There is something else I'm trying to track down: Kenneth Burke notes at one point that the rain dance is done right before the rainy season begins. It is not that people believe, naively, that the dance causes the rain; instead, the dance is a ritual preparation for the coming showers.
We might think there are many kinds of magical thinking. Other people's behavior manifests itself as magical, from our perspective, but our own kind of magic is invisible to ourselves because it is integrated into our behavior and thought patterns in a seamless way.
[Update: I've found a reference to Wittgenstein's critique of James Frazer along these lines. I'm not sure if Burke makes the same critique or if I was misremembering. Burke does talk about Frazer as well. The idea is that the Western mind talks about rain dance as a kind of cause effect relation, but its real meaning is "let's celebrate the beginning of the rainy season."].
1 comment:
Yes.
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