A Maximal Understanding of Sacrifice: Bataille, Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage and the Bayreuth Festival

Abstract

This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understanding of sacrifice as non-utilitarian expenditures of money, energy, passion and effort directed towards the experience of transcendence. From this perspective, pilgrimage can be understood as a specific modality of sacrificial activity. This paper applies this understanding of sacrifice and pilgrimage to the annual Bayreuth “Wagner” Festival in Germany. Drawing on a multi-year mixed-methods study involving ethnography, semi-structured interviews and historical research, the article traces sacrificial expenditures at the level of individual festival attendees. These include financial costs, arduous travel, dedicated research of the artworks, and disciplines of the body. Some are lucky enough to experience transcendence in the form of deep emotional experience, and a sense of contact with sacred spaces and forces. Our study is intended as an exemplary paradigm case that can be drawn upon analogically by scholars. We suggest that other aspects of social experience, including many that are more ‘everyday’, can be understood through a maximal model of sacrifice and that a rigorous, wider comparative sociology could be developed using this tool.

Why Fans of the Evil Genius Remain Fans: The Case of Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival

“…The unique aesthetic/emotional experience offered by Wagner, amplified at the Festspielhaus by its storied history, sense of community and outstanding acoustics, is a reason for the fans to ‘stay’ rather than ‘move on’. To abandon Wagner and Bayreuth would be to lose something rare, valued and arguably sacred that is worthy of sacrifice and pilgrimage (see Smith and Stoll, 2021). Fans are already knowledgeable and invested, subject to emotional path dependency and aesthetic sunk costs.…”