{"product_id":"meshel-naphtali-s-grammar-of-sacrifice-9780198705567","title":"\"Grammar\" of Sacrifice","description":"The notion that rituals, like natural languages, are governed by implicit, rigorous rules led scholars in the last century, harking back to the early Indian grammarian Patanjali, to speak of a \"grammar\", or \"syntax\", of ritual, particularly sacrificial ritual. Despite insightful examples ofritual complexes that follow hierarchical rules akin to syntactic structures in natural languages, and ambitious attempts to imagine a Universal Grammar of sacrificial ritual, no single, comprehensive \"grammar\" of any ritual system has yet been composed. This book offers the first such \"grammar.\" Centering on ¿-the idealized sacrificial system represented in the Priestly laws in the Pentateuch--it demonstrates that a ritual system is describable in terms of a set of concise, unconsciously internalized, generative rules, analogous to the grammar of anatural language. Despite far-reaching diachronic developments, reflected in Second Temple and rabbinic literature, the ancient Israelite sacrificial system retained a highly unchangeable \"grammar,\" which is abstracted and analysed in a formulaic manner. The limits of the analogy to linguistics are stressed: rather than categories borrowed from linguistics, such as syntax and morphology, the operative categories of ¿ are abstracted inductively from the ritual texts: zoemics--the study of the classes of animals used in ritual sacrifice; jugation-therules governing the joining of animal and non-animal materials; hierarchics-the tiered structuring of sacrificial sequences; and praxemics--the analysis of the physical activity comprising sacrificial procedures. Finally, the problem of meaning in non-linguistic ritual systems is addressed.","brand":"Oxford University Press(UK)","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53768306327894,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.momoxbooks.com\/products\/meshel-naphtali-s-grammar-of-sacrifice-9780198705567","provider":"momoxbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}