accepted pain. But that is not the only effect. A necessary requirement
for all successful cooperation in the form of coalitions is not just that
people accept to pay a price for membership but also that they trust
others to cooperate too. Now initiation does not seem to confer much
benefit on the young participants, and in fact it costs them a great
deal. But it also confirms (or makes more plausible) to each of them
that the others are indeed loyal members. So what is going on during
these rites and produces real effects has little to do with changing the
participants themselves and a lot to do with making possible the build-
ing of risky coalitions with other men.
[246] There is more than meets the eye in such rituals, indeed more than
meets the eye even of the participants, who are both baffled and fasci-
nated by the special "relational catch" of these rituals: You thought
you were conniving with older men to deceive the women, children
and other outsiders, but what happens in secret has nothing to do with
that. What I call a relational catch is a way of acting toward other peo-
ple that is difficult to understand or describe to oneself, often quite
fascinating, but intuitively related to the effects of the ceremony.
Without clearly knowing why, the participants feel that the special
"game" they are playing produces important changes in their rela-
tions. Which it does, although people could not readily explain how it
works.
MARKING AND CREATING OCCASIONS
Social relations are changed through ritual in a way that is not
entirely clear to the participants. This is true even in very familiar rit-
uals that are far removed from the complexities of initiation. Con-
sider for instance the many rituals whereby people "mark an occa-
sion," ceremonies organized around events that would happen any-
way. A new child is born, two people are now a family unit. People
say that the child is not "really" born until some birth ritual has been
performed, or that the couple are not a family at all before the wed-
ding. These same people also know very well that children get born
and are alive before any ritual is performed. In many places a cere-
mony marks the official "birth"; before that it would be unseemly to
declare that a child is born. But the emotional reactions of parents
and other interested parties are of course not bound by these official
regulations. In the same way, wedding rituals are practically universal,RELIGION EXPLAINED