Are Ancestors Dead?

Abstract

This chapter concerns the fact that people who routinely perform rituals in which they interact with their dead ancestors will, in the context of formal psychological testing, be quite uncertain about what, if anything, survives after death. The contexts in which, implicitly or explicitly, they subscribe to these different understandings of death have markedly different social implications: in psychological testing, individuals are asked to reflect on their own beliefs in isolation, while in rituals they are part of the process of coordinated actions. Because of deference – the reliance on the beliefs of others, on which ritual and social life more generally depend – people's individual conviction does not conflict with their ritual action. Nonetheless, deference always coexists with a reflective, skeptical, and inquisitive attitude. The essay is an illustration of the authors' general theoretical approach, which combines the study of specific ethnographic worlds with the study of the evolved characteristics of the human mind.

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