see. For instance, people are members of particular clans or villages. It
appears to everyone that these groups were not created by their cur-
rent members, nor will they disappear with them. It seems that the
lineage or the group has a life of its own. Indeed, people are constantly
faced with situations where being a member of this clan or that village
matters because of how previous members of these units acted. If your
village has always fought (note the anthropomorphic term) against the
next village, then in a sense the interaction transcends the existence of
its participants. So it makes perfect sense to think of villages and other
such units as abstract persons or living organisms, because that helps
explain stable interaction. People often say that all members of a vil- [253]
lage or a clan have the "same bones," that they share some essence that
is the eternal life of the social group. As anthropologist Maurice Bloch
points out, belonging to such groups is "not at all like joining a social
club." Bloch shows that the biological understandings that are so often
used in naive sociology—"we share the same bones" or "the essence of
the clan is inside us," etc.—are not loose metaphors. They express the
intuition that stable political units do transcend individual people's
transient roles, even in small-scale social arrangements.^19
The "magic" of society is merely the fact that our naive sociology
cannot explain such stable or complex aspects of social interaction. We
are left with explanations like "we in the village act in this way because
we share the bones of our ancestors" or "we have inflation because the
middle classes have decided to ruin us." These explanations are magi-
cal in the sense that there is no easily described connection between
the hidden causes that are described and their effects. No matter how
detailed your notions about the ancestors' bones, such concepts just
fail to explain why, for instance, a feud between two villages can be
extraordinarily stable or why you intuitively trust members of your
clan more than outsiders.
RELEVANCE OF RITUAL GADGETS
I started with a puzzle: Why does it seem obvious that performing
particular actions in a prescribed, rigid manner will have particular
effects—for example, creating a new family or turning boys into
men? We might think that there is a simple solution, which is that
everyone around believes that rituals have such effects, so that in the
end they do have the effects. If everybody treats the boys returning
WHYRITUALS?