whether you are in a crowd or on your own, sitting on a train or driving
your car. In many places Christians also treat some artifacts as endowed
with special powers. People for instance go to a distant place to pray to a
particular Madonna, which means standing in front of an artifact and
talking to it. (You may find this description rather crude, and retort that
no one is really talking to a man-made object; people are considering a
"symbol" of the Virgin, a "sign" or "representation" of her presence and
power. But that is not the case. First, people are really representing the
Madonna as an artifact. If I tell them who made it, using what kind of
wood and paint, they will find all that information perfectly sensible, as
[86] it would be indeed of any other man-made object. Second, it really is
the artifact they are addressing. If I proposed to chop the Madonna to
pieces because I needed firewood, and suggested that I could replace it
with a photograph of the statue or with a sign reading "pray to the Vir-
gin here," they would find that shocking.)
Now people who represent these two types of violations do not
usually combine them. They have a concept of agents that can hear
you wherever you are; they also have a concept of artifacts that can
hear you. But they do not have the concept of artifacts that can hear
you wherever you are. That is, people who want to pray to the
Madonna of such and such a place actually go there and in most cases
will take care to stand within hearing distance of the statue when they
utter their prayers. This is in fact a general observation. All over the
world we find concepts of artifacts that hear or think or more gener-
ally have a mind; and concepts of minds with counterintuitive proper-
ties are not uncommon. But their combination is extremely rare. This
illustrates, again, the fact that a combination of one violation with pre-
served expectations is probably a cognitive optimum, a concept that is
both attention-grabbing and that allows rich inferences.
Violations are attention-grabbing only against a background of
expectations. But what happens if people routinely produce counter-
intuitive representations? If you are brought up in a place where
people repeatedly assert that a mountain is digesting food, that a
huge invisible jaguar is flying over the village, that some people have
an extra internal organ, does that have an effect on your expecta-
tions? In the past, anthropologists used to think that the presence of
such supernatural representations might have a feedback effect on
people's expectations. But there is no evidence for such an effect. On
the contrary, there is experimental evidence to show that ontological
intuitions are quite similar. Psychologist Sheila Walker conducted a
RELIGION EXPLAINED