ple becoming a couple, by children getting born, by people growing
up to adulthood and dying. These changes by nature happen only
once. Because of our naive sociology's weaknesses, they are rather dif-
ficult to understand and they require, as I said before, that everyone
coordinate their actions to accommodate the change in the same way
at the same time. These reasons alone suffice to make loud and salient
rituals more intuitively apposite than sober ones. The point about
weddings is not just that people should take the new relationship into
account but that everyone should do so, preferably at the same time.
In contrast, other rituals trigger social effects that require repetition.
Sacrifice seems to establish an exchange between gods and people, but [261]
all humans intuitively construe such exchange as an iterated game that
people will play repeatedly with the same partners. People also have
the intuition that the terms of exchange with a partner are indepen-
dent from those that obtain with another. That is, that my exchange
with the gods is vastly in my favor so far is not changed by the fact that
the gods have swindled someone else. In such circumstances the loud
gadgets that ensure coordination between people and similar effects
on them all would be superfluous. So the correlation observed by
Lawson and McCauley (one-shot, loud rituals have the gods them-
selves acting; repeated, sober rituals have the gods acted upon) may
well stem from a difference between the social effects of the cere-
monies. (As a belated caveat, let me repeat that this is speculation; it is
a sad but true fact that we simply do not have enough experimental
evidence so far, as concerns people's representation of the gods and
spirits' roles in ritual.)
Whether rituals are thought to have long-lasting social effects
(changing people and their relations) or transient ones (curing the
sick, guaranteeing good crops), in both cases the participation of
supernatural agents adds relevant elements to the mental representa-
tion of the ceremonies, but it is not indispensable. Indeed, in many
places the hidden "something" that explains the ritual effect is "Soci-
ety" or "The Lineage" or "The Community." This, incidentally, is the
way nonreligious people often explain their own participation in reli-
gious performances such as weddings, bar mitzvahs and funerals. They
do not "believe," they say, but they accept that such ceremonies are
important, that they have effects, that people's sense of being a com-
munity requires continued performance of the rites even if the meta-
physics loses its persuasive power. I would suggest that these people
are perhaps much closer than they realize to the mind-set of religious
WHYRITUALS?