future cooperation can be established is clearly available to people the
world over, without further explanation, since such inferences are pro-
vided by our social mind systems. So far, nothing mysterious.
However, as an exchange procedure, sacrifice is of course paradoxi-
cal. Although it is presented as giving away some resources in
exchange for protection, the brutal fact remains that the sacrificed ani-
mals are generally consumed by the participants. This irony is not lost
on the Kwaio, some of whom point out to Keesing that it is a kind of
"cheating" to promise the ancestors a pig, since they cannot actually
share in the feast. In many places, people find some clever way of
[242] finessing this conceptual difficulty. They say that the gods crave the
smell of meat, that they ingest the smoke, that they eat the soul of the
animal, etc. Outsiders often consider these explanations as so many
ways of avoiding the embarrassing fact that the beneficiaries of the
ceremony cannot actually receive anything. But I think there may be
more to these explanations.
As I said, sacrifice is often offered in exchange for better crops or
plentiful game. However, people also have the intuition that the out-
comes of their agricultural or hunting operations mainly result from
their own action. Indeed, whatever the ritual guarantee, farmers and
hunters never dispense with any empirical measures that increase their
likelihood of success. You may give a goat to the gods but you still
plow your fields to the best of your abilities. The ways in which the
gods actually confer benefits are not really described or even thought
about. Inasmuch as people get good crops or game, this may well be,
in their view, because of the sacrifice, but this is only a conjecture with
very little obvious support. In such situations, then, people give
resources to the ancestors butthe part that the ancestors receive is not
obvious, or not visible, or not material. In exchange people receive
protectionbutthis is not obvious, or not visible. So there may be an
intuitive correspondence between what people think they give away (it
is after all possible, though counterintuitive, that some agents feed on
smoke or eat souls) and what they think they receive (it is after all pos-
sible, though difficult to establish, that the gods really help).
Another reason why the ceremonies make intuitive sense is that in
many cases people's attention is focused not so much on the potential
exchange with invisible partners as on the actual exchange or distribu-
tion of resources among the actual participants. In many cases sacri-
fices are occasions of communal sharing. Kwaio people do not just
"dedicate" a pig to the ancestors and eat it. Theyshareit with the
RELIGION EXPLAINED