mation. This is the general principle of imperfect access: In social inter-
action, we presume that other people's access to strategic information is nei-
ther perfect nor automatic.
Suppose you went to the other village last night for a secret ren-
dezvous. The identity of the person you met is, at least potentially,
strategic information for other people. (Again, it may be of no real
importance.) Knowing that you met so-and-so would activate their
inference systems and could change the way they interact with you.
But it is not clear to you to what extent that information is available to
other people. That is, you cannot presume that they know. Indeed,
you may hope that they do not (for fear of scandal) or wish that they [155]
did (so you can brag about the romantic episode).
Humans generally spend a great deal of time and energy wonder-
ing whether other people have access to some information that is
strategic from their own standpoint, wondering what inferences,
intentions, plans, etc. these other people draw from that information,
trying to control their access to such information and trying to moni-
tor and influence their inferences on the basis of such information. All
these complex calculations are based on the assumption that our own
and other agents' access to strategic information is complex and gen-
erally imperfect.
GODS AND SPIRITS AS SPECIAL PERSONS
The reason for going through these complex definitions and explana-
tions is that if people consider gods and spirits agentswith which they
engage in interaction, then surely the cognitive systems that shape
our regular interactions with other agents will inform interaction with
supernatural agents too.
At first sight, interacting with them is very much like interacting
with human agents, in that most of our ordinary inference systems are
activated and produce their inferences in much the same way as usual.
It is worth insisting on this, because this is what makes interaction with
these rather discreet agents so natural.Gods and spirits have minds, so
they perceive what happens; we can predict that they will remember
what happened, that they will have particular intentions and do what it
takes to get these intentions realized. More subtle aspects of social
interaction seem also to apply to gods and spirits. As we saw in the
Kwaio example described by Keesing, offering a pig to an ancestor
WHY GODS AND SPIRITS?