going through all this complicated, dangerous and clearly irrelevant
rigmarole? Since boys do grow up eventually, why not just assemble
the whole village and have everyone agree that they are now full men
and should be treated as such? These crude questions spring to mind
when we consider exotic ceremonies, but they are equally pressing
with more familiar ones. Why have the groom wait at the altar while
the bride and her father are walking up the aisle? Why invite friends
and relatives to witness this event? Why do we have showers, bap-
tisms, ordinations and funerals? Why bother with all this?^7
The problem, then, is to explain why people feel the need to resort
[234] to what seems to be a particular mode of action, as anthropologists Car-
oline Humphrey and James Laidlaw put it. Since the phenomenon is
so general, it would seem that we need a psychological explanation for
this human propensity. However, ritual is not an activity for which we
can easily demonstrate some specific disposition or a special adaptive
advantage. It is difficult to explain, even as a speculative exercise, how
people would develop a capacity or an urge to organize collective cer-
emonies, how the genes that create this drive would spread better than
a nonritualistic genotype. True, some anthropologists have proposed
extremely speculative origin scenarios for the appearance of rituals in
early human societies. Performing a ritual together implies that you
act in a coordinated manner, as each person does his or her bit as
directed by the ritual script. This might have made groups more cohe-
sive, and it mighthave allowed some coalitions to wield more influence
in a group. If that was advantageous to each individual, the capacity or
inclination to do all this might have become entrenched in human dis-
positions.^8
However, such scenarios are rather shaky. This is not just because it
is difficult to reconstruct what happened in early human groups but
also because of a crucial gap in the explanation. Evolution does not
create specific behaviors; it creates mental organization that makes
people behave in particular ways. For all these scenarios to work, we
would have to establish that people do have a "ritualistic disposition"
and to describe what this amounts to. But we have no evidence for a
special "ritual system" in the mind, at least not so far. Even if we found
it, we would still have to explain why people use rituals in some cir-
cumstances rather than others. Rituals are used for a bewildering vari-
ety of purposes, or so it would seem: to obtain a good harvest and keep
disease away, to celebrate birth and marriage, to cure the sick and help
the dead reach another world, to ordain priests and initiate young folk,
RELIGION EXPLAINED