.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ CRISTIANO GROTTANELLI, *Il sacrificio*, Roma – Bari, Laterza, 1999, pp. 24-25.</footnote>
Pierluigi Lanfranchi

In his article on consumption that I discussed earlier, Graeber keenly observes: « Eurasian world religions from Zoroaster onwards (“Axial Age” religions as they’re often called) almost invariably seem to have arisen, in large part, in opposition to this sort of sacrificial ritual and all it represents. They were veritable anti-sacrificial ideologies »<fnref n="32" />. Criticism of animal sacrifice does not necessarily mean a total rejection of it, but a questioning of certain aspects of the sacrificial ideology. Rejection is only one option, and not even the most common one. Anti-sacrificial tendencies emerging in the Eurasian world from the Iron Age onward can take the most varied forms: from the denial of the classical form of animal sacrifice, as in Hinduism, to the inversion of its logic, as in Christianity. Let us repeat: the crisis of sacrificial exchange expressed by the religious movements of the Axial Age does not necessarily lead to the suppression of animal sacrifice. Nor can it be seen as the beginning of an alleged « spiritualization » of ritual, a category loaded with strong theological assumptions but still dear to many historians of religions<fnref n="33" />. The Axial Age is not the beginning of the end of sacrifice. Bloody sacrifice will still have a long life, and even within Christianity it survives to this day among Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, and among Georgian, Armenian, Maronite, Chaldean, Coptic, and Ethiopian Christians. It is undeniable, however, that by the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, clear anti-sacrificial tendencies emerged in different geographical areas and in different religious traditions. Graeber is right to insist on this crucial phenomenon. I believe, however, that this criticism is less about animal sacrifice per se than about the boundary, perceived as tenuous, between sacrifice and economic transaction, between sacrifice and money.

In *Debt*, Graeber notes that the Axial Age is characterized by the almost simultaneous appearance of coins and a new, more impersonal type of market in the eastern Mediterranean, India, and China in connection with the development of mercenary armies. These epochal transformations are incomprehensible if one does not assume an active role of states in their implementation. By insisting that only the coins of the states were accepted for the payment of taxes and fees, the rulers were able to eliminate the social money that already existed on the periphery of their territories and establish something similar to uniform national markets. Unlike credit markets, money markets can take place between strangers and do not presuppose personal relationships<fnref n="34" />. The consequences of the establishment of impersonal markets are also visible in the history of ideas and mentality. During the Axial Age, materialist philosophies developed, such as those of the Ionian philosophers, who sought the principle of the cosmos in material elements and no longer in divine powers. A new way of thinking about human motivation also emerged, a radical simplification of motivation that made it possible to start talking about concepts such as « profit » and « advantage ». As a reaction to this materialistic mentality, we also find thinkers who devalue the material world and put the idea of humanity and the soul at the center of their thinking, seeking a new basis for ethics and morality.

<footnote n="32">³² DAVID GRAEBER, « The Very Idea of Consumption », p. 74. Graeber draws on the concept of the Axial Age. As a historiographical category, it has been subject to much criticism since its introduction by Karl Jaspers in 1949. However, it is still used by historians of religions (see, for example, ROBERT N. BELLAH, HANS JOAS eds., *The Axial Age and Its Consequences*, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 2012) and even by archaeologists (see, for example, BARUCH HALPERN, KENNETH S. SACKS eds., *Cultural Contact and Appropriation in the Axial-Age Mediterranean World: A Periplos*, Leiden, Brill, 2016). Axial Age has recently regained some prestige, especially in the context of global history.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ See, for instance, GUY G. STROUMSA, *La Fin du sacrifice. Les mutations religieuses de l'Antiquité tardive*, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2005.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ This difference is evident if we compare the mode of exchange of Homeric society – based on custom and feeling and where money is absent – with the monetary economy that pervades classical Greece, where almost everything can be bought and sold with money. See RICHARD SEAFORD, « Aristocracy and Monetization: Plato, Parmenides, Herakleitos, and Pindar », *Greece & Rome* 67.1 (2020), pp. 54–70. By the same author, see the seminal study *Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy*, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.</footnote>
We must once again turn to Plato to find a perfect illustration of the crisis that has befallen the old sacrificial order. Regarding the beginning of the first book of the *Republic*, Leo Strauss has keenly observed that the discussion on justice between Socrates and his friends can only really begin when Cephalus, the aged and rich merchant who represents the old order as opposed to the present decay, leaves the scene to go and perform a sacrifice and never returns<fnref n="35" />. But before leaving the scene, Cephalus has a discussion with Socrates about justice, which for him is identical with truthfulness and paying back what one owes to gods or men:

> The possession of money has a major role to play if one is to avoid cheating or lying against one's better judgment, and also avoid the fear of leaving this life still owing some ritual offerings to a god or some money to someone.<fnref n="36" />

As already in *Euthyphro*, Plato highlights the contiguity between sacrifice and money in a system based on debt. Sacrifice is to the gods as money is to men. A similar confusion between reciprocity, debt and trade expressed by Cephalus is found in the Hippocratic treatise *Airs, Waters, Places*. Regarding the impotence that afflicts many Scythians, especially the rich and noble, the author of the treatise refutes the belief that this disease is a divine punishment and believes that its cause is entirely natural: impotence is the consequence of excessive horse riding. If the disease were sent by the gods, it would not affect the rich, who could afford to honor the gods with sacrifices and thus have their favors in return.

> And yet if this disease was more divine than the rest, it should befall not only the noblest and the richest of the Scythians, but all alike – and especially those possessing little rather than the highly honored, if the gods take pleasure in being worshipped by human beings and repay this with favors (εἰ χαίρουσιν οἱ θεοὶ καὶ θαυμαζόμενοι ὑπ΄ ἀνθρώπων καὶ ἀντὶ τούτων χάριτας ἀποδιδοῦσιν). For naturally the rich, possessing great wealth and honors, offer great sacrifices to the gods and set up many votive offerings, whereas the poor can do less since they lack these means, and besides they even find fault with the gods for not giving them wealth, so that the penalties for such blasphemy should be sustained more by the poor than by the rich.<fnref n="37" />

Commenting on this passage, Robert Parker observes that the commercial interpretation of *kharis* is a distortion and simplification of this concept because it ignores a fundamental element of it: «An exchange of kharites is not an exchange of goods, the value of one strictly calculated in relation to the value of the other, the exchange taking place automatically once a particular asking price has been met; it is an exchange of favours, a voluntary, if socially prescribed, expression of a relationship of friendship»<fnref n="38" />.

Such a commercial interpretation of the relationship between humans and gods would hardly have developed in a society that ignored money. Can we go as far as to count anti-sacrificial tendencies among the reactions to the introduction of money and the birth of impersonal markets?

<footnote n="35">35 LEO STRAUSS, *The City and Man*, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 67-70.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 PLATO, *Resp*. 331b, translated by ROBIN WATERFIELD, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 HIPPOCRATES, *Airs, Waters, Places* 22, translated by PAUL POTTER, in *Hippocrates*, vol. 1, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 ROBERT PARKER, «Pleasing Things: Reciprocity in Greek Religion», in CHRISTOPHER GILL, NORMAN POSTLETHWAITE, RICHARD SEAFORD eds., *Reciprocity in Ancient Greece*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 105-126, here pp. 118-119.</footnote>
Indeed, extending Graeber's argument, we can see that anti-sacrificial criticism develops, at least in Greece, when the Greeks began minting coins in the vith century BCE. My hypothesis is that the introduction of money and the monetary economy on the one hand contributed to the crisis of sacrificial exchange and on the other hand fostered the development of ethical instances around animal sacrifice. If the sacrifice that ensured communication between humans and gods could be conceived in terms of a commercial transaction, it was because money highlighted a weakness inherent to the sacrificial ideology and blurred the boundaries between sacrificial and market economy. Even the divine order could appear to be based on the opposition between prosperity and sterility, gain and loss, advance and compensation, that excluded grace (χάρις) understood as generosity, gratuity, unproductive and sumptuary expenditure<fnref n="39" />. Precisely in order to avoid the confusion between sacrifice and trade, we see an ethical revitalization of sacrifice during the long Axial Age, which strives to distinguish it from the utilitarian spirit of commercial exchange by investing sacrifice with moral values. In both Greek and Jewish contexts, the emphasis is increasingly placed on the refusal to calculate the value of the victim in economic and quantitative terms, and on the purity of the one who offers and their ethical dispositions<fnref n="40" />.

In these pages, I have attempted to present the role that sacrifice plays in David Graeber's thought and in the elaboration of his theory of value and debt. The richness of Graeber's thought is a stimulus to reconsider with an unprejudiced gaze some of the great questions that interest historians of religions in the ancient world. But there is a more general lesson that Graeber has bequeathed to us and which stems from his anarchism: the study of the past is also the study of the possibilities of human action and human creativity: «There is a shape to the past, and it is only by understanding it that we can begin to have a sense of the historical opportunities that exist in the present»<fnref n="41" />.

Pierluigi Lanfranchi
Aix-Marseille Université
Campus Aix-en-Provence
BATIMENT RENÉ EGGER
29 Avenue Robert Schuman
Aix-en-Provence Cedex 01, 13628
pierluigi.lanfranchi@univ-amu.fr

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Consider, for example, the condemnation of sacrificial violence by Empedocles. According to ANNE GABRIÉLE WERSINGER, «Empédocle, la violence sacrifielle et la grâce», *Revue de métaphysique et de morale* 75 (2012), pp. 379-402. Empedocles's anti-sacrificial attitude was not inspired by a simple food loathing or a religious prohibition as in the case of the Pythagoreans and Orphics. Empedocles's rejection of sacrifice signifies a break with the theological foundations of the Olympian divine and sacrificial system.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ This type of concern is still present in contexts where sacrifice is practiced. For example, in the case of *matagh*, the Armenian animal sacrifice, whoever buys the sacrificial victim, usually a rooster, cannot bargain over the price.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ DAVID GRAEBER, *Debt*, p. 212.</footnote>