but people know perfectly well that any two adults could enter into
some long-term sexual and economic partnership without the rites.
Again, this is all a matter of norm rather than fact. But why then mark
these occasions with ritual gadgets?
The standard anthropological answer—which I think is roughly on
the right track—is that although such events may seem intrinsically
"private" they have direct implications for the communities where
people live. Indeed the very notion of childbirth as a private event or
of marriage as involving only two partners would be a very odd one in
most human groups. By having children, people are putting them-
selves in a new situation as regards resources and social exchange. [247]
Children are the focus of greater investment from their biological par-
ents than from anyone else. The urge to feed and protect one's chil-
dren rather than others is a general human tendency, for obvious evo-
lutionary reasons. Naturally, the nature of the resources and
protection vary a lot from one group to another, from foraging groups
to industrial environments, and so does the way those resources are
acquired, from communal operations to private enterprise. But the
fact remains that cooperation with people will vary a lot depending on
whether they have children, how many, how old, etc.
This is why a birth is a social event, and why many birth rituals
(baptism, circumcision, formal christening, etc.) should happen some
timeafter birth. In many societies there is an official doctrine that the
child is not "really" born before such ceremonies. This would seem
paradoxical if the biological birth of the child really was the event cel-
ebrated. But note that in most human environments up to modern
times, having a child delivered only provided a plausible chance that
there would be a child to invest in, because of high infant mortality. So
the delay between birth and ritual seems to confirm that such rituals
are relevant once it becomes clear that the child is here to stay and that
people's interaction will indeed be recalibrated to accommodate
parental investment.
A similar anthropological argument explains why marriages are
intensely public and publicized events. Again, the details of wedding
celebrations vary a lot with differences in family organization, in the
relative status of men and women, in the degree of autonomy of
women and in the particular rules of marital exchange. However, some
ritual is felt to be necessary in most human groups, and virtually
everywhere it is made as salient as possible within the limits of avail-
able resources. The cheapest way of celebrating a marriage is to make
WHYRITUALS?