cepts, that they are driven by relevance.This notion was first formu-
lated by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in studies of verbal commu-
nication, but it provides a very useful tool in the description of cultural
acquisition.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL TOOL KIT 4:
RELEVANCE AND TRANSMISSIONHuman verbal communication is not a code-deciphering operation.
Every utterance is compatible with many different interpretations, [163]
and a listener's task (or rather the listener's brain's task) is to infer an
optimal interpretation, via a description of what the speaker intended
to convey. This can in general be done if the interpretation chosen is
one that produces more inferences than others or requires fewer
inferential steps, or both. More generally, an optimal interpretation is
one that corresponds to a higher inferences/inferential steps ratio
than other available interpretations.
The technical aspects of relevance theory are not important here.
What is important is that the principle gives us a good approximation
of how cultural information can become more or less successful. Some
types of cultural input are easily acquired because they correspond to
intuitive expectations. In this case the inferential effort required to
assimilate this material is minimal. If you are told that poodles are a
type of dog, it is very easy to assimilate the consequences of this fact,
because the living-beings-as-essential-classes system described by
Atran is already in place.
This is quite clear in the domain of supernatural concepts too. As I
mentioned in Chapter 2, there is a small catalogue of templates. Indi-
vidual imagination may expand beyond this catalogue but concepts
that do not correspond to one of our templates are usually found in
marginal beliefs rather than mainstream ideologies, and in obscure
theological scholarship rather than in popular representations. The
concepts built according to these templates were built by relevance-
driven inference systems. Someone tells you that there is an invisible
presence of the dead in the forest and your intuitive psychology infer-
ence system produces all sorts of inferences about what they know
and what they want, on the assumption that their minds are like ours.
You are told that this statue can listen to you, and that too affords
WHYGODS AND SPIRITS?