whenanotherancestor was causing trouble was just a waste of one's
resources. The offended spirit would carry on making people sick until
someone offered him a proper sacrifice. All this is quite natural; indeed
the Kwaio diviner cited by Keesing only gives us an elliptic formulation
of this reasoning, because all this goes without saying. But it goes with-
out saying only if you apply the relevant inference systems.
More generally, all gods and ancestors and spirits are construed as
beings with which we can interact by using our social inference sys-
tems. You pray to God because you want to be cured. This requires
the assumption that God perceives that you are ill, understands that
[156] you wish to be better, desires you to be happy, understands what
would make you happier, and so on. (Incidentally, prayers and other
utterances addressed to gods and spirits require that such agents
understand not only our language but also the way we use it. Saying
"Dear God, it would be so much nicer if my relatives could get on
with each other" implies that God knows how to translate this indirect
form into the direct request "Please make my relatives get on with
each other.") Gods and spirits that wantsomething in particular will
often try to get it, they will be satisfied once they have it but not
before that, they will retaliate if people try to cheat them out of it, etc.
The fact that all these statements sound so trite shows how intuitive
these assumptions are, if you apply the right inference systems.
So are ancestors and gods just like other people? Not really. There
is one major difference, but a subtle one that is generally not explicit
in people's statements about these powerful agents. The difference is
this: In social interaction, as I said above, we always assume that other
people are agents with limitedaccess to strategic information (and we
try and evaluate the extent to which they have access to that informa-
tion). In interaction with supernatural agents, people presume that
these agents have full access to strategic information.
Supernatural agents are in general credited with good access to
information. That they appear at several places at the same time or
become invisible gives them the means to hold information that real
agents have more difficulty acquiring. This does not mean that such
agents are always considered wiser than mere mortals. The point is
not that they know betterbut more simply that they often seem to
know more. Indeed, in the many narratives (anecdotes, memories,
myths, etc.) that include such agents as well as human ones, the sce-
narios in which a religious agent has information that a human agent
does not possess greatly outnumber descriptions of the converse situa-
RELIGION EXPLAINED