AGENTS ARE RELEVANT TO MANY SYSTEMS
Throughout the previous chapters I emphasized that notions of gods
and ancestors are of practicalconcern, because this fact is crucial and
often ignored. That religion is practical means that most representa-
tions of supernatural agents are not primarily about their general
properties or powers but about specific instances of interaction with
them. Among the many representations of such agents that get acti-
vated in people's minds, only a very small part are general interpreta-
tions such as "The ancestors live underground," "God knows what
[312] people are up to," etc. The religious furniture of the mind is cluttered
with far more specific representations such as "God is punishing so-
and-so and that's why he is ill," "Such and such ancestor was not
pleased with our sacrificed pig," etc.
It may be of help to see how this works in the case of Kwaio
notions of adalo. The ancestors are constantly present. As Roger
Keesing's vivid descriptions make clear, this sense of a constant pres-
ence does not mean that people live in fear or awe or that they are per-
petually lost in metaphysical reflections. As the ancestors are always
around in some way or other, people's attitudes toward them are
almost as varied as their attitudes toward each other. People respect
and sometimes fear the adalo,but they also think about them as
recently deceased people and grieve for them; sometimes people
resent their intrusion, or question their protection, or wonder which
ancestor will help them or could harm them.
This does not mean that the Kwaio have no coherent concept of
ancestors but that the concept is distributed among a whole variety of
systems in the mind. When people think about what the ancestors
know and perceive, they have intuitions produced by their intuitive
psychology. When they think that the ancestors will resent the sacri-
fice of a smallish, unimpressive pig, this intuitive judgement is deliv-
ered by a social exchange system. When they feel guilty about a trans-
gression of proper behavior toward the ancestors—for instance, when
someone urinated in a place that is abu—this intuition comes straight
from a moral feeling system. Sometimes a sacrifice fails to have the
desired effect—for instance, fails to cure a sick person. People think
that this is because they sacrificed to the wrong ancestor, to an adalo
that was not actually responsible for the problem in the first place.
Such an explanation comes naturally if you have a social exchange sys-
RELIGION EXPLAINED