The Sacrifice of Others. South Asian Religious Practices in Early Modern European Vocabulary

This essay intends to discuss the notion of ‘sacrifice’ as an issue that has strongly marked the Western attempts to define religion as a comparative notion in the early modern age, at the beginning of the great encounter between the European conquerors, merchants, travellers, the inhabitants of the faraway lands. In order to discuss the construction of religion as a colonial concept, this essay focuses on the use of ‘sacrifice’ by Christian Europeans as a semantically efficient term. Indeed, from 15th c. onwards, the term sacrifice was used to describe India and the Indian people, rites, and laws for their audience. This essay suggests that sacrifice, strictly connected with idolatry, has served as a category that was ‘good to think with’ for the understanding of Others. At the same time, it served as a cultural instrument to visualise the features of false religions when the discourse and the narratives on ‘otherness’ have definitively shifted from simple description to obsessive stereotypisation.