The Review: Primitive sacrifice and the presidential turkey pardon

Plus: On a significant burlesque. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. Last week our Claire Wallace looked into an underexplored topic: What [happens]( to the presidentially pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys? As of a few years ago, they ended up at colleges, where they became a sort of combination pet, research object, and mascot. Peanut Butter and Jelly, who were pardoned in 2021, retired to Purdue (not [Perdue)]( University. As for the unpardoned Thanksgiving turkey: Is it, as Anya puts it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “a ritual sacrifice, with pie”? I found that quip on Cynthia Haven’s [blog]( in a post called “Have a scapegoat for Thanksgiving!” Haven, a scholar of René Girard (we [spoke]( a few weeks ago) writes that she has “always been ashamed of the annual White House ritual: the turkey pardoned for a crime it did not commit. Mock laughter accompanies the mock crime.” And she cites Karen Davis on what this sort of burlesque scapegoating means: The idea of a Thanksgiving turkey as a scapegoat may seem like a parody of scapegoating, but what is the scapegoat phenomenon but a parody of reason and justice? The scapegoat, after all, is a goat. Animals have been scapegoats in storytelling, myth, and history every bit as much as humans and probably more, as the scholar of myth and ritual René Girard observes in Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford University Press, 1988). Social animals especially have been scapegoated since time immemorial. "[I]n all parts of the world,” Girard says, “animals living in herds, schools, packs — all animals with gregarious habits, even if completely harmless to each other and to man,” have been vilified. SPONSOR CONTENT | The University of Queensland [From Waste to Wonder: The Science of Mitigating Environmental Risks From Mining]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. In Girardian scapegoat theory, the primitive act behind all animal sacrifice is the murder of a human being, usually a disfavored outsider of one kind or another. Usually, but not always. The sacrificial victim might be “the king himself,” since kingship “serves to isolate him from his fellow men, to render him casteless,” as Girard writes in Violence and the Sacred. Indeed, Girard sees human sacrifice as at the origin of kingship. In sacrifice, the king unites his people. Perhaps the president’s pardoning of a Thanksgiving turkey, too, involves the relationship of primordial violence to the magical powers of kingship. My friend Abhishek Kaicker, a historian of the Mughal Empire and the author of a [book]( on kingship and sovereignty, told me, tongue only slightly in cheek, that the presidential turkey pardon reminds us “that the sacral aspects of kingship have not been entirely evacuated even from the secular rulership of the first democratic revolution of the modern era.” There’s a reason, after all, that the turkeys pardoned by Barack Obama in 2015 were named “Honest” and “Abe.” ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Science Has a Censorship Problem]( By Musa al-Gharbi and Cory Clark [STORY IMAGE]( The motives are benign. The effects are insidious. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Dear Administrators: Enough With the Free-Speech Rhetoric!]( By Richard Amesbury and Catherine O'Donnell [STORY IMAGE]( It concedes too much to right-wing agendas. 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Recommended - “He was a blithe optimist, and when he collaborated with women in his field, he could be a blithe credit hog.” In The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai [reviews]( Jennifer Burns’s new biography of Milton Friedman. - “Sometimes even obscure histories have contemporary implications.” In The New York Review of Books, Magda Teter [writes about]( Moshe Taube’s The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe. - “I am persuaded by primatologists such as Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, who argue that observing the ‘politics’ of the great apes can teach us things about ourselves.” That’s the historian Darrin McMahon [talking]( about his new book, Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea, with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins in The Nation. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Surviving as a Small College - The Chronicle Store]( [Surviving as a Small College]( The past decade has been especially hard on small colleges. 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