intuition that your relations with the newlyweds will now be different,
and that this may be the case for other participants too; but having a
ritual may give you a simple representation of why these changes are
so clearly coordinated in all participants, since the event is itself a
salient and mutually manifest reference point.
Rituals do not createsocial effects but only the illusion that they do.
When people perform rituals, they combine some ritual gadget—eas-
ily acquired because it activates our precaution-contagion system—
and a particular social effect—for which they have intuitions but no
good concepts—in a single package. Thoughts about the social effect
and thoughts about the ritual sequence are combined since they are [255]
about the same event. So rituals are naturally thought to produce the
social effects.
This illusion is strengthened by the fact that not performing a par-
ticular ceremony, when others do, very often amounts to defecting
from social cooperation. For instance, once you attach a particular rit-
ual (initiation) to full cooperation between men, or another one (wed-
ding) to mate-choice, then not performing the ritual amounts to a
refusal to enter into the same social arrangements as other people. In a
place where everybody signals their openness and reliability by keep-
ing their windows open, drawing your curtains is a clear signal of non-
cooperation. So the illusion that the ritual is actually indispensable to
its effects, although untrue if you consider human societies in general,
becomes quite real for the people concerned, as their choice is
between going through the actions prescribed—which seems to con-
firm that the rituals are a sine qua non—or defecting from coopera-
tion with other members of the group, which is not really an option in
most human groups.
BANAL TRANSCENDENCE:
AN OPENING FOR GODS AND SPIRITSStudents of religion used to think that rituals in general were the
expression of some emotional religious attitude, that they expressed
people's awe of the spirits and gods, a mixture of fear, respect, submis-
sion and trust that is consistent with the perception of gods and spir-
its as immensely powerful. This is still very much the way B-grade
films and comic strips represent religious ceremonies, with an exotic
priest muttering opaque incantations to the gods amid a crowd of
WHYRITUALS?