Vanificare il "sacrificio". Una proposta metodologica a partire dall'India antica

Sacrifice is a problematic category and a fuzzy concept for the study of religions. The big misun- derstanding arises since there is the illusion of a conventional use of the term “sacrifice”. While the boundaries of application can vary considerably according to context or fields of study, one has to face the impossibility of defining “sacrifice” in a consistent manner. Hence, this paper puts for- ward a methodological approach that advocates to abandon a category lacking a precise meaning, in favour of the analysis of ancient sources as the proper method. It means looking at “sacrifice” as a historical object of analysis, whose fortune in the scholarship grows at the end of the 19th cen- tury, at the crossing point between Indology as a new philological discipline, anthropology, and sociology. This paper suggests also a rethinking of “sacrifice” as an interpretative “map”, starting from the study of Vedic rituals as “territories” which show the imperfection of the map.