are indeed "incomplete" or "unfinished." But they have no idea why
this is so. The causal link is obvious but its mechanism is difficult to
describe. Some undeniably real but inscrutable cause is thought to
have produced a visible effect. There is somethingin initiation that
turns boys into men, although no one can say what it is. There seems
to be something in the wedding ceremony that really turns people into
a couple, in a way that remains mysterious.
All this is quite familiar to anthropologists. It is the reason why we
often say that rituals have a definitely transcendentflavor. They seem to
activate some source of causation, some mysterious forces that people
can sense but not describe, let alone explain. There is "something [257]
else" to the ritual than the mere sequence of actions, for how could a
few gestures and words really produce such important and undeniable
effects? You cannot perform the rituals seriously without assuming
that a prescribed series of actions will have a certain result andguess at
the same time that the series of actions as such cannot explain the
result.
To say that rituals suggest some transcendence seems to imply
deep mystical attitudes and a propensity for magic. But things are
much simpler. That people think in terms of hidden and inscrutable
causes is not by itself particularly mystical. On the contrary, tran-
scendence of this kind is found in a great number of perfectly ordi-
nary situations. As I said several times in previous chapters, most of
the intuitions that we get from our inference systems imply some
mysterious causation of this kind. For instance, we know that objects
that are thrown hard will go farther, and we explain this by saying
that they have more "momentum." But this term is largely vacuous
unless you have learned physics. Likewise, there is something inside
the developing organism that pushes it to be similar to other mem-
bers of the same species. This species-specific "essence" is what
makes zucchinis and brussels sprouts develop their particular shape
and taste.
Unless we do science, the way we explain our ordinary intuitions
very often refers to inscrutable causal processes. In this sense there is a
great deal of transcendence in our concept of the eggplant. This lim-
ited sense of "something unobservable that causes the observable
effects" is also what we find in people's thoughts about ritual effects.
People have the thought that the ritual created some social effect and
have some intuition that the actions themselves are not the whole
explanation, so something else is involved.
WHYRITUALS?