ritual sequences. If we have a ceremony to ask the gods for good
crops, this specifies for instance that we will say things to them, we
will sacrifice a pig, they will listen, they will hopefully decide to pro-
tect our crops. If we ask the ancestors to turn this young man into a
shaman, they are said to descend upon him and change him for good.
People know (or rather have some representation of) what the ances-
tors and gods are doing.
Lawson and McCauley developed a very precise account of these
possible roles of supernatural agents. In the mental representation of
religious rituals, there is both a representation of the series of acts pre-
scribed (what they call an "action-description"), and a particular point [259]
where concepts of gods and spirits are inserted. Performing a ritual is
like cooking a stew. The recipe is an "action-description" (brown the
meat, put it aside, sauté the onions, put the vegetables in, put the meat
back in, reduce heat, etc.) that specifies the various elements involved
(the cook should be a person, the meat a dead animal, etc.) as well as
some syntax: some actions come before other ones and some actions
requireother actions. In religious rituals too you have such action-
descriptions: for instance, priest dons special robes, takes crucifix in
hand, blesses the crowd. Here too you can say that there are specific
labels (the priest must be a person) and syntactic rules (the ordaining
of the priest should come before his blessing of things or people).
What makes religious rituals different is only that some of the ele-
ments in an action-description are described as "special," as Lawson
and McCauley put it—that is, connected to supernatural agents. In
this case, "priest" implies "special person, ordained," and crucifix is
"special object, representing crucifixion," etc.^20
Now rituals differ in whereyou put the "special" elements. When a
priest blesses a crowd, it is the main agent, the priest himself, who is
labeled as connected to divinity, whereas the crowd is not special at all;
anyone (indeed anything) can receive a blessing. On the other hand, if
you are offering a pig to the gods, the agents are not special but the
patients (i.e., the ones affected by the ritual) are, in the sense that they
are supernatural. Some rituals are agent-special (the god or his repre-
sentative, or someone specially affected by them is performing the
action); some rituals are patient-special (the gods or their representa-
tives are the ones on whom the ritual is said to have an effect).
Lawson and McCauley realized that this difference had important
effects on people's intuitions and on the general style of ritual perfor-
mance. Rituals with special agents—in particular, rituals in which the
WHYRITUALS?