The Untold Sacrifice: The Monotony and Incompleteness of Self-Sacrifice in Northeast Brazil

There is no such thing as an accidental sacrifice. Sacrifice is always premeditated, and if not entirely goal-oriented, at the very least inherently meaningful as a process in itself. This paper is about how we might begin to understand sacrifices that do not conform to these rules. It concerns the question: does sacrifice exist outside of its (often) dramatic, self-conscious elaboration? Within the Brazilian Catholic tradition everyday life-ideally characterised by monotonous, undramatic, acts of self-giving - is `true sacrifice'. For ordinary Catholics, the challenge is not how to self-sacrifice, but how to make one's mundane life of self-sacrifice visible whilst keeping one's gift of suffering `free'. In this paper I describe, ethnographically, the work entailed as one of `revelation' and use the problems thrown up to reflect upon both the limits and advantages of Western philosophical versus anthropological under-standings of Christian sacrificial practices to date.