heal. In this way [the statuettes] are believed to become themselves
diviners.^3
The patient in this ritual has been identified by the community as
mentally disturbed, which is explained in religious terms. The soul of
the person was taken away by evil spirits and it is now held hostage. A
shaman is a specialist who can enlist auxiliary spirits to help him
deliver the imprisoned soul and thereby restore the patient's health.
Note that this goes well beyond a straightforward explanation for
aberrant behavior. True, there is direct evidence of the patient's con-
[14] dition; but the evil spirits, the auxiliary spirits, the shaman's ability to
journey through the spirits' world, the efficacy of the shaman's songs
in his negotiation with the evil spirits—all this has to be postulated.
To add to these baroque complications, the auxiliary spirits are in fact
wood statuettes; these objects not only hear and understand the
shaman, but they actually become diviners for the time of the ritual,
perceiving what ordinary people cannot see.
An "explanation" like that does not work in the same way as our
ordinary accounts of events in our environment. We routinely pro-
duce explanations that (i) use the information available and (ii)
rearrange it in a way that yields a more satisfactory view of what hap-
pened. Explaining something does not consist in producing one
thought after another in a freewheeling sort of way. The point of an
explanation is to provide a context that makes a phenomenon less sur-
prising than before and more in agreement with the general order of
things. Religious explanations often seem to work the other way
around, producing more complication instead of less. As anthropolo-
gist Dan Sperber points out, religion creates "relevant mysteries"
rather than simple accounts of events.
This leads to a paradox familiar to all anthropologists. If we say
that people use religious notions to explainthe world, this seems to
suggest that they do not know what a proper explanation is. But that is
absurd. We have ample evidence that they do know. People use the
ordinary "getting most of the relevant facts under a simpler heading"
strategy all the time. So what people do with their religious concepts is
not so much explain the universe as ... well, this is where we need to
step back and consider in more general terms what makes mysteries
relevant.^4RELIGION EXPLAINED