with a whole range of supernatural notions but these were entirely
nonserious, belonging to the genres of fantasy, folklore, science fic-
tion, comic books, and the like. The Fang, in contrast, are exposed to
a whole range of supernatural objects, beings and occurrences that are
taken in a very matter-of-fact way as part of daily existence. Witches
may be performing secret rituals to get better crops than you. Ghosts
may push you as you walk in the forest so that you trip and get hurt.
Some people in the village are presumed to have an extra organ and
may prove to be very dangerous. Indeed some people are widely
believed to have killed other people by witchcraft, although nothing
[84] could be proved. I do not mean to suggest that Fang people live in a
paranoid world with ghouls and monsters lurking in every corner.
Rather, ghosts and spirits and witchcraft are part of their circum-
stances in the same way as car crashes, industrial pollution, cancer and
common muggings are part of most Western people's.
To vary contexts even further, I also conducted a small-scale repli-
cation in a very different context, among Tibetan monks in Nepal
with some help from Charles Ramble, a specialist in Tibetan Bud-
dhism. The monks, like the Fang, live in groups where religious and
supernatural occurrences and concepts are part of the familiar sur-
roundings rather than distant fictions. However, in the context of
Tibetan Buddhism, these concepts are mainly inspired by written
sources. Indeed the monks are local specialists in these sources and in
the various intellectual disciplines associated with them. So we
thought these studies would tell us whether these important cultural
differences had much effect on memory for supernatural concepts.
In both places, violations were best recalled, followed by oddities
and then by standard items with the lowest recall rate. This suggests
that there is indeed a generalsensitivity to violations of intuitive expec-
tations for ontological categories. That is, the cognitive effects of such
violations do not seem to be much affected by (1) what kinds of reli-
gious concepts are routinely used in the group people belong to, (2)
how varied they are, (3) how seriously they are taken, (4) whether they
are transmitted from literate sources or informal oral communication
and (5) whether the people tested are actually involved in producing
local "theories" of the supernatural. This, at least, would be the nat-
ural conclusion to draw from the essentially similar recall performance
observed in all three cultural environments. French and American stu-
dents, like Fang peasants and Tibetan monks, are more likely to recall
ontological violations than oddities or standard associations.
RELIGION EXPLAINED