Death, War, and Sacrifice.

Studies in Ideology and Practice by Bruce Lincoln

Review by: Jörg Rüpke
Numen, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 102-103
Published by: BRILL
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102 Book reviews

Mr. Henderson's study is a useful, within its limits well-documented,

supplement to the comparative study of the "scriptures" and hopefullya
firststep towards the study of the texts of the commentaries themselves.

Universitit Heidelberg RUDOLF G. WAGNER

Sinologisches Seminar
Sandgasse 7
D-6900 Heidelberg

BRUCE LINCOLN, Death, War, and Sacrifice.Studiesin Ideologyand Practice.

Foreword by Wendy Doniger-Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press 1991 (xxi+ 289 p.) ISBN 0 226 48200 6 pbk. ?14.25.

To the studentof the historyof religionBruce Lincoln should be known

forhis stimulatinganalyses of mythsand rituals in differentsocieties and
historicalcontexts.Judged by the material, his new book deals with Indo-
European religion. Taking a closer look at it, however, method, not con-
tents, forms the binding link between the twenty-one chapters: the
analysis of myths and rituals within the horizon of material conditions,
social conflicts,and patterns of legitimation of the society performingor
transmittingthese practices.
Most of the twenty-onechapters consist of articles published in the
1980s, they are collected in three differentparts. After an introductory
chapter on Indo-European religion, the firstpart deals with different
mythologems concerning death and the nether world (chs. 2-8).
Ultimately, the reconstructionof an IE basic myth, however, is aban-
doned (ch. 9). The criteriafora positive or negative afterlifecould not be
reduced to one "original" criterion:Myth is defined "as an authoritative
mode of narrativediscourse that may be instrumentalin the ongoing con-
structionof social borders and hierarchies" and as such it "is oftena site
of contestation between groups and individuals whose differingversions
of social ideals and reality are inscribed within the rival versions of the
myths they recount" (p. 123). This is converging with a general scep-
ticism towards the existence of a historical Proto-Indo-European society,
a scepticism that makes a lot of observations in earlier chapters obsolete.
The second part (chs. 10-18) is rather heterogenous, some of the articles
are very specialized. "War" figuresin chs. 10-12 only; the only chapter
of general interest (11) has been previously published in Eliade's
Encyclopedia ofReligion.Chs. 13-18 deal with sacrificein a way similar to
Lincoln's understandingof myth. As a particular traitof IE sacrificesthe

NUMEN Vol. 40 (1993)

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 Book reviews 103

correspondence of cosmic and social interpretationsis demonstrated in

Celtic or Scythian rituals. Science, as shown for middle Persian
physiological texts,may work out the same correlations(chs. 17-18). The
thirdpart, aptly titled"Polemic pieces", deals withhistoryof science and
ideology criticismand addresses George Dumezil in particular. Dumezil's
and the king's position within the sociiti tripartite
iddologietrifonctionale is
shown to closely correlate with right-wingpolitical associations and their
model for an integrated corporative society. Ultimately, even the inter-
pretations of single myths show traits of this preoccupation-something
that must be taken into account when using Dumezil's results.
Like all of Lincoln's publications, these chaptersare discours
de la mithode
and should be read as such. I am not sure, however, if it was very useful
to put them togetherinto a book. Many articles are interestingto the stu-
dent of Indo-European religions only (which should have been indicated
in a subtitle) and most of them are published in standard journals. To
grasp the idea, it would sufficeto read a fewof them. To serve as a scien-
tific biography of Lincoln (which, I hope, is too early, anyway) they
should have been arranged in chronological order, and not within three
rather diverging parts.
St.-Leonhard-Str. 33 J6aR ROPKE
D-7410 Reutlingen

LAURI HONKO (Ed.), Religion,Myth,and Folklorein the World'sEpics. The

Kalevala and itsPredecessors.
(Religion and Society 30, General Editors:
Luther Martin, Jacques Waardenburg). Berlin, New York: Mouton
de Gruyter 1990 (XI, 587 p. ) ISBN 0-89925-625-2 DM 238.-

This book contains a collection of papers presentedat the conferenceat

Turku on the occasion of the 150th anniversaryof the Kalevala in 1985.
The organization of the book is ambiguous. On the one side the editor
seems to aim at a general study of the world's epics as indicated by the
title Religion,Myth,and Folklorein the WorldsEpics. On the other side he
intends to pay tributeto the importance of the Kalevala as indicated by
the subtitle The Kalevala and its Predecessors. Potential contributorswere
presented with a list of general themes that could be discussed, and this
resulted in twenty-sevenessays by twenty-fiveauthors discussing the
Kalevala and other epics. According to the editor (22) the material fell
'naturally' into three categories: Models, Result, and Points of com-
parison: Europe, Africa, and Asia. He states thatthe "the main emphasis
was on general comparative research (22) but comparison is not made in
a systematicway, and a common theoretical approach is lacking.

NUMEN Vol. 40 (1993)

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