a series of unannounced, violent ordeals that have nothing to do with
the official "secret."
This way of instituting a real and painful shock within a declared
but empty deception is very common in such rites, according to
Houseman. It seems to create a strange "relational catch" in the sense
that the candidates are given two incompatible versions of what hap-
pened. The older men are both their tormentors and their partners in
an elaborate deception directed against women. The Gbaya boys,
before they join the initiation camp, sing "Father, are you tricking
me?" Even after they have completed the ritual this remains an open
question. As most participants in such rituals comment, there is no [245]
way to understand what happened but it is clear that something did
happen and that it did change them in some way.^16
So why go through all this? The discrepancy between the official
goals (initiation is supposed to produce adult men) and the means
employed is quite striking. Now the official goal itself is more complex
than it may seem. As many participants will say, one is not really a
man, or a "real" man, or a "full" man unless one has gone through the
rite. But this would not make much sense if taken literally. Everyone
around the candidates knows perfectly well that boys will become
men, come what may, ritual or no ritual. So the statements express a
norm, not a fact. They point to a kind of interaction that shouldoccur
between adult men but that is not guaranteed by mere biological
growth. In the tribal environments where such rites are found, this
interaction consists in participation in collective hunting as well as in
coalitions and warfare, in the defense of the group, and in some cartel-
like marital strategies. These are all situations where success depends
on cooperative interaction, where it is difficult in advance to assess
people's dispositions to cooperate, where defection might be tempting
and would endanger all nondefectors, and where it would be difficult
to punish a defector after the fact.
The ordeals make more sense if we take into account that warfare
and tribal solidarity activate mental systems for coalitional behavior.
One difference between coalitions and ordinary groups, as I explained
in Chapter 3, is that coalitions can launch extremely risky operations if
certain conditions of interaction are met. Each member of a coalition
must signal that he will cooperate regardless of the cost. Initiation rit-
uals seem to play on these intuitions. The best way to assess whether
young men are prepared to pay a heavy cost as members of the coali-
tion is to make them pay some of it up front, as it were, in the form of
WHYRITUALS?