The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks

The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, edited by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1989, presents the influential Paris school reading of ancient Greek animal sacrifice as fundamentally a system of cooking and meat distribution, one that defines the human place between gods and beasts and binds the civic community that shares in the sacrificial meal. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and the editors' own standing as leading figures in French structuralist and comparative approaches to Greek religion. Its limit is that it presents one influential interpretive school's own theoretical framework, which other scholars of Greek religion have engaged, extended and in places challenged, so it is best cited as a major and formative position within the field rather than as the field's unanimous last word on the meaning of Greek sacrifice.