We anthropologists used to think that such magical thinking was the
result of some failure in the mind's usually firm grip on what causes
what. People are usually quite good at figuring out the causes of events;
if they were not, they could not manage their everyday activities. But
then in magic they seem to abandon all that, assuming that an unde-
tectable change in a woman's dress will make her feel romantic. So it
would seem that people believe in magic when they somehow relax their
criteria of what could count as the cause of a particular phenomenon.
This representation of magic is not very convincing, however,
because magical reasoning is not in fact very different from many
[134] ordinary inferences. Many people know that it is better to brown the
meat before putting it in the stew but they have no idea why this is the
case. They till the soil when they plant seeds but have little knowledge
of soil chemistry. Indeed, ideas of purity and pollution seem absurd if
you consider them against generalstandards of what causes what, and
much less so if you consider a specialinference system in the mind, the
one that deals with possible contamination and contagion. As I said
above, this system seems to have its own principles: that the dangerous
substance is not necessarily visible, that the dose does not matter, that
any contact with the original source of danger transmits the whole of
the pollution. Apparently strange beliefs about touching the hand of a
blacksmith are only an application of these principles outside their
adaptive domain, that of contaminants and toxins. Once it is suggested
that low-caste people contain a specific substance, the contagion sys-
tem naturally derives all the consequences: for instance that anycon-
tact with such a person is polluting, however brief; also, that the dan-
ger is there even if it is invisible.
This neatly encapsulates the features of some of these cognitive
gadgets that seem to have haunted human minds ever since they were
human. First, the whole pollution story is based on a counterintuitive
assumption, namely that although other people are of the same species
as we, their internal constitution may be different. Second, an adaptive
inference system is activated that naturally produces all sorts of addi-
tional consequences, once you represent the initial assumption.
Finally, the whole scenario is usually represented in the decoupled
mode, as an interesting "what if" scenario, since people in fact do not
share food with polluting castes. This does not in any way hinder the
transmission of the belief; quite the opposite. The notion of polluting
people is one of the artifacts that fascinate the mind because they pro-
duce relevant inferences from salient suppositions, and that is enough.
RELIGION EXPLAINED