race, lineage or gender. Also, in all human groups people have con-
sciously accessible concepts of social relations, folk theories about
how such relations are built and maintained, culturally specific ways
of construing them. They have explicit understandings of what
friendship is, what exchange ought to be, how power is attained and
maintained in complex groups—in so many words, "how society
works."
All these understandings, obviously, differ with the kind of social
world people live in. But they have one feature in common. They are
very often based on concepts that seem extremely poor and vague,
compared to the actual interaction that takes place, and even com- [251]
pared to people's intuitive grasp of what they should do in any social
context. To give a few examples: First, the way people categorize social
groups is very generally by assuming that there are naturaldifferences
between them. In a caste system, people of different castes are said to
carry very different "essences," which supposedly explains why they
should not intermarry or even come into close contact. In racist ide-
ologies too, the basic assumption is that some differences are founded
in nature although they are not always visible. Second, people faced
with any complex interaction tend to use anthropomorphicconcepts.
Villages or social classes or nations are described as "wanting" this,
"fearing" that, "taking decisions," "failing to perceive" what is hap-
pening, etc. Even the workings of a committee are often described in
such psychological terms: the committee realized this, regretted that,
etc. To think that a village, a company or a committee is a big agent
spares us the difficult work of describing the extraordinarily compli-
cated interaction that occurs when you get more than two people
together.
Anthropologist Larry Hirschfeld coined the term "naive sociology"
to describe such understandings of social groups and social relations.
"Naive" does not mean that these understandings are primitive or
necessarily misguided but that we develop them spontaneously with-
out the systematic training that we need to acquire scientific concepts.
"Naive sociology" is what you get when you combine (a) the intuitions
that we have by virtue of having social mind systems and (b) the con-
cepts that we use to create social categories, folk theories of social
interaction and so on. Such concepts, obviously, are adapted to the
social realities we have to explain: people who live in nomadic bands of
foragers have little need for a concept of "social class" or of "caste."
However, they are also constrained by expectations about the nature
WHYRITUALS?