of society that we develop very early. Hirschfeld's developmental stud-
ies show how even young children have some expectations about social
groups. For instance, children assume that kinship terms (aunt, father,
sister, etc.) refer to something more than the mere fact of living
together. They (and adults) tend to guess that some undetectable,
internal "essence" is shared by people with a common genealogy, in
the same way that they (and adults too) assume that all tigers share
some internal tigerhood. Young children also have some understand-
ing that a "family" (or whatever this kind of unit is called in their soci-
ety) is therefore logically different from a collection (e.g., the pupils in
[252] a class, the flowers in a bouquet).^17
Children also seem prepared to think of social groups as founded
on such undetectable common properties. This makes them, like
adults, extremely receptive to ideologies that describe a whole group
of people as internally, naturally different from others. Both children
and adults acquire such ideologies effortlessly, suggesting that these
ideologies are at least congruent with some general expectations about
social groups. This does not mean that children are born "racist."
Indeed, Hirschfeld's studies demonstrate the opposite. Not only are
young children often remarkably impervious to the emotions and atti-
tudes that accompany ethnic classification in their social environment;
they do not even seem to pay much attention to the external traits
(skin tone for instance) that are the supposed "foundation" of racial
distinctions. In other words they—and we all—seem prepared to think
of social groups in terms of natural differences, but the racist notion
that a particular occupation or skin color is the index of such differ-
ences requires some special cultural learning.^18
Our "naive sociology," then, is an attempt to make sense of our
own intuitions about the social world around us. But it is often flawed.
The accessible, explicit concepts lag far behind the intuitions they are
supposed to explain. Villages do not "perceive" situations, committees
cannot "remember" what happened, companies have no particular
"desires," simply because all these groups are not persons.
This gives many aspects of social interaction a magical character.
Because people live in a social context, they are constantly surrounded
by social events and processes that their concepts do not fully explain.
These events and processes are real and their consequences are real
too. But how they came about is something that cannot really be
explained using the concepts of "naive sociology." They all seem to
require hidden forces and processes that cause all the effects we can
RELIGION EXPLAINED