is very clear in the Kwaio case. As Roger Keesing reports, "When an
illness or misfortune occurs, a father or neighbor will break knotted
strips of cordyline leaf, talking to the spirits to find out which one is
causing trouble and why." People want to know which ancestor is
involved and why. It goes without saying that some ancestor is
involved. This is in fact a most common situation, from ancestors
causing bad crops to God punishing people's lack of faith or other
misdemeanors by afflicting them with plagues and lean years.^16
According to some "origin of religion" scenarios, people have reli-
gious concepts because some salient events require some urgent atten-
tion, yet cannot be explained. The spirits and gods fill the explanatory [195]
gap. But why is that the case? What makes it convincing or plausible that
supernatural agents are the source of misfortune? The first reason that
springs to mind is that gods and spirits are described as powerful agents
that can cause bad crops or other problems. People are told that God can
make people sick or that the ancestors can make you fall from a tree.
That is precisely what makes them different from ordinary mortals.
This obviously is not a very good explanation, for it takes us
straight back to square one: Why are the gods and spirits described as
having such powers in the first place? To anthropologists, it is clear
that people's reasoning actually works the other way around, that peo-
ple attribute great powers to gods and spirits becausethe latter are fre-
quently mentioned as the originators of misfortune. That is, you first
hear about particular cases of illness and accidents that people inter-
pret as the consequence of the gods' or spirits' actions and you then
infer that they must have whatever powers it takes to do such things.
Naturally, these two kinds of representations feed each other. A
description of the gods as powerful makes them plausible originators
of misfortune; their description as causes of misfortune makes it plau-
sible that they are powerful. So, again, why are these representations
combined so easily? Why are people so keen to see the vagaries of
misfortune as the whim of malfeasance?
MISFORTUNE AS A SOCIAL THING
In the past, anthropologists sometimes suggested that this may be
because people were not very good at understanding natural correlations
or the work of random variables. In some groups, mostcases of disease
or death are ascribed to witchcraft. Surely, the argument goes, statisti-
WHYDOGODS ANDSPIRITSMATTER?