Meaning of terms and details

Sample questions

1. Rituals Without Believers

   Anthropologists who study ritual in small-scale societies have sometimes been accused of a double standard. Among distant peoples, they find meaning in every procession and offering; at home, surrounded by retirement parties, graduation ceremonies, and the singing of birthday songs over a cake nobody especially wants, they tend to see only empty convention. The implicit assumption is that a ritual works by expressing belief, and that when participants no longer believe, or perform with an ironic shrug, the ritual has hollowed out.

   I think this assumption gets ritual backward. Much of what ritual accomplishes does not depend on what participants privately think at all.

   Consider the office retirement party. Few of the people eating sheet cake in a conference room believe that the event transforms the retiree in any metaphysical sense. Many attend reluctantly, and the speeches are often clichéd. Yet the party does something that an email announcement could not. It marks a change of status publicly, so that everyone present knows that everyone else knows the retiree is leaving. It gives colleagues a sanctioned occasion to express regard they would find awkward to express unprompted. And it closes a chapter in a way that allows the organization, and the retiree, to move on. None of these effects requires sincerity. They require only that people show up and go through the motions together.

   The phrase "going through the motions" is usually an insult, but in the case of ritual it is closer to a definition. What distinguishes ritual from other forms of communication is precisely that its meaning is carried by the form rather than by the inner states of those performing it. A wedding vow is binding not because the couple feels a particular emotion at the moment of speaking (they may be nervous, distracted, or overwhelmed) but because the words were said in the proper setting before witnesses. The form does the work so that the feelings do not have to.

   Critics may object that this makes ritual sound mechanical, and that surely a ceremony performed with conviction is better than one performed without it. I agree that conviction can enrich a ritual; a funeral at which mourners genuinely grieve is a different experience from one at which they are merely present. But enrichment is not the same as efficacy. The funeral accomplishes its social work, acknowledging a death, redistributing roles, gathering the community around the bereaved, whether or not every mourner is moved. If ritual required sincerity, it would be fragile in exactly the moments when it is most needed, since grief, fear, and exhaustion are hardly conditions in which people reliably summon the right emotions.

   This view has a practical implication. Institutions sometimes abandon rituals because participants seem to find them perfunctory, replacing them with nothing or with more "authentic" alternatives designed to elicit genuine feeling. The results are often disappointing. The authentic alternative, precisely because it asks for feeling, can make people self-conscious, and without a shared form there is no way to know when the thing has been done. A perfunctory ritual may be doing more than it appears to.

   None of this is to say that every convention deserves preservation. Some rituals encode hierarchies or exclusions that ought to be challenged. But the fact that participants do not believe in a ritual, or perform it half-heartedly, is not by itself evidence that it has stopped working.

   Question 1

   In the context of the passage, the author uses the phrase "going through the motions" to mean:

   • A.

     behaving dishonestly in order to deceive others.

   • B.

     performing the prescribed form of an act, which the author regards as central to how ritual works.

   • C.

     participating reluctantly and without conviction, and thereby undermining the ritual's social effects.

   • D.

     rehearsing a ceremony before it is performed.

   Show answer

2. Where the Line Falls

   Few questions in biology generate as much heat as the question of whether two populations are one species or two. Treatises have been written, and conferences have broken up, over groups of birds, orchids and beetles. The usual way to understand such quarrels is as disputes about evidence. Somewhere, the story goes, there is a fact of the matter, a single correct arrangement of living things that nature has already made, and disagreement persists because we have not yet gathered enough data to read it. I think this picture, though natural, is partly mistaken. Some disagreements about species are not failures of knowledge, because the thing being asked about is not wholly settled by nature.

   Consider a worked example. Two populations of a small flowering plant grow on opposite sides of a mountain ridge. They differ slightly in the shape of their petals and flower in different weeks; where their ranges overlap, in a narrow valley, they occasionally produce hybrids, which are fertile but poorly adapted. How many species are there? A geneticist who studies how gene flow is restricted may say one, since the hybrids are fertile and genes pass between the groups, however sparingly. A horticulturist who wants to know which plants will thrive in a given garden may say two, since in practice the groups behave differently and need different care. A conservation agency deciding whether the populations merit separate protection may also say two, for yet another reason: that to treat them as one might let the rarer one vanish unnoticed. All three have the same plants, the same measurements and the same facts about the hybrids. They are not disagreeing about the facts.

   The objection arrives at once: if the answer depends on what the classifier wants, then classification is arbitrary, and one may carve nature however one pleases. This does not follow. Purposes do not manufacture the differences; they select among differences that really exist. Petal shape and flowering time are real and measurable, as is the fertility of the hybrids. Nothing about the geneticist's interests can make the hybrids sterile, and nothing about the conservationist's can make the groups indistinguishable. What interests do is decide which of these real features should carry weight in drawing the line. A mapmaker serving sailors and one serving hikers draw different maps of the same coastline, and neither draws a mountain where there is a lake.

   I do not wish to say that all classifications are equally good. Some purposes are better served by some lines, and some lines serve no purpose at all. A scheme that grouped plants by the color of the pots they were sold in would damage every purpose that matters. Nor do I deny that accumulating evidence sometimes does settle a dispute; a population once thought distinct has occasionally turned out to be a variant of a familiar species. My claim is that evidence settles some questions and leaves others open, and that among those it leaves open there is no hidden correct answer waiting to be discovered, only a choice to be made for reasons that should be stated.

   To say so is not to cheapen the work of taxonomists. It is to ask them to say what each line is for, and to stop treating every dispute as a measure of someone's ignorance. A division of living things can be both useful and accurate, as a map can be both selective and true.

   Question 2

   Which of the following can most reasonably be inferred from the description of the two plant populations in paragraph 2?

   • A.

     Some exchange of genes between the two populations is possible, though it is infrequent.

   • B.

     The hybrids will eventually cause the two populations to merge into a single population in the valley.

   • C.

     The ridge once divided a single ancestral population into two.

   • D.

     The two populations are completely isolated from each other's genes by the ridge and by their flowering times.

   Show answer

3. Why the Ladder Holds

   Social theorists have long treated belief in merit as the ideology of the winners. The reasoning is simple and has the charm of cynicism. Those who rise need a story that turns luck, inheritance and connection into achievement, and the story of merit supplies one: I am here because I am better, not because of whom I knew. Those who fall short, it is assumed, can see through the story, since they stand where its failures are visible. If this is right, belief in merit should thin out as one descends the ladder, and the bottom rungs should be the home of skeptics.

   The evidence does not bear this out. In a survey of some 3,400 working adults in three cities, respondents were asked how far they agreed that people in their society get ahead mainly through talent and effort. Among those in the top income quartile, 78 percent agreed; among those in the bottom quartile, 71 percent did. A seven-point gap is real, but it is small beside the gap one would expect if the story were a luxury of the successful. More striking, respondents who had been made redundant in the preceding two years agreed at 74 percent, hardly below the 77 percent of those who had kept their jobs.

   Why would those at the bottom hold a belief that appears to condemn them? Three reasons suggest themselves. First, the belief offers hope: if talent and effort are what count, a child's prospects are not fixed by her parents' circumstances, and a poor parent has every reason to want that to be true. Second, the alternative is costly. To conclude that the contest is rigged is to conclude that effort is wasted, and few people can sustain daily labor on that footing. Third, merit supplies the common measure by which people judge themselves, so that a setback is read as a verdict on oneself and not on the arrangements. Inequality is rarely held in place by the grip of those at the top; it is held in place by the willingness of those at the bottom to keep climbing the same ladder.

   None of this means that the belief is unconditional. Respondents notice favoritism: 62 percent said they knew of a case in their own workplace where a post had gone to a relative or friend of someone senior. Yet among these respondents, 72 percent still agreed that people get ahead mainly through talent and effort, scarcely fewer than the 77 percent among those who knew of no such case. They treated the case they knew as an exception, an abuse of a rule that remained sound, and in doing so they left the rule intact. A principle that survives its counterexamples by classifying them as abuses is a sturdy one.

   A stabilizing effect plausibly follows. In the same survey, support for higher taxes on large incomes was lowest among the strongest endorsers of merit, and this held within each income quartile. People who hold themselves responsible for their position are less inclined to demand that the arrangements change, and where merit is believed by those who lose, the arrangement needs few enforcers. This does not make the winners' beliefs unimportant, and the belief does flatter them. My claim is narrower. Calling meritocratic belief an ideology of the winners is accurate about who benefits and mistaken about who holds it. The mistake has practical consequences. If the belief were a delusion confined to the comfortable, exposing a few rigged appointments might be enough to dissolve it. Because it is held for reasons of its own by those at the bottom, such exposure will mostly be absorbed as one more exception.

   Question 3

   The author's statement that inequality "is held in place by the willingness of those at the bottom to keep climbing the same ladder" most nearly means that inequality:

   • A.

     is maintained mostly by those at the top, who actively keep the poor from reaching the higher rungs of society.

   • B.

     persists mainly because those who fall behind accept the terms of the contest and keep competing.

   • C.

     will disappear once those at the bottom stop working and refuse to take part in any economic activity.

   • D.

     shrinks whenever lower-paid workers are offered regular promotion along the same ladder of jobs in their firms.

   Show answer

4. The Traveling Bones

   It is often assumed that holy places are holy in advance. A saint dies on a certain hillside, or a vision appears at a certain spring, and the place is thereafter set apart; pilgrims arrive because the holiness was already there, waiting to be recognized. On this account sacred geography is a given, a map drawn by revelation that devotees can only discover. I want to argue that the map was drawn largely by exchange, and the best way to see it is to follow a single saint's body about.

   Teodric was a hermit who died in about the year 640 in a stone cell above a mountain lake, and for some decades he was venerated by the shepherds who had known him. The cell was not a destination. In 702 a bishop, who needed a saint for his new cathedral in the lowland city, had the body lifted from the grave and carried down the valley in a procession that, according to the chronicler, took eleven days and produced three cures. The cathedral thereby acquired a patron, and the city a reason to be visited. A tooth went next to a river-port monastery as part of a bargain over land, and its abbot built a chapel to receive it. A rib passed to a duke's wife, who wanted her new castle to be a place where prayers were answered; the castle chapel soon had a reputation for answering them.

   Consider what happened to the cell above the lake. If holiness belonged to the place, it should have kept it. The sources suggest otherwise: for nearly two centuries after the body was taken, the cell is hardly mentioned, and the path to it was overgrown. The one traveler who does mention it, in the tenth century, calls it a ruined place kept by a single goatherd. Its standing returned only in the twelfth century, when a monk brought back a small bone from the cathedral treasury and fitted it into the wall of the cell. The place where the saint had died became holy again by receiving a piece of him.

   I am not suggesting that anyone was cynical. The pilgrims believed, and the miracles credited to the relics seem to have been reported in good faith. Revelation and the experience of cure mattered enormously. But what the pilgrims believed was attached to bones that had been moved, bought, bargained over, and in at least one case stolen from a rival house, and a belief in a place that was fixed in advance is, in this case, a belief held in retrospect. Each shrine told a story about why it was where it was, and each story made the location sound inevitable.

   The conclusion I draw is that the sacred landscape of that region is a record of transactions: gifts to secure alliances, purchases to settle debts, thefts that rivals never forgave. The holiness did not stay put. It traveled, and where it was set down a holy place came into existence. To call this an economy is not to deny the sacred. It is to say that holiness, like any other valued thing, could be moved, and that those who moved it left a map.

   Question 4

   The passage implies that, after Teodric's body was removed from the cell above the lake:

   • A.

     the cell was destroyed by a fire that was started by the bishop's men.

   • B.

     the cell was visited far less often for a long time.

   • C.

     the cell was claimed by the bishop as the burial place of the saint.

   • D.

     the cell was never again regarded as a holy place by the people who lived nearby.

   Show answer

5. The Ledger Behind the Feast

   Visitors to the upland villages where I lived for two years rarely leave without remarking on the weddings. A household that eats millet porridge most evenings will, for a daughter's marriage, slaughter three goats, hire musicians from the market town and feed several hundred guests for two days. Funerals are scarcely more modest. To the visiting agronomist or the district officer, the arithmetic seems damning: a family spends in a weekend what it might otherwise invest in fertilizer, a water tank or a child's school fees. The standard development verdict follows naturally. Such spending is a ritual excess, sustained by status anxiety, and the kindest policy is to discourage it through savings campaigns or caps on the number of guests.

   I came to the villages sharing something like that view. What unsettled it was not any argument but the ledgers. Nearly every household I knew kept, in a school exercise book or simply in memory, a careful record of who had brought what to its ceremonies: a sack of maize from one neighbor, a goat from a cousin, a sum of cash from a former employer. These gifts were not presents in the sentimental sense. They were entries in an account, and everyone understood that they would be returned, in roughly equal measure, when the giver's own household faced a wedding, a funeral or a failed harvest.

   Seen through the ledgers, the feast looks less like consumption than like a deposit. The host who feeds four hundred people is not only displaying wealth; he is renewing and enlarging a web of obligations on which he can later draw. When a widow in one hamlet lost her harvest to hail, it was the families she had fed at her husband's funeral who arrived with grain. No bank in the district would have lent to her, and no government scheme reached her in time. The obligations created at the feast did.

   This is not to say that the system is benign for everyone. The ledgers bind as well as protect. Poorer households sometimes borrow at punishing rates to meet a ceremonial obligation, and a family that cannot reciprocate may find itself quietly dropped from the circle of those who will come when it is in need. Nor would I claim that display plays no part; a lavish feast plainly also announces a family's standing. The point is narrower. Spending that looks irrational when measured against a single household's budget can be sensible when measured against the risks that household faces and the alternatives open to it.

   What follows for policy is a caution rather than a program. Campaigns that cap guest numbers or urge families to save instead of feasting may succeed in reducing visible spending, yet they also weaken the very mechanism through which people insure one another. If a formal alternative, such as crop insurance or a reliable savings cooperative, already reached these villages, the trade might be worth making. Where it does not, curbing ceremonial spending risks leaving households both poorer in their networks and no richer in their protection. Before calling a practice wasteful, outsiders would do well to ask what work it is doing, and what would take its place.

   Question 5

   In the third paragraph, the author's description of the feast as "a deposit" most nearly means that the feast:

   • A.

     leaves physical stores of food behind for later use

   • B.

     builds up claims on others that can be drawn on later

   • C.

     is paid for with money borrowed from a bank

   • D.

     serves chiefly to display the host's accumulated wealth

   Show answer

Find your real gaps

A few questions show the style. The free scan shows which MCAT skills cost you the most points, then builds a plan around them.