from initiation camp as full-grown men, then it seems that the ritual
did give them a new identity. If everybody treats the newlyweds as a
family, then they have become one. But there is a problem here,
which is to explain why this belief is convincing at all, and why it
always focuses on rituals.
I think this becomes less puzzling if we take into account the weak-
ness of our intuitive sociology. People enter stable relationships where
sexual access, reproduction and economic cooperation are bound
together; when children are born, resources are allocated in a different
way; as children grow up, their contribution to social interaction
[254] changes. All these processes have been part of our social life for a long
time. They are all bound to happen in the kinds of groups humans live
in. But these processes are seen by people through the concepts of
naive sociology, which just cannot explain what happens and the con-
nections between different social processes. People certainly have the
intuition that a stable sexual-economic arrangement between two
members of the group has consequences for everyone else, but they
may not have the concepts to describe why this is the case.
Now consider what happens if people have the same interaction—
that is, they are faced with social phenomena without a conceptual
explanation,but they accompany these situations with a specific ritual
gadget. When two people become a stable pair, there is now a special
set of actions to perform, with a prescribed list of words, a prescribed
cast of actors, etc. This has to be done in public. When boys slowly
change from nurtured, immature individuals to potential allies in
coalitions, this is marked by ordeals whose effect is to emphasize the
cost of defection. The required actions are presented in a manner that
triggers the definite intuition that not doing these things or not doing
them the right way might be detrimental or dangerous.
Rituals are not necessary to social processes but they are certainly
relevant to people's thoughts about these processes. That is, once you
see your cultural elders associating a given set of prescribed actions
with social effects that would otherwise appear magical, this associa-
tion has some staying power because it is both easily acquired and
constitutes a rich source of inferences. It is easily acquired because the
intuitions are already there: that an otherwise unmotivated set of pre-
scribed actions should be followed very precisely to avoid an unde-
fined danger is a very easy intuition to create in human beings,
because of our contagion system. The ritual gadgets also produce rich
inferences. For instance, attending a wedding may well give you the
RELIGION EXPLAINED