whole group. Sacrificial rituals are very often performed in this spirit
of unconditional sharing, in contrast with ordinary social exchange.
For instance the Muslim annual sacrifice of a ram should be a collec-
tive affair and the meat should be shared between families. Those who
cannot afford to perform the ritual can count on gifts from neighbors
or even perfect strangers. (Conversely, in many places it would be
strange to have any communal sharing of costly resources without
"dedicating" at least some part of the feast to the ancestors, gods or
spirits. Where I worked in Cameroon, people who open a bottle to
share with their friends must spill a few drops on the ground for the
ancestors. The banal fact of sharing resources unconditionally with [243]
actual people is turned into exchange with imagined partners.) In
other sacrifice rituals, people pay great attention to the way the animal
is divided up. The Fang pay great attention to who receives which part
of a sacrificed goat, each part being assigned to a person who stands in
a particular genealogical relationship to the head of family who offers
the animal to the ancestors.
I mention this to highlight what is, for good reason, a central point
in anthropological descriptions of ritual. There may be all sorts of
official justifications for performing the ceremonies, and there may be
some notion of what effects they bring about. But it is difficult to
understand why people take all this as intuitively plausible, unless you
consider the social relations involved. This means not just the preexist-
ing relations between the people who get together to perform a partic-
ular ceremony but also the particular ways in which these relations are
modified by ritual.
Many rituals produce important changes in social interaction, but
not always those changes presented as the reason for performing the
ritual in the first place. Here is an example. Consider the initiation
rites illustrated at the beginning of this chapter by some details from
the Gbaya rituals of Central Africa. In many places adolescents have to
go through long and often painful initiation ordeals to be considered
full members of the group. Such rites are generally far more complex
and more widespread in the male-only version. Boys can be "trained"
for years before they return to society as full men.
Anthropologists have always found these complex rites fascinating
because of their length and complexity but also because of apparent
discrepancies between their performance and their official justifica-
tion. A familiar explanation for initiation rites is that young boys must
acquire the secret knowledge and skills that define real manhood.
WHYRITUALS?