to appease the gods' anger or secure their protection. So this would
imply that ritual is an atavism.In this view, humans first performed rit-
uals for one particular reason (to ensure social cohesion, to wage war,
to negotiate relations between men and women) and then extended
this to other circumstances. Even if there was good evidence for this
historical sequence, it would not tell us why rituals are compelling now
on occasions other than the original ones. As I said in Chapter 1, ori-
gin scenarios of this kind do not really explain present behavior.
Perhaps the mistake is to assume that a uniquecapacity or propen-
sity in human minds accounts for the existence of prescribed cere-
monies in all human groups. As I said several times previously, many [235]
cultural creations, from visual art to music to the low status of tanners
to the fascination of corpses, are successful because they activate a
variety of mental capacities, most of which have other, very precise
functions. In other words a lot of human culture consists of salient cog-
nitive gadgets that have a great attention-grabbing power and high rel-
evance for human minds as a side effect of these minds' being orga-
nized the way they are.
This may be the case for rituals as well. Indeed, I think we can
explain in this way at least three important properties of this kind of
action: First, acting in rituals is not quite the same as acting in other
contexts, as any participant or observer feels quite clearly. However,
this feeling is particularly difficult to describe. Although what you do
is supposed to have some direct effect, ritual is not quite like ordinary
work because the connection between what you are doing (e.g., biting
a ram's tongue) and its supposed effect (turning you into a real
shaman) is not terribly obvious. Although there is a lot of acting (e.g.,
pretending to kill the young boys), it is not quite like theater as the
consequences of the performance are all too real. What makes a ritual
special is that it combines these elements of work and play with a sense
of urgency, that is, an intuition that you should perform them in the
correct way otherwise something terrible may happen; but there is
often no explanation of how correct performance averts that danger
(or indeed of what the danger actually is). This is the sense of urgency
problem, which I think is easily solved if we take into account other
situations where human minds feel that particular emotion.
Second, many rituals have consequences for social interaction: the
wedding makes an honest family of two lovers, initiation makes a man
out of a boy, sacrificing a sheep to the ancestors seals your alliance
with that other village. This is the social effects problem, which is not
WHYRITUALS?